Director's Notes – 146 – The Birthday of Lee Marvin

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Hello from Los Angeles, where I am currently living. When I tell people this, they say “oh, to work on TV” and no. While hopefully the tv stuff we’re working on will keep chugging along, there’s no particular reason I need to be here for that. We’re in LA because it rules and many of our friends live here. Back home there’s snow predicted. It’s mid-April. Here in LA the afternoon heat is cut by cool winds off the Pacific. 

This episode continues the slow development of Lee Marvin’s story that started with, I believe, the building of a statue of him in an episode Jeffrey wrote some time ago. Why Lee Marvin? It’s a good question. Jeffrey found the idea of him living in Night Vale interesting. Then in the [Best Of?] episode, we added the mythology that he is always turning 30, and never aging a day past that. Gradually that got built out into the story we’re looking at today.

The voice of Lee Marvin is TL Thompson. It’s rare that we ask a guest voice to carry an entire episode, but here TL steps up to the challenge with aplomb. When my wife and I first heard their performance of the opening lines, we burst out laughing and rewound to hear them again. Their voice has that quality that just makes you want to keep listening to it, and they have a great sense of timing with both the poetry and the jokes. 

For the music of this episode, Jon has gone a slightly different direction than the usual. Instead of collaging together bits of his older work, he sets the entire monologue to one continuous piano piece. The unity of the music sets off the unity of the story and the performance. We give our collaborators little to no upfront direction, so this musical choice belongs entirely to Disparition. I think it’s a smart one, marking the episode sonically as different from the majority of our episodes, in the same way that the script marks it as different structurally.

While the episode might on first listen appear to be a series of interesting tangents, not bound to a tight structure, there is actually a very rigid skeleton underneath. The episode primarily consists of a series of repeating segments. Throughout the pre-weather portion, the episode loops back over the same subject matters: a visit to the dark planet, a vision, a description of a daily routine, and repeat. Then post-weather we get into a bit of fun and time-tested structure: the list. Any time you can write a list (for instance, everything I’ve never done) it allows you to go wild your subject matter while giving a easy glue that holds it all together.

This episode focuses once again on the dark planet lit by no sun. That image is an important one for me, although I couldn’t explain why. It’s a gut feeling. I like the dark planet. One day we will all go there.

- Joseph Fink
April 15, 2019

P.S. We are finishing up the scripts for our special one-off show at the Largo in LA right now. I’m very excited. The Alice script is a lot of fun, and I think accidentally is the pilot episode for a sequel to the podcast. I’m not sure I’ll write that sequel, but the start is there if I want it. And the Faceless Old Woman show is truly one of the most disturbing things we’ve ever written, diving deep into body horror. I can’t wait to see Mara Wilson perform it.

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