For nearly a decade — since comedy legend Lily Tomlin played a salty septuagenarian in Paul Weitz’s “Grandma” — I’ve been trying to track down a copy of her one-woman show, “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”
Well, the search is over.
Last week, on Friday night, Tomlin sat down with “Frank and Gracie” co-star and frequent collaborator Jane Fonda for the first public screening of the newly restored film, which made its debut at RescueFest — IndieCollect’s first-ever showcase of films restored by the organization — in Los Angeles.
Long out of print and nearly always incomplete, the feature version (directed and shot by John Bailey) was released in 1991, six years after Tomlin performed — and perfected — her show live at New York’s Plymouth Theater.
Reviewing “Search” back in 1985, Frank Rich called it “the most genuinely subversive comedy to be produced on Broadway in years” in the pages of The New York Times, and while the text of the show — written by Tomlin’s wife, Jane Wagner — has been readily available for years, Bailey’s film had become all but impossible to see … that is, until Ed Carter (who’d been Academy Film Archive curator until the organization’s restructuring earlier this fall) discovered the original negative among a pile of reels rescued from Deluxe Labs.
The restoration itself took three years, complicated by the fact the negative was nine minutes shorter than Tomlin remembered. “They found 108 minutes, and I had to approve it, so I looked at the film, and I said, ‘Something is missing,’” Tomlin told me upstairs before the event. “That’s when we discovered the other nine minutes that were missing, so they went back and found them in a print and were able to marry them.”
To this Tomlin fan, the screening was a revelation: a chance to see her play everything from Agnus Angst, an irate teenage runaway who rages against society, to a trio of former feminists to Trudy, the Madison Ave. ad exec turned bag lady, who pushes her shopping cart, pinning deep thoughts on Post-It notes, as she speculates about aliens.
“I do characters, I don’t do ordinary standup,” Tomlin explained. “At the time, it was kind of monumental for me, because it set me apart. And it got incredible reviews.”
After the screening, Fonda conducted a half-hour Q&A with her longtime friend. “That’s why ‘9 to 5’ is the way it was,” she told the crowd, gesturing toward Tomlin, “because of when I saw her in a one-woman show.” (To clarify: Fonda pushed for Tomlin to play Violet Newstead in the 1980 workplace satire after seeing her first Broadway production, “Appearing Nitely,” in 1977.)
“I did the first Broadway show to legitimize myself,” Tomlin said. “I was tired of doing one-nighters on the road. Usually, I’d be booked for a night or two, and I’d be leaving the next day on the conveyance, and I’d be reading a great review about myself, and I said, ‘I wish we could just stay here and play for a while.’”
So she and Wagner came up with “Search,” in which Tomlin alternated between a dozen different characters over the course of 117 minutes.
“I was doing a touring act, working in Lexington, Ky., and Jane sent me a bunch of cards, an inch thick, and they were all Agnus,” she recalled. “That night, I did my regular show, and then I sort of read, because I couldn’t possibly put all the words to my memory.”
Wagner had given her so much good material to try out that years later, Tomlin was still getting notes from a fan who’d been there at the Lexington Opera House that night, complaining how she and Wagner had ruined the show by cutting Agnus’ part down to make room for the 11 other characters — like Trudy, who serves as the show’s scatterbrained host.
“Trudy is a philosopher,” Tomlin told Fonda. “It’s like having the wise fool, that theatrical conceit. Because Jane was always interested in science and exploration of space, she began to create — with Trudy as the spine of the show — different characters, trying to get as broad a range of characters as we could to be played by one person and represent as much of humanity as we could.”
During the years I spent searching for a chance to see “Search,” several ambitious stage organizations have tried to mount theatrical productions of it — the challenge being to do it without Tomlin’s involvement.
Back in 2022, during her last year on “Saturday Night Live,” Cecily Strong gave it a shot — an ambitious feat, and an equally crushing failure in this critic’s estimation. According to Tomlin, “When most people put the show on, they’ll use 12 actors.” That was true of a 2016 production at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. “Everyone takes this project on, but a lot of the time, they walk away from it. They can’t master it in time.”
Wagner wrote the characters for Tomlin, and the two workshopped them for months. That process is documented in another ultra-rare film, Joan Churchill and Nick Broomfield’s “Lily Tomlin: The Film Behind the Show,” in which provides valuable insights into the couple’s writing and rehearsal process.
Tomlin is proudest of the live Broadway production, but grateful that the 1991 film has been restored. “You’re never satisfied,” she said. “That’s why I like to work live, because nobody ever really remembers it, except very sketchily, and every night you get to do it again and try to make it better.”
According to Independent Filmmaker Project founder Sandra Schulberg, the version screened at RescueFest — overseen by Cameron Haffner and Ciara Kain of IndieCollect, with audio restoration by Nick Bergh of Endpoint Audio Labs in Burbank — is nearly complete and should be ready for a theatrical re-release next year.
In theory, “Search” might seem like a time capsule, but in fact, it resonates with new relevance today, as when Agnus gripes, “I must’ve missed out on most of the things that made America great.”
What struck me about the dozen characters Tomlin plays in “Search” is how she treats each of them like a real person. Sure, they’re meant to be funny, but Tomlin inhabits each of them — from Trudy the homeless woman to Brandy and Tina, hookers tired of being interviewed by intellectuals — with affection and empathy alike.
As she told Fonda, “That empathy thing, that’s a big assignment for people who don’t have it.”
At the end of the Q&A, Fonda asked her friend whether she sees any signs of intelligent life in the universe at the moment, to which Tomlin replied, “Well, golly … I see a lot of intelligence, but we apply that intelligence so stupidly that it’s hard to endorse it totally.”