When Jonathan Lynn was summoned to Hollywood to jot down the screenplay for Clue, his first response was that it was the silliest idea he’d ever heard. A feature film based on a board game? But he’d never flown firstclass before, and he had a spare week. So he went.
Forty years later, the film is a real cult phenomenon — performed live by shadow casts the best way Rocky Horror once was, endlessly rewatched on streaming, and quoted with near-religious devotion by multiple generations of fans. On the most recent episode of It Happened in Hollywood, I sat down with Lynn for a wide-ranging conversation about how considered one of comedy’s most intricately engineered movies got here to exist. (It very nearly didn’t.)
Lynn arrived in Los Angeles because the sixth author to be approached concerning the project — after Tom Stoppard, who accepted the commission after which mailed back the check with a note saying the entire idea was hopelessly old-fashioned. Lynn met producer Peter Guber and director John Landis, the latter pitching his vision for the film in a performance that involved jumping on office furniture and running in circles for ten minutes straight.
“After which the butler says, ‘I can let you know who did it!’” Lynn recalled. “So I said, ‘Who did?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. That’s why I would like a author.’”
Lynn checked in to the Chateau Marmont — which bore a resemblance to the foreboding mansion he was about to invent, and had recently hosted its own premature death in the shape of John Belushi’s overdose — and spent the night attempting to work out if there was actually a story here.
The breakthrough got here when he realized that characters named after colours couldn’t possibly be their real names. Which meant they were all aliases — which meant all of them had something to cover.
“It was the spine of the entire thing,” Lynn says.
From that single logic problem, your complete clockwork machinery of Clue — the blackmail, the secrets, the cascading murders — was born.
The film’s casting is considered one of the good sliding-doors stories in Eighties Hollywood. The role of Miss Scarlet was originally solid with Carrie Fisher, who got here in and was, by Lynn’s account, genuinely hilarious within the room.
His wife back in London was somewhat less enthusiastic when Lynn called to share the news.
“She said, ‘Are you nuts?’ I said, ‘Why?!’ She said, ‘She’s a drug addict!’ So I said, ‘Really? She seemed effective to me.’” Lynn then met Fisher for lunch and remained unconvinced — whilst she fell over a chair on her technique to the table.
Days before rehearsals were set to start, Fisher called to say she was in rehab at Cedars-Sinai and would want to commute to set every day. Insurance firms took a dim view of this arrangement. With 4 or five days left, Lynn solid Lesley Ann Warren. Warren turned out, he says, to provide an exquisite performance.
The film’s most celebrated gimmick — three different endings, distributed to different theaters — was another person’s idea, and Lynn was nervous about it from the beginning. The pondering was that audiences would return 3 times to see each resolution. As a substitute, as he puts it, individuals who couldn’t determine which ending to see simply didn’t go in any respect.
“The ending is what people remember,” Lynn says. “It’s what they exit having just seen. If you happen to can’t determine what your last two hours has been about, critics are inclined to say, ‘They couldn’t even make up their minds learn how to end it.’ In order that was a disaster.”
When the film moved to home video and cable television, all three endings were joined together and played in sequence; that’s the format most viewers know today. That version, Lynn says, finally revealed the complete ingenuity of what he had built. The box office damage was done, however the cult was just starting to form.
One detail I had never heard before the interview: Lynn and Tim Curry attended the identical school in England. Lynn was 14 when Curry was 12. They weren’t close, but they knew one another — and Curry would later tell Lynn that seeing him pursue acting had shown him it was possible for somebody from their conservative, Methodist-founded institution to enter the business.
Many years later, on the Paramount lot, each of them veterans by that time, Lynn solid Curry as Wadsworth the butler — the role that anchors your complete film.
“I don’t know that I can truthfully say I got that work out of him,” Lynn says. “I believe he did that work.”
Probably the most famous line within the film — Madeline Kahn’s “flames… flames on the side of my face” confession — was improvised. Kahn asked Lynn if she could scrap what he’d written for that moment and check out something of her own.
“Sure,” he told her. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll do the speech within the script.” They never shot the script version.
The one other notable ad-lib was Michael McKean’s final line — “I’m going home to sleep with my wife” — and even then, Lynn isn’t entirely sure McKean invented it. “He believes he adlibbed that one and he can have done, although I assumed I wrote that.”
The script, by necessity, was essentially airtight: with three separate endings requiring precise choreography of who was offscreen at which moment, a single modified line could collapse your complete structure.
The whole interior of the film was shot on the Paramount soundstage where Alfred Hitchcock had built the apartment complex for Rear Window. The set was so convincing that after production wrapped, Dynasty reportedly purchased it and repurposed it because the Carlyle Hotel — which I looked up online and located to be true.
Lynn first met John Landis the day Landis was mixing Thriller. In the blending suite — an enormous room with a ping-pong table, a pool table, and no chairs — a friendly young man got here over to ask if Lynn wanted pizza. It was Michael Jackson.
“Very nice fellow,” Lynn says. “Yeah.”
Lynn is 83 now and, he says, retired from filmmaking for a while. He stays surprised that anyone still desires to speak about a movie he made 40 years ago.
However it’s no mystery: This movie consistently kills.
Take heed to the complete episode of It Happened in Hollywood — featuring Jonathan Lynn on Clue — wherever you get your podcasts.