Event – Detail Past

In 2014, what would turn out to be Peter Bogdanovich's final feature (starring Owen Wilson, Imogen Poots, Jennifer Aniston and Will Forte) was eviscerated by its producers, who demanded Bogdanovich recut and rescore his film, removing over a half an hour while adding superfluous narration and additionally shot scenes that went against his vision. It was released as She's Funny That Way and was soon forgotten, and Bogdanovich thought his version was forever lost. However, in an incredible story, in 2020 Bogdanovich aficionado James Kenney discovered the only exisiting copy of Bogdanovich's original cut, Squirrels to the Nuts, for sale on eBay, which has lead to the release of Bogdanovich's original vision, premiering in March 2022 at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Film critic Glenn Kenny called the resurrected Squirrels "a really special picture [that] exceeded my expectations. See it if you can!", the New Yorker's Richard Brody said Bogdanovich "develops an aspect of his world view, of his artistic cosmology, which energizes the very best of his films," and film scholar Farran Smith Nehme wrote "My husband and I had a great time last night at Squirrels to the Nuts, the [rescued] Peter Bogdanovich film ….A very funny movie that the audience clearly enjoyed."  As Bogdanovich himself wrote to Kenney before his passing in January 2022, "It really is such a better film than the released version...It is like a lost child being found." This screening will include a discussion of the film and its discovery by Kenney and film critic Carrie Rickey, plus a Q & A. Run time 113 minutes.

Price of admission for this event helps cover the costs of our public programming.

James Kenney is a film scholar and an English Lecturer for the City University of New York and St. John's University.  His research has been shared in the New York Times, the New Yorker and Sight and Sound, and he recently arranged the premiere of the director's cut of Gee Malik Linton's Daughter of God, starring Keanu Reeves and Ana De Armas, at the 2023 Wisconsin Film Festival.  His writing on Squirrels, God and other films can be found at www.tremblesighwonder.com

Carrie Rickey was born in Los Angeles during the widescreen era of movies and bagged a couple degrees from the University of California, San Diego in the years surfers traded longboards for short. She moved to New York just in time to read the headline Ford to City: Drop Dead and decamped as tabloids thus immortalized the passing of Andy Warhol: Platinum Prince of Pop Dies. During her New York years she wrote art criticism for Artforum and Art in America, film criticism for the Village Voice and Film Comment and was a columnist for Mademoiselle. For 25 years she was film critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer where she reviewed everything from Room With a View to Shame, interviewed celebrities from Lillian Gish to Will Smith, and reported on technological breakthroughs from the rise of video to the introduction of movies on-demand. She has taught at various institutions including School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, is a popular speaker and has appeared frequently on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, MSNBC and CNN.