Sondheim was also an enthusiast puns, games and crossword puzzles, and he liked to orchestrate murder mystery parties with his friend Anthony Perkins. He and Perkins wrote the screenplay for the 1973 whodunit.The last of Sheila”, starring James Coburn, Dyan Cannon, Raquel Welch and Ian McShane, and which Johnson proudly cited as the inspiration for his “Knives Out” films.
Sondheim’s ties to the mystery genre run even deeper: his only non-musical Broadway production was the play “get away with murder,‘, which he co-wrote with George Furth and ran for just over a month in 1996. In an interview with The New York Times that year he recounted how Laurence Olivier had told him he had used Sondheim as his model for the game-loving mystery author he played in the 1972 film “Sleuth.” (In the same interview, Anthony Shaffer, the author of “Sleuth”) denied Sleuth,” a long-standing rumor that he originally titled it “Who’s Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?”.)
Through his love of Sondheim’s musicals, Johnson was introduced to Angela Lansbury, who played Mrs. Lovett in the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” as well as a film version often seen on Johnson’s television. That is, when Johnson wasn’t glued to “Murder, She Wrote,” the cozy CBS series that cast Lansbury as crime-solving author Jessica Fletcher. For 1980s kids, that show was “actually pretty pivotal in installing a love of whodunits and murder mysteries in all of our brains,” said Johnson, who also slipped a few seconds from a Spanish-dubbed episode “Murder, She Wrote.” . in the original “Knives Out.”
Ram Bergman, Johnson’s producing partner, said Sondheim and Lansbury’s cameos were shot during the editing of “Glass Onion,” as he and Johnson tried to reach them, using every possible connection.
In Sondheim’s case, Bergman said, “I wasn’t quite sure how to reach him. But then I was talking to Bryan Lourd, our agent, and somehow it came up. I said, we would really like Stephen to do this. And I swear, five minutes later he emailed me: he’s going to do it.”
Bergman added, “Rian was in heaven and I was in heaven because I knew how much he meant to Rian.”
Sondheim made his contribution during a recorded Zoom call. In that conversation, Johnson said, “I told him we were trying to get hold of Angela Lansbury. And he said, ‘Oh, Angie – I’m friends with her. Tell her I do. She will.’”