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.

Peter Jackson will be presented with an honorary Palme d’Or at the opening night ceremony at this year’s 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, even though he’s never had a film play the fest itself. Nevertheless, he’s left a lasting imprint on Cannes. Jackson has recalled first visiting the Croisette in 1988 because his first movie, Bad Taste, was in the marketplace. But it was his return trip in 2001 that made cinema history, when he offered the first glimpse of footage from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. 

New Line Cinema’s decision to invest more than $270 million in three films based on the J.R.R. Tolkien classic was considered a big gamble, if not an outright folly. But the 26 minutes of footage previewed for the press quickly silenced the naysayers.

Writing in a blog he maintained at the time, Ian McKellen, who played the wizard Gandalf, wrote, “With relief and some excitement I can report that Peter Jackson’s images not only look convincing, they look stunning.” And then, New Line upped the hype by staging one of the most legendary of Cannes parties, high on a hill at the Château Castellaras.

As described in exhaustive detail on the fan site TheOneRing.net, “Orcs, hobbits, elves and men were dancing wildly to French versions of ‘Oh What a Night’ and the latest Latin offerings. In the back of the crowd, you could see the flicker of candles as a huge cake floated toward the front. The band played a rather strange/disturbing version of Happy Birthday, and Bilbo’s cake appeared before us. We all cheered wildly and toasted our favorite hobbit.” 

Festival director Thierry Frémaux wasn’t exaggerating when, in announcing the honorary Palme, he said there is “clearly a before and an after Peter Jackson. Larger-than-life cinema is his trademark, and his all-encompassing art of entertainment is particularly ambitious. He has permanently transformed Hollywood cinema and its conception of the spectacle.” 

When it comes to Paramount Pictures’ pending takeover of Warner Bros., the shouts from those with pitchforks — including exhibitors, filmmakers and lawmakers — are loud: The monopoly of it all, the zany promise of some 30 movies annually, the anxiety that the new merger becomes Disney-Fox, the mass elimination of jobs and so on.

Many forget that the debt-ridden Warner Bros. Discovery was in need of a hero to fly in and save the day, much like Tom Cruise’s Maverick from Paramount Skydance’s all-time top-grossing $1.5 billion movie Top Gun: Maverick. WBD was bound to be bought. Enter David Ellison.

In February, he snatched Paramount from the jaws of Netflix with a $31-per-share all-cash bid, amid the streamer’s questionable promises for theatrical. Given Ellison’s financial weight from his father, Larry Ellison, and Middle East funds, it could be said that Warners was always his to lose.

Many will argue that the Ellisons’ union of Paramount-Warner Bros. is another nail in the coffin of a shrinking motion picture industry. But there’s a reasonable case to be made that the Ellisons are here to evolve the combo as a fierce competitor against giants Netflix, Amazon and Apple. And Paramount-Warners will be a mighty competitor, touching every aspect of entertainment, news, tech and social media, with extended brands such as CNN, CBS and TikTok (Oracle has a 15% stake in the American arm venture). With an expected market cap of $170 billion, Paramount-Warners will easily rival Disney. The marriage of Paramount+ and HBO Max will also yield a subscriber count of 172 million, enough to push its way against the holy trinity of Netflix (325 million), Amazon’s Prime Video (200 million) and Disney+ (195 million).

For those concerned about theatrical, a new consolidated studio has a vested interest in putting films into theaters. As a rival studio business affairs executive puts it, “They’ll have $79 billion in debt, and the only way they’ll be able to get out of that is not by putting movies simply on Paramount+, but by releasing them theatrically.”

Sure enough, last month, Ellison made a surprise appearance at CinemaCon to announce his commitment to a 45-day theatrical window, starting immediately, and 90 days to SVOD. He explained he wanted to look exhibitors “directly in the eye” and promise at least 30 films a year, if and when the deal closes. “You can count on our complete commitment,” he said. “And we’ll show you we mean it.”

Ellison loyalists say that if Netflix can pull off 50 feature productions a year, why can’t the new Paramount? However, some maintain that this takeover situation is a sign of a bigger issue. Also speaking at CinemaCon, The Odyssey producer Emma Thomas said that the merger was “disruption for disruption’s sake,” saying that “there’s so many things wrong with the corporate world at the moment, in terms of the decisions that are being made that benefit a small number of people and nobody else.”

But it’s worth pointing out that Ellison isn’t like the other antiquated cable TV or telecom conquistadors in the biz. He’s a boots-on-the-ground producer, known for propelling Top Gun: Maverick — from his early pitches to late filmmaker Tony Scott, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Cruise, to rescuing the movie with extended reshoots involving Cruise and Jennifer Connelly’s characters.

Reportedly, Paramount brass initially told Ellison that Top Gun 2 would be lost on the under-35 set and was a ridiculous, pricey gamble. Ellison reportedly retorted that he would finance the entire tentpole.

In an entertainment industry where the culture is so often calculated and quite cynical, David is a fan first. The dude loves movies.

Shawn Levy

When the 2013 Brad Pitt zombie movie World War Z was in trouble, it was Ellison who was key in financially saving the film, with the pic’s budget booming from $125 million to near $270 million. Josh Greenstein, now Paramount Pictures co-chair and then the marketing boss, cut a teaser that enabled Ellison to see what the Marc Forster-directed movie could be. The pic ultimately grossed $540 million worldwide.

“From day one, David was fully committed to making the best movie possible,” says Greenstein, “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve worked with in this town who shy away from that kind of self-imposed pressure. David immediately saw the vision, embraced it and was responsible for pushing the film forward.”

“He is abundantly fair. From the moment I met him, he hasn’t just said it — he has proven through his actions that the best idea always wins,” says Paramount Pictures co-chair Dana Goldberg, who has known Ellison for 16 years. “He doesn’t care if it’s his idea, our idea, the director’s idea or the third AD’s idea. At the end of the day, what David cares about the most is the movie, and whatever serves it best wins.” 

Says director Shawn Levy, who made the 2022 Netflix movie The Adam Project with Ellison: “In an entertainment industry where the culture is so often calculated and quite cynical, David is a fan first. The dude loves movies.”