Director's Notes – Episode 139 – The Birthday of Lee Marvin

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

Hello from the other side of the hardest tour I’ve ever done. I went on book tour for the Alice Isn’t Dead novel and I got both severely physically sick, and then also had the worst backslide in my anxiety that I’ve had in nearly a decade. Please respect my sacrifice by checking out the book, I think it’s really good.

This is an episode about Lee Marvin. It will not be the last about Lee Marvin over the coming months. That is all I can say about that for the moment. Why did Lee Marvin become a citizen of Night Vale? I wasn’t exactly sure, so I did some investigating through our archive of scripts, and have the following evidence. 

Lee’s first appearance was a Jeffrey written bit in episode 7, in which “Route 800 will be closed for the next two Saturdays because of the biennial Lee Marvin Film Retrospective.”

His next appearance was a year later, in episode 36, in another Jeffrey penned bit that mentioned “the 138-year-old bronze statue of actor Lee Marvin, just outside the Night Vale post office.” 

From this we can see two things. One: The inclusion of Lee Marvin was clearly originally a Jeffrey initiative, so I am exactly the wrong person to be answering this question, but I wrote this episode and so here we are. And, two: For quite a while, Lee Marvin is only a town obsession, and not a living citizen of the city. The only thing that points to a larger story, of course, is that the statue of him is 138 years old. 

In fact, while Night Vale’s love of Lee Marvin is a quiet recurring joke over the ensuing years, Lee himself does not appear as a character until well into 2015, with the release of [Best Of?], in which we learn that not only is he alive and well in Night Vale, but it is always and has always been his 30th birthday. That was the idea that would gradually turn into the story I’m telling here.

I knew that I wanted to hear from Lee Marvin, and TL Thompson was a performer who immediately came to mind. They are a member of the New York Neo-Futurists, a company from which many Night Vale voice actors have come. Part of this is familiarity, obviously. It’s a company I know well and have seen perform many, many, many times. But also the theater work they do is intensely personal, and gives you a real sense of the human being who is on stage. My belief about casting voice actors is that it is most important to cast the human being more than the actor. Partly this comes from the fact that I have such an embarrassment of riches when it comes to talented actors I know, that I can afford to place other standards on the process. But I believe that when you hear someone talk, you get some sense of the person they are. 

TL is a fascinating and warm person, and I thought they would be perfect for this character. My one note to them was that I didn’t want an impersonation of the real Lee Marvin. I just wanted them to be themself. I thought that would be far more interesting and affecting. 

I was blown away by their performance, and I hope you were too.

Two quick notes:

1. The moon fact bits is a direct reference to the incredible podcast Imaginary Advice by the brilliant Ross Sutherland. Specifically, it is a reference to the episode “Re: The Moon” and I cannot recommend listening to that enough.

2. For more about the story of Martin McCaffrey, check out our novel It Devours!, which has a little self-contained story about him that leads directly to what he’s up to here.

Thanks for supporting our show, and thanks for listening to our show, and what was that weird click in your elbow? Did you hear that? That click in your elbow? What could that be?

- Joseph Fink
December 1, 2018