For nearly a decade — since comedy legend Lily Tomlin played a salty septuagenarian in Paul Weitz’s “Grandma” — I’ve been trying to track down a copy of her one-woman show, “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”

Well, the search is over.

Last week, on Friday night, Tomlin sat down with “Frank and Gracie” co-star and frequent collaborator Jane Fonda for the first public screening of the newly restored film, which made its debut at RescueFest — IndieCollect’s first-ever showcase of films restored by the organization — in Los Angeles.

Long out of print and nearly always incomplete, the feature version (directed and shot by John Bailey) was released in 1991, six years after Tomlin performed — and perfected — her show live at New York’s Plymouth Theater.

Reviewing “Search” back in 1985, Frank Rich called it “the most genuinely subversive comedy to be produced on Broadway in years” in...