So, yes, spoiler alert. This post gives away a key plot point in Peter Bogdanovich’s final film, which was titled She’s Funny That Way when it was released in 2014, but which Bogdanovich originally wanted to call Squirrels to the Nuts. A couple of years before the director died, in 2022, a film scholar and archivist named James Kenney recently found a copy of Bogdanovich’s long-missing original edit, which is twenty minutes longer than the 93-minute running time of She’s Funny That Way. Kenney has been screening the director’s cut under the original title, and I caught up with it at a recent showing at the Athenaeum in Philadelphia.
The spoiler comes in the next paragraph so if you have any plans to see the movie, stop reading here.
The kind of odd premise of the film, a light comedy, is that famous director Arnold Albertson (Owen Wilson) has a predilection for hiring prostitutes, availing himself of their services, and then asking them if this is the life they truly want for themselves, if it’s their “place.” They tend to answer in the negative, after which Arnold delivers a speech (it’s the same speech every time):
Nobody can tell you where your place is. Where’s my place? Where is anybody’s place? I’ll tell you where it is. Wherever you’re happy, that’s your place. And happiness is a matter of purely personal adjustment to your environment. You’re the sole judge. In Hyde Park, for instance, some people like to feed nuts to the squirrels. But if it makes you happy to feed squirrels to the nuts, who am to say, “Nuts to the squirrels”?
Then he says that if they promise to give up prostitution and follow their dream, he will give them $30,000, which he happens to have in. his briefcase. They all say yes. Or anyway, that’s the impression we get from a half dozen women, all of them now accomplished professionals, Arnold encounters in the course of the movie. When each one spies him, she shouts, “Squirrels to the nuts!” and attempts to wrap her arms around him in gratitude. On a couple of occasions, he’s accompanied by his wife, Delta (Kathryn Hahn), who is bemused, to put it mildly.
In the last scene, the play Arnold has directed has just opened and the company has gathered in Sardi’s restaurant to wait for the reviews. A rave airs on TV. Then someone switches to a channel where a the 1947 Ernst Lubitsch film Cluny Brown (Lubitsch’s last), with Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones, is playing.
Delta turns to Arnold and says “You mean after all that, it wasn’t even original!?!” For once, Arnold has nothing so say. Cut to black.











