She's Funny That Way (2014) on Netflix
Broadway director Arnold Albertson, using the name Derek, pays a call girl, Izzy, to leave sex work and chase an acting career. She auditions for his play, not knowing Derek runs it.
- Netflix2.7/5
- IMDb6.2/1030,964 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes44%
Trailer
Plot summary
Arnold Albertson is a Broadway director with a wife and two children. Calling himself Derek, he meets a call girl named Izzy and gives her thirty thousand dollars so she can stop working in the sex trade and try to become an actress. Arnold has made this kind of offer to other women before. His wife, Delta Simmons, has the lead in his new play, A Grecian Evening. Izzy keeps her word to Derek and goes to audition for a role in that play as a call girl, not knowing that Derek and the director are the same man. Playwright Joshua Fleet, who is dating Izzy's therapist Jane Claremont, becomes interested in her. Judge Pendergast, another client of Izzy and a patient of Jane, hires the private investigator Harold Fleet, Joshua's father, to follow her.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about She's Funny That Way (2014)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Peter Bogdanovich drew the story from his own experience filming Saint Jack in Singapore in 1978, where he hired prostitutes for the film and gave them more money than their salary so they would leave the business.
- Bogdanovich wrote the part of Arnold Albertson for John Ritter but shelved the project after Ritter's death; when Owen Wilson took the role, the physical gags written for Ritter were turned into verbal jokes.
- Bogdanovich's original cut, still titled Squirrels to the Nuts, was found on eBay in 2020 by an English lecturer at City University of New York, and after the director's death in January 2022 it was shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
- To get the film released, Bogdanovich had to cut his 113-minute version down to 94 minutes: the opening and ending were changed, Frank Sinatra and Tom Petty music was removed, and an interview framing device was added.
- Jennifer Aniston was offered the part of Arnold Albertson's wife, Delta Simmons, but preferred the role of the therapist and was cast in that instead.
- Edward Shearmur was brought in to score the film in 2014, replacing Stephen Endelman, who had already recorded music for it by the time of the announcement.
- The film was the first feature Bogdanovich had directed in 13 years, since The Cat's Meow, and it proved to be the last non-documentary feature he directed as well as Richard Lewis' final theatrical film.
