All but Impossible to Find for Years, Lily Tomlin’s ‘The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe’ Is Back

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic 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.