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Sondheim was additionally a lover of wordplay, video games and crossword puzzles, and he loved orchestrating murder-mystery events together with his pal Anthony Perkins. He and Perkins wrote the screenplay for the 1973 whodunit “The Final of Sheila,” which starred James Coburn, Dyan Cannon, Raquel Welch and Ian McShane, and which Johnson proudly cited as a supply of inspiration for his “Knives Out” movies.
Sondheim’s ties to the thriller style go deeper nonetheless: his solely nonmusical Broadway manufacturing was the play “Getting Away With Homicide,” which he wrote with George Furth and which ran for simply over a month in 1996. In an interview with The New York Occasions that 12 months, he recounted how Laurence Olivier had instructed him he’d used Sondheim as his mannequin for the game-loving thriller creator he performed within the 1972 film “Sleuth.” (In the identical interview, Anthony Shaffer, the creator of “Sleuth,” denied a longstanding rumor that he had initially titled it “Who’s Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?”)
By way of his love of Sondheim’s musicals, Johnson was launched to Angela Lansbury, who performed Mrs. Lovett within the authentic Broadway manufacturing of “Sweeney Todd,” in addition to a filmed model that performed steadily on Johnson’s tv. That’s, when Johnson wasn’t glued to “Homicide, She Wrote,” the comfortable CBS sequence that solid Lansbury because the crime-solving creator Jessica Fletcher. For kids of the Nineteen Eighties, that present “was truly fairly pivotal in putting in a love of whodunits and homicide mysteries into all of our brains,” mentioned Johnson, who additionally slipped a number of seconds of a Spanish-dubbed “Homicide, She Wrote” episode into the unique “Knives Out.”
Ram Bergman, Johnson’s producing associate, mentioned that Sondheim’s and Lansbury’s cameos have been recorded in the course of the modifying of “Glass Onion,” as he and Johnson tried to achieve them, working each connection that they had.
In Sondheim’s case, Bergman mentioned, “I wasn’t actually certain get to him. However then I used to be on a name with Bryan Lourd, our agent, and it one way or the other got here up. I mentioned, we actually would love Stephen to do that. And I swear, 5 minutes later, he emailed me: he’s going to do it.”
Bergman added, “Rian was in heaven, and I used to be in heaven as a result of I knew how a lot he meant for Rian.”
Sondheim carried out his contribution on a recorded Zoom name. In that dialog, Johnson mentioned, “I discussed to him that we have been making an attempt to get Angela Lansbury. And he mentioned, ‘Oh, Angie — I’m buddies together with her. Inform her I’m doing it. She’ll do it.’”
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