making them like they used to
thoughts on the Oscars, and the best film of 2025/2014/1972/1946
The Oscars were Sunday and they meant nothing.
I’ve said plenty about Anora already, so I won’t bother repeating myself here. As for the broadcast itself, it was a fun show, and kind of boring, which weirdly makes it more fun than when something unexpected happens.1 Sean Baker spent all four of his acceptance speeches championing “Indie Film.” What he was talking about - what anybody, really, is talking about when they talk about Anora - is labor: who benefits from a film, who gets paid, who sees a movie, who gets to make another one. But, in no small part due to the lack of a baseline collective understanding of film production, conversations inevitably circle back to representation and mythos.
I have spent this past awards season keenly aware of how the forerunners all seem borne from some pre-lapsarian cultural landscape. Anora is an R-rated, actor-driven broad comedy with the veneer of a social-issues picture. The Brutalist is a towering analogue spectacle, a movie with striking images, big performances and pronounced ideas. Conclave was a star-studded chamber drama for the whole family, ridiculous and saccharine. Wicked is a reverent ode to one of the most classic of motion pictures that doubles as a neutered political decree. Emilia Perez is, for all you could say about it, a bold movie, one whose audaciousness is both grossly exoticized and delusionally associated with falsely crowned American monoliths like Netflix and Selena Gomez.2
I am not the one to speak to the economics of show business itself, exactly. Watching lots of movies without being officially “in the industry” makes one especially bad at assessing the state of the world. But it is notable that, while these films all market their acclaim under the guise of some bygone era of prestige picture, the reality of their production is totally different from their predecessors. Sean Baker and Brady Corbet have gone on the record saying that they and many other filmmakers at similar places in their career are experiencing financial precarity. Emilia Perez is a French movie, and suggesting the state of medium in France has anything in common with America is absurd. All of these films are distinctly post-COVID, post-Weinstein phenomena that the broader discourse, both in the trades and online, try to contort into some commonsense wisdom that’s long outdated.
The tension inherent between how Hollywood venerates old modes of moviemaking while also relentlessly improvising new scaffolding to meet the present needs of the industry isn’t unique. It is, however, the whole point and half the fun. I do not know what the future of film looks like, but who can blame me? Movies aren’t what they used to be.
Cinephilia is about chasing ghosts as much as anything else.
Even the most forward-thinking filmmakers of today are indebted to the mythos of the turn-of-the-century indie boom. The Linklaters and Soderberghs of the world, likewise, longed for a pre-Spielberg New Hollywood ecosystem. The old vanguard drew from the French New Wave. The Cahiers crowd venerated James Agee and Howard Hawks. Busby Berkeley grew up in silent film. The earliest pictures moved like theater.
This can be chalked up to mundane nostalgia and the natural course of history, of course. Yet cinema has always felt uniquely fueled by its own mythology, that everything new will eventually become a hallmark of a bygone era. Like any medium, it is constantly evolving, but the arc of its changes come from failing to recreate what once was.
If they are making movies 15 years from now, young filmmakers will idolize Anora, and the ways it was marketed, and the system that funded it. Making movies will be worse and different and better. It will be the same as it always has been. This is not good or bad. It is just part of the whole deal.
No matter how you slice it, Peter Bogdanovich’s last movie was not his own. The last film he worked on, The Other Side of the Wind, was the unfinished final project of his mentor, Orson Welles. Using footage and archival material from Welles prior to his death, Bogdanovich and producer Frank Marshall spent four years reconstructing the film to the best of their ability.3 It was released via Netflix on November 3rd, 2018 after a stint on the festival circuit. By the end of that year it’d already been promptly forgotten, even by the most rabid lost film fanatics.
It is striking in how lively and unmodern it feels. Bogdanovich offers a perfect simulacrum of his mentor’s tics and visual melodies. It is hard to tell, without background knowledge, what is reconstructed and what is “authentic.” The film, which follows an aging, neurotic director who screens his latest, mysterious project at his own birthday party, is excellent, if a bit silly.
So it feels like an Orson Welles movie because it is an Orson Welles movie, and its story - which includes a protegee played by Bogdanovich himself - is so metatextually serendipitous it feels fated. But it was a non-event, a seance completely dismissed by critics and its distributor after its time as a viral curio had passed. What was once something mythic, something that could only exist in a better, more beautiful world, was now just some crushingly extant late work, one that would be of little note were its production not the stuff of legend.
As Bogdanovich leans into the passenger seat of a car in a pivotal scene, it feels like he could be looking past the camera, at Welles himself. “What did I do wrong, daddy?”
Two weeks ago, the original cut of Bogdanovich’s actual final film was unceremoniously made available to rent on Amazon. Squirrels to the Nuts, as it was originally called, underwent extensive reshoots before being released in 2014 under the title She’s Funny That Way at the behest of the studio. Though never publicly disowned,4 Bogdonavich was reportedly unhappy with having to abandon his original version, thought lost to the studio vaults. That was, until James Kenney, a cinephile and “full-time eBay buyer” stumbled upon a listing for an HDCAM tape of the original film. The rest is history.
It’s a good Hollywood story, the kind you’d get in a TCM intro. Bogdanovich would probably be thrilled to know that the best picture was raucous comedy about a call girl and a hoard of foolish men in a madcap chase around the city of New York. That’s kind of what Squirrels to the Nuts is about, too.
Both versions of the film, though they only share 60% of the same footage, follow nearly the exact same plot. Imogen Poots plays Izzy, a call girl hired by Owen Wilson’s Arnold Albertson. After a romantic evening together, Arnold offers her 30,000 dollars to quit sex work and pursue whatever passion she has in life. She agrees, and the very next day auditions for a role - ironically, as a call girl. Izzy shows up to the audition, only to find that the director is Arnold and her potential co-star is his wife, Delta Simmons (played by Kathyrn Hahn, who is so good we should put her in a time machine so she could work with Billy Wilder). The playwright just broke up with Izzy’s therapist, and she’s being chased around town by the playwright’s father, a private eye hired by one of Izzy’s former clients. The web of cruel happenstance only becomes more complicated as the film goes on.
She’s Funny That Way removes basically all of the jokes that do not happen to crop up in plot-essential moments (which means it is still quite funny!), replacing them with a framing device where Izzy is being interviewed about her life. The vast difference between the two cuts alone makes this a worthy case-study in studio filmmaking. Poots gives, essentially, two different performances - that of a Golden Age sweetheart in the original material, and that of a post-Rowlands drama student in the framing device. This is clumsy narrative work, but it is nonetheless thrilling to watch Poots rattle off monologues. I should mention that this has long been one of my favorite performances of all-time, a perfect showcase for the power of a good starlet.
Despite the ratio and original of the material, the pre-reshoot footage in She’s Funny That Way feels, like it is interrupting the interview itself, bizarrely. The humor, the pathos, the waxing poetic on showbiz’s fundamental emptiness, all of it comes from the fifteen minutes or so of Imogen Poots staring just to the right of the camera, just talking. In this way, it plays like early Wood Allen, the kind of comedy that rose to prominence as Bogdanovich was, even in his heyday, returning to ancient forms with What’s Up, Doc? and They All Laughed. Izzy, in this version, is a real person who willfully resigns herself to becoming an angel of a bygone era, out of time. Poots kills the bit, here. All the plot-heavy, exaggerated tomfoolery reads as strained artifice, as we watch Izzy swap from two-dimensional to three-dimensional as we jump backwards and forwards in time. The same elements that make Poots such a miracle make the picture a fundamental failure.
And the thing is, if I had never known there was an alternate cut out there, I would have assumed this was exactly the film as it was supposed to be. It does not play like a hack job, just a bit of a late-period mess.
Squirrels to the Nuts is, basically, the same plot, except with a different ending scene and no framing device. It includes somewhere around 40-50 minutes of additional footage, all of which is jokes. It plays like an even more devoted resurrection of 30s screwball than Bogdanovich’s own films from nearly half a century prior. This version is unabashedly old-fashioned, perhaps even moreso now than upon release. Call girls are sent via landlines, rideshares don’t exist, The overwrought deadpan delivery has no impulse for realism. The cameras move slowly, with no urge to disguise the choreography of the actor’s blocking.
The joy of Squirrel’s unique footage is in the entanglements, the unforced errors, the Rube Goldberg machine of escalating wordplay. The joy is walking through a dream vision of New York City in the summertime, of seeing arguments spill out into the hallway, of being the kind of woman who will angrily hail down a taxi on her cheating husband’s dime, of catching a passing gesture so charismatic you never forget it. It’s the joy of watching TCM at 3AM, the joy of remembering what movies once were to you, before they were what they are now. It is a perfect movie, and I cried at the end because it was so wonderful. It is so funny, and so charming, I could fill a piece triple the length of this one with moments I love.
But does it work? Well, the real world on digital looks a lot worse than studio lots on celluloid, and there are a few cast-members who don’t know how to act like they’ve never seen a Cassavettes film before. The most interesting thing about the theatrical cut, the more grounded half of Poots’ performance which recontextualized her broader charade in the rest of the material, is completely absent here. Traditional wisdom suggests that screwball comedies are about three things: Class, lying, and romance. She’s Funny That Way is about all of these things; Squirrels to the Nuts about none of them, really.
And, well, I don’t really care.
The title comes from a running gag in both films, one where Arnold can’t stop running into sex workers he has been with over the years, all of them quick to quote back at him the same cutesy lesson he imparted on them. “If it makes you happy to feed squirrels to the nuts, who am I to say, ‘Nuts to the squirrels!’” The button on the film is the revelation that this line comes from the 1946 film Cluny Brown.5 At the end of the film, Delta turns to Arnold and says, “So after all that, it wasn’t even original?”
Squirrels was colloquially referred to as the “Lubitsch cut,” after Cluny Brown’s director. If the plot makes the film sounds like a madcap nightmare of patriarchal obsession, that’s because, on one level, it is.6 Yet the sexual anxieties and showbiz satire are mostly functional extensions of the picture’s true heart. This cut is about Bogdanovich’s paranoid fear of unoriginality, the neuroses that filters through his entire career. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is the man whose most famous work is called The Last Picture Show. There is a nagging and not totally unjustified sense that Squirrels to the Nuts is aware of its own irrelevance, that this movie cannot be good enough that it would ever be something that matters.
Ironically, of course, nothing feels like quite like a Bogdanovich movie, and I would argue he has never made flown closer to the sun than he does here. Squirrels to the Nuts exists past the studio comedy vanishing point. It nails a dead form so perfectly that it goes beyond uncanny, towards something transcendent.
What does this have to do with the Oscars, or the state of the industry? Nothing, probably. But despite the nagging futility of Bogdanovich’s final outing, Squirrels to the Nuts proves a far more essential, pleasurable, and insightful reckoning with our collective pursuit of a dead medium’s false promise than anything nominated this year, or last year, or next year.
I guess the point is that, the first time I watched Cluny Brown, when Charles Boyer leaned down to talk to Jennifer Jones under the kitchen sink, my first thought was, “Oh, hey, I know that line.”
The only truly discourse-worthy event of the evening was Halle Berry kissing Adrien Brody on the red carpet, but even then, no essay would be better than a simple “lol crazy”
If I did not feel compelled to share my opinion on Emilia Perez beyond a few glib tweets before, I sure as hell don’t now.
Welles had only really edited the film-within-a-film segments, which are a very obvious parody of Zabriske Point. This old queen!
Brady Corbet, god love him, is an actor, not a director, and you can tell because directors will be classy and bitchy in equal measure when they don’t get final cut.
The one moment where the reshoot material strains credulity is when Izzy, a young actress who knows Lana Turner’s government name, has apparently never seen Cluny Brown.
Reviews at the time called the film’s politics “outdated.” I will say that, for my money, every character has agency and is lampooned for disrespecting or manipulating sex workers in any way, while the women all operate with independent desires and total agency. It is not an accurate depiction of sex work, but it’s not an accurate depiction of Broadway or outer-borough Italians either. The shorthand it employs do not appear particularly malicious to my sensibilities. I think the sex workers all seem very cool and very funny and very beautiful, which, for a screwball comedy, is the most virtuous way a person can be.
Thanks for sharing this post - happy Thursday