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All but Impossible to Find for Years, Lily Tomlin’s ‘The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe’ Is Back
At its first-ever RescueFest, IndieCollect unveiled a restoration of Lily Tomlin's elusive one-woman show, followed by a Q&A with friend Jane Fonda.
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.” 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. 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.
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