Jonathan Lynn remembered telling his agent about the movie's producers, 'these people are insane'
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(jpeg)/clue-the-movie-051226-5e8f1a5040df424fa815955cb1f1fe83.jpg "Clue, Lesley Ann Warren, Martin Mull, Madeline Khan, Michael Mckean, Tim Curry, Christpher Lloyd, Eileen Brennan")
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NEED TO KNOW
- Jonathan Lynn, who wrote and directed 1985’s Clue, remembered being pitched the movie and thinking it was the ‘silliest idea’ he’d ever heard
- Lynn eventually signed on as a screenwriter and ended up taking over directing duties, too
- Though the movie was a flop upon its initial release, it’s since turned into a cult classic
He thought making a movie out of the board game Clue was the “silliest idea” he'd ever heard — and then he did it anyway.
Jonathan Lynn, who wrote and directed 1985's now-classic mystery film Clue, opened up about making the movie on the May 12 episode of the It Happened in Hollywood podcast, hosted by Seth Abramovitch. He remembered that at the time, he was in London and met Peter Gruber, who ended up being an executive producer of the film.
“After about three minutes, in which I really didn't say anything, he said, ‘I've got the perfect project for you.' And it was to write a screenplay based on the board game Clue, which I thought was the silliest idea I'd ever heard,” Lynn, 83, remembered. “And I wasn't interested, but then I thought, ‘I've never been to the West Coast. I've never flown first class… I've got a spare week. I might as well go and see what this is all about.' ”
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Lynn went to Los Angeles, where he met John Landis, who was attached as director. He later learned he was the sixth person they'd talked to about writing a script, after people like Tom Stoppard, Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins.
“So they were nowhere,” Lynn said. “And so John pitched his idea for a story, which was very entertaining. He ran around his office and jumped on the furniture and yelled, and it was wonderful… I've never seen a pitch like that. In England, everything is much more subdued.”
Landis said it was the butler (played by Tim Curry in the film) who would tell everyone who did it, the same way as he was explaining the plot now. When Lynn asked who carried out the murder, Landis said, “I don't know. That's why I need a writer.”
Lynn had to figure out how to turn the characters from the board game — who weren't really characters, but colors — into a real storyline.
“I called my agent in London and said, ‘These people are insane. Can I come home?' ” Lynn remembered. His agent encouraged him to work on the idea anyway, and eventually he was hired to write the script, which was just “a series of events.”
Lynn finally cracked some of the script when he figured out, “They couldn't all have names that were colors without some reason, so they all had to be aliases.” If all the characters were using aliases, it meant they had something to hide, so Lynn had to figure out what secrets each person was keeping.
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Gruber and Landis loved it, but Landis left to direct another movie. Lynn, who has only ever directed for the stage, agreed to take the film on.
Before Lynn agreed to write the script, he knew that the producers wanted multiple endings. He wrote and filmed four, though only three made it into the final film. Lynn said it was “hard enough” to keep the plot of one whodunnit a secret, let alone three.
Now, when people watch the film on home video, cable or streaming, all three of the endings play at the end, but when the movie went into theaters in December 1985, only one ending played. “They thought people would see the movie three times,” Lynn said, but instead people “didn't go and see any of them.”
The movie bombed at the box office. “Critics tend to say, ‘Well, they couldn't even make up their minds how to end it.' So that was a disaster.” At the time, Lynn “regretted it deeply,” but 40 years later, he “couldn't care less.”
Once they put all the endings together at the end of the film, “it worked,” he explained. “You could see the ingenuity of the whole thing, how all three endings could be made to make sense, and they're all different.” Even though it wasn't a success at the time, over time it developed a cult following, thanks in part to children and teenagers watching it on TV.
“And they still apparently love it when they've grown up,” Lynn said. “And so the film has become sort of a big hit 40 years later.”
In addition to Curry, Clue also starred Eileen Brennan as Mrs. Peacock, Madeline Kahn as Mrs. White, Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum, Michael McKean as Mr. Green, Martin Mull as Colonel Mustard and Lesley Ann Warren as Miss Scarlet, plus Colleen Camp, Lee Ving, Bill Henderson, Jane Wiedlin, Jeffrey Kramer and Kellye Nakahara.
Lynn continued to work as a director, directing, among others, 1992's My Cousin Vinny and 2003's The Fighting Temptations.