[This story contains mild spoilers from the Neighbors finale.]
A couple of days ago, 72-year-old Danny Smiechowski left his house to greet his chauffeur. There was a limousine parked outside, waiting for him. For much of his life, Smiechowski had been an outcast in his San Diego neighborhood, insulted and ostracized for his penchant for wearing nothing but yellow briefs while exercising in his driveway. He describes the treatment as “emotional abuse.” But here he was an area celebrity, the star of a hot HBO/A24 series getting picked up for a splashy finale event in Hollywood.
“The neighbors were looking their window, going, ‘Oh my God, that guy,’” Smiechowski says over coffee (well, he just drinks water) in West Hollywood, acting out their disbelief. “You may’t really imagine it might be true, however it’s true.” He’s wearing an A24 sweatshirt as Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford, the creators of the show, Neighbors, sit on either side of him. They crack up on the story. “Amazing,” Fishman says. “They need to be like, ‘What’s happening?!’”
Each of the six episodes in the primary season of Neighbors, billed as a late-night documentary series, depicts random but intense disputes inside local communities across the country. Filmed in an immerse, chaotic style that recalls the work of executive producers Josh Safdie, Ronald Bronstein and Eli Bush (Marty Supreme), the installments intercut between multiple feuds at a time — aside from the finale, which is each supersized and focused exclusively on Smiechowski. It follows him from his initial unhappy state in California to the Florida nudist community he decides to maneuver into. He winds up back in San Diego, though, after realizing that house is home, for higher or worse — a fitting final note for a series dedicated to the brutally funny day by day indignities that, for a lot of us, include simply coexisting with others.
“The very best revenge is success, in order that’s the nail within the coffin with [my neighbors] — and now they ignore me,” Smiechowski says. “There’s this French guy who was horrible to me during my [mayoral] campaign. He betrayed me with money, he told me that I used to be a crook. And now, he called me a pair days ago and left a message. He goes, ‘Wow, congratulations. Can I’m going to LA with you?’ Like, oh my God — what are these people pondering?”
It’s the result Smiechowski had hoped for when he first responded to a Craigslist ad put out by Neighbors casting director, Harleigh Shaw, several years ago. “I just desired to do it to get the word out,” he says. After an initial conversation, he didn’t hear anything for greater than a 12 months and grew incredibly frustrated — so he blocked the phone numbers of just about everyone related to the show. Fortunately, producer Rachel Walden was not one among them, and he or she got in contact with him once they were able to officially bring him in.
HBO
“We had come across a pair disputes in nudist communities…and Harleigh had the concept of, ‘Would Danny be considering living in a spot like this?’” Fishman says. Redford adds, “He had considered moving at various points, so it felt like a natural experiment that Danny was considering doing and desired to try.”
They spent a month together all told, with dozens of hours of footage left on the cutting-room floor. What we do see in Neighbors is an awfully compelling character study, though. We meet Smiechowski in San Diego as locals call him out in front of the cameras for showing a lot skin, and he’s baffled by their criticisms. “I do it to be blissful, I do it because I feel good inside — I feel younger,” Smiechowski says now of why he prefers to not wear much clothing. “What’s so ironic about that is that for the individuals who were abusing me — and are abusing me — this is sort of inconceivable for them to imagine.” (Smiechowski says that since filming the show and returning home, his situation is “about 90% higher.”)
Once he gets to the Florida nudist community, called Eden, Smiechowski is greatly surprised by the sensation of liberation. He meets a welcoming group of individuals. He lets loose at karaoke. He falls hard for a much younger woman who shows, at the very least initially, a glancing interest in him. In other words, it’s a reasonably naked — pun form of intended — presentation of Smiechowski, and a seemingly vulnerable one. He didn’t see it that way.
“I just threw caution to the wind — in the event that they say jump, I say how high, and that’s what we did,” he says. He committed to the character of doc production: “I’d repeat something literally 20 times until I got it right, after which I’d go, ‘Well, let’s do it again’ — because I had that Iron Man in me.” He believes this all speaks to his unique structure: “Dr. Michael Dean was known all around the world as a hypnotist in San Diego. He tried to crack me. He couldn’t do it, and he became frustrated because he was hypnotizing everybody within the room. I used to be the just one. So I’m one among the few people on the planet who can’t be hypnotized.”
After filming concluded, Smiechowski began taking drama classes and has been attending consistently within the run-up to the episode’s airing. “Individuals are going to call me a freak, but they don’t understand…. Even my drama teacher said to me, ‘Danny, I’m really sorry for you. You’re going to take a whole lot of abuse,’” he says. “I said, ‘George, don’t even worry about it, man. Water off the duck’s back. Just ignore it.’” Fishman turns to his subject with a smile and says, “It’s rare to search out any person who’s so truly themself. You’re, like, aggressively yourself.”
HBO
Fishman and Redford grew increasingly considering nudist communities the more they learned about them. “Once we got in there, we saw that a whole lot of these communities were actually functioning much at a much higher and more forgiving level than most of the neighborhoods that we had been to throughout the country,” Redford says. “Everyone there really wanted these communities to work. They didn’t need to lose it. They didn’t want the infighting or whatever conflict existed inside there to get to a degree where they might lose this place that they love a lot.”
Fishman adds, “People were so blissful there. It was insane.” This could be very clear in what Neighbors shows. “There’ll be a minority that can, what’s the word to make use of, gravitate or develop into interested,” Smiechowski says. He’s less confident it’s going to result in significant changes in perception.
“For most individuals, it’s too socially dangerous. They’d be embarrassed. Most individuals couldn’t do it,” he says. Does he still consider himself an element of the nudist community while living outside it? “Type of an existential query,” he replies. “My behavior, where I live, is somewhat related to that community.”
Neighbors has been officially renewed for a second season, and while it seems obvious Smiechowski could be up for one more round — perhaps for the most effective that it’s unlikely, since he’s at relative peace on his block now — Fishman and Redford see a ton of runway for where they’ll go next.
“There’s so many subjects and places that we didn’t get to explore in season one for a bunch of various reasons, so we’re just so excited to get back and see what’s on the market,” Fishman says. “The more we’re painting this portrait of America, in a way, and the more that we add to it, the more exciting it gets.”
The primary season of Neighbors is now streaming in its entirety on HBO Max. Read THR‘s in-depth feature on making the series.