How a Local Outcast Found His Nudist Haven in HBO's ‘Neighbors’
Danny Smiechowski in 'Neighbors.'
HBO
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[This story contains mild spoilers from the Neighbors finale.]
A few 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 a local celebrity, the star of a hot HBO/A24 series getting picked up for a splashy finale event in Hollywood.
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“The neighbors were looking out 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 can’t really believe it could be true, but 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 at the story. “Amazing,” Fishman says. “They must be like, ‘What’s going on?!’”
Each of the six episodes in the first season of Neighbors, billed as a late-night documentary series, depicts random but intense disputes within 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 — except for the finale, which is both supersized and focused exclusively on Smiechowski. It follows him from his initial unhappy state in California to the Florida nudist community he decides to move into. He winds up back in San Diego, though, after realizing that home is home, for better or worse — a fitting final note for a series dedicated to the brutally funny daily indignities that, for many of us, come with simply coexisting with others.
“The best revenge is success, so that’s the nail in 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 was a crook. And now, he called me a couple days ago and left a message. He goes, ‘Wow, congratulations. Can I go to LA with you?’ Like, oh my God — what are these people thinking?”
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 wanted to do it to get the word out,” he says. After an initial conversation, he didn’t hear anything for more than a year and grew incredibly frustrated — so he blocked the phone numbers of almost everyone associated with the show. Fortunately, producer Rachel Walden was not one of them, and she got in touch with him when they were ready to officially bring him in.
HBO
“We had come across a couple disputes in nudist communities…and Harleigh had the idea of, ‘Would Danny be interested in living in a place like this?’” Fishman says. Redford adds, “He had considered moving at various points, so it felt like a natural experiment that Danny was interested in doing and wanted 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 so much skin, and he’s baffled by their criticisms. “I do it to be happy, I do it because I feel good inside — I feel younger,” Smiechowski says now of why he prefers not to wear much clothing. “What’s so ironic about this is that for the people who were abusing me — and are abusing me — this is almost impossible for them to believe.” (Smiechowski says that since filming the show and returning home, his situation is “about 90% better.”)
Once he gets to the Florida nudist community, called Eden, Smiechowski is taken aback by the feeling of liberation. He meets a welcoming group of people. He lets loose at karaoke. He falls hard for a much younger woman who shows, at least initially, a glancing