When Jonathan Lynn was summoned to Hollywood to write the screenplay for Clue, his first reaction was that it was the silliest idea he’d ever heard. A feature film based on a board game? But he’d never flown first class before, and he had a spare week. So he went.
Forty years later, the film is a genuine cult phenomenon — performed live by shadow casts the way Rocky Horror once was, endlessly rewatched on streaming, and quoted with near-religious devotion by multiple generations of fans. On the latest episode of It Happened in Hollywood, I sat down with Lynn for a wide-ranging conversation about how one of comedy’s most intricately engineered films came to exist. (It very nearly didn’t.)
Lynn arrived in Los Angeles as the sixth writer to be approached about the project — after Tom Stoppard, who accepted the commission and then mailed back the check with a note saying the whole 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.
“And then the butler says, ‘I can tell you who did it!’” Lynn recalled. “So I said, ‘Who did?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. That’s why I need a writer.’”
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 untimely death in the form of John Belushi’s overdose — and spent the night trying to figure out if there was actually a story here.
The breakthrough came when he realized that characters named after colors couldn’t possibly be their real names. Which meant they were all aliases — which meant they all had something to hide.
“It was the spine of the whole thing,” Lynn says.
From that single logic problem, the entire clockwork machinery of Clue — the blackmail, the secrets, the cascading murders — was born.
The film’s casting is one of the great sliding-doors stories in 1980s Hollywood. The role of Miss Scarlet was originally cast with Carrie Fisher, who came in and was, by Lynn’s account, genuinely hilarious in 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 fine to me.’” Lynn then met Fisher for lunch and remained unconvinced — even as she fell over a chair on her way to the table.
Days before rehearsals were set to begin, Fisher called to say she was in rehab at Cedars-Sinai and would need to commute to set each day. Insurance companies took a dim view of this arrangement. With four or five days left, Lynn cast Lesley Ann Warren. Warren turned out, he says, to give a wonderful performance.
The film’s most celebrated gimmick — three different endings, distributed to different theaters — was someone else’s idea, and Lynn was nervous about it from the start. The thinking was that audiences would return three times to see each resolution. Instead, as he puts it, people who couldn’t decide which ending to see simply didn’t go at all.
“The ending is what people remember,” Lynn says. “It’s what they go out having just seen. If you can’t decide what your last two hours has been about, critics tend to say, ‘They couldn’t even make up their minds how to end it.’ So 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 full ingenuity of what he had built. The box office damage was done, but the cult was just beginning to form.
One detail I had never heard before the interview: Lynn and Tim Curry attended the same school in England. Lynn was 14 when Curry was 12. They weren’t close, but they knew each other — and Curry would later tell Lynn that seeing him pursue acting had shown him it was possible for someone from their conservative, Methodist-founded institution to go into the business.
Decades later, on the Paramount lot, both of them veterans by that point, Lynn cast Curry as Wadsworth the butler — the role that anchors the entire film.
“I don’t know that I can honestly say I got that work out of him,” Lynn says. “I think he did that work.”
The most famous line in 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 try something of her own.
“Sure,” he told her. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll do the speech in the script.” They never shot the script version.
The only 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 may have done, although I thought 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 changed line could collapse the entire structure.
The entire 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 as the Carlyle Hotel — which I looked up online and found to be true.
Lynn first met John Landis the day Landis was mixing Thriller. In the mixing suite — a vast room with a ping-pong table, a pool table, and no chairs — a friendly young man came 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 some time. He remains surprised that anyone still wants to talk about a film he made 40 years ago.
But it’s no mystery: This movie consistently kills.
Listen to the full episode of It Happened in Hollywood — featuring Jonathan Lynn on Clue — wherever you get your podcasts.
