For practically a decade — since comedy legend Lily Tomlin performed a salty septuagenarian in Paul Weitz’s “Grandma” — I’ve been attempting to trace down a duplicate of her one-woman present, “The Seek for Indicators of Clever Life within the Universe.”

Nicely, the search is over.

Final week, on Friday night time, Tomlin sat down with “Frank and Gracie” co-star and frequent collaborator Jane Fonda for the primary public screening of the newly restored movie, which made its debut at RescueFest — IndieCollect’s first-ever showcase of movies restored by the group — in Los Angeles.
Lengthy out of print and practically all the time incomplete, the characteristic model (directed and shot by John Bailey) was launched in 1991, six years after Tomlin carried out — and perfected — her present reside at New York’s Plymouth Theater.

Reviewing “Search” again in 1985, Frank Wealthy known as it “essentially the most genuinely subversive comedy to be produced on Broadway in years” within the pages of The New York Instances, and whereas the textual content of the present — written by Tomlin’s spouse, Jane Wagner — has been available for years, Bailey’s movie had grow to be all however inconceivable to see … that’s, till Ed Carter (who’d been Academy Movie Archive curator till the group’s restructuring earlier this fall) found the unique detrimental amongst a pile of reels rescued from Deluxe Labs.

The restoration itself took three years, sophisticated by the actual fact the detrimental was 9 minutes shorter than Tomlin remembered. “They discovered 108 minutes, and I needed to approve it, so I regarded on the movie, and I mentioned, ‘One thing is lacking,’” Tomlin advised me upstairs earlier than the occasion. “That’s once we found the opposite 9 minutes that had been lacking, in order that they went again and located them in a print and had been capable of marry them.”

To this Tomlin fan, the screening was a revelation: an opportunity to see her play every little thing from Agnus Angst, an irate teenage runaway who rages towards society, to a trio of former feminists to Trudy, the Madison Ave. advert exec turned bag girl, who pushes her buying cart, pinning deep ideas on Submit-It notes, as she speculates about aliens.

“I do characters, I don’t do bizarre standup,” Tomlin defined. “On the time, it was form of monumental for me, as a result of it set me aside. And it obtained unimaginable opinions.”

After the screening, Fonda carried out a half-hour Q&A together with her longtime buddy. “That’s why ‘9 to five’ is the way in which it was,” she advised the group, gesturing towards Tomlin, “due to after I noticed her in a one-woman present.” (To make clear: Fonda pushed for Tomlin to play Violet Newstead within the 1980 office satire after seeing her first Broadway manufacturing, “Showing Nitely,” in 1977.)

“I did the primary Broadway present to legitimize myself,” Tomlin mentioned. “I used to be bored with doing one-nighters on the highway. Often, I’d be booked for an evening or two, and I’d be leaving the subsequent day on the conveyance, and I’d be studying an amazing overview about myself, and I mentioned, ‘I want we may simply keep right here and play for some time.’”
So she and Wagner got here up with “Search,” through which Tomlin alternated between a dozen totally different characters over the course of 117 minutes.

“I used to be doing a touring act, working in Lexington, Ky., and Jane despatched me a bunch of playing cards, an inch thick, they usually had been all Agnus,” she recalled. “That night time, I did my common present, after which I form of learn, as a result of I couldn’t probably put all of the phrases to my reminiscence.”

Wagner had given her a lot good materials to check out that years later, Tomlin was nonetheless getting notes from a fan who’d been there on the Lexington Opera Home that night time, complaining how she and Wagner had ruined the present by reducing Agnus’ half right down to make room for the 11 different characters — like Trudy, who serves because the present’s scatterbrained host.

“Trudy is a thinker,” Tomlin advised Fonda. “It’s like having the smart idiot, that theatrical conceit. As a result of Jane was all the time occupied with science and exploration of house, she started to create — with Trudy because the backbone of the present — totally different characters, attempting to get as broad a spread of characters as we may to be performed by one individual and characterize as a lot of humanity as we may.”

In the course of the years I spent looking for an opportunity to see “Search,” a number of bold stage organizations have tried to mount theatrical productions of it — the problem being to do it with out Tomlin’s involvement.
Again in 2022, throughout her final yr on “Saturday Evening Dwell,” Cecily Robust gave it a shot — an bold feat, and an equally crushing failure on this critic’s estimation. In accordance with Tomlin, “When most individuals put the present on, they’ll use 12 actors.” That was true of a 2016 manufacturing on the Los Angeles LGBT Middle. “Everybody takes this challenge on, however a number of the time, they stroll away from it. They will’t grasp it in time.”

Wagner wrote the characters for Tomlin, and the 2 workshopped them for months. That course of is documented in one other ultra-rare movie, Joan Churchill and Nick Broomfield’s “Lily Tomlin: The Movie Behind the Present,” through which supplies invaluable insights into the couple’s writing and rehearsal course of.

Tomlin is proudest of the reside Broadway manufacturing, however grateful that the 1991 movie has been restored. “You’re by no means glad,” she mentioned. “That’s why I prefer to work reside, as a result of no person ever actually remembers it, besides very sketchily, and each night time you get to do it once more and attempt to make it higher.”

In accordance with Unbiased Filmmaker Mission founder Sandra Schulberg, the model 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 almost full and needs to be prepared for a theatrical re-release subsequent yr.

In concept, “Search” may look like a time capsule, however in actual fact, it resonates with new relevance in the present day, as when Agnus gripes, “I need to’ve missed out on many of the issues that made America nice.”

What struck me in regards to the dozen characters Tomlin performs in “Search” is how she treats every of them like an actual individual. Positive, they’re meant to be humorous, however Tomlin inhabits every of them — from Trudy the homeless girl to Brandy and Tina, hookers bored with being interviewed by intellectuals — with affection and empathy alike.

As she advised Fonda, “That empathy factor, that’s a giant project for individuals who don’t have it.”

On the finish of the Q&A, Fonda requested her buddy whether or not she sees any indicators of clever life within the universe in the meanwhile, to which Tomlin replied, “Nicely, golly … I see a number of intelligence, however we apply that intelligence so stupidly that it’s laborious to endorse it completely.”