[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.
“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.
“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 interest in him. In other words, it’s a rather naked — pun sort of intended — presentation of Smiechowski, and a seemingly vulnerable one. He didn’t see it that way.
“I just threw caution to the wind — if they say jump, I say how high, and that’s what we did,” he says. He committed to the nature of doc production: “I would repeat something literally 20 times until I got it right, and then I would go, ‘Well, let’s do it again’ — because I had that Iron Man in me.” He believes this all speaks to his unique constitution: “Dr. Michael Dean was known all over 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 in the room. I was the only one. So I’m one of the few people in the world who cannot be hypnotized.”
After filming concluded, Smiechowski started taking drama classes and has been attending consistently in the run-up to the episode’s airing. “People 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 lot of abuse,’” he says. “I said, ‘George, don’t even worry about it, man. Water off the duck’s back. Just forget about it.’” Fishman turns to his subject with a smile and says, “It’s rare to find somebody who is so truly themself. You’re, like, aggressively yourself.”
Fishman and Redford grew increasingly interested in nudist communities the more they learned about them. “Once we got in there, we saw that a lot of these communities were actually functioning much at a much higher and more forgiving level than many of the neighborhoods that we had been to throughout the country,” Redford says. “Everyone there really wanted these communities to work. They didn’t want to lose it. They didn’t want the infighting or whatever conflict existed within there to get to a point where they would lose this place that they love so much.”
Fishman adds, “People were so happy there. It was insane.” This is very clear in what Neighbors shows. “There’ll be a minority that will, what’s the word to use, gravitate or become interested,” Smiechowski says. He is less confident it will lead to significant changes in perception.
“For most people, it’s too socially dangerous. They would be embarrassed. Most people couldn’t do it,” he says. Does he still consider himself a part of the nudist community while living outside it? “Kind of an existential question,” 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 would be up for another round — perhaps for the best 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 can go next.
“There’s so many subjects and places that we didn’t get to explore in season one for a bunch of different reasons, so we’re just so excited to get back and see what’s out there,” 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 first season of Neighbors is now streaming in its entirety on HBO Max. Read THR‘s in-depth feature on making the series.
