Intrigue On Ice: Spy Brunch’s Nick Rheinwald-Jones Talks Spies (Q&A)
The creator of LA’s ‘Safehouse’ series, and writer of ‘Cold War Lounge: The Asset’ dives deep on his love of the genre.
Spies.
Spy Brunch founder Nick Rheinwald-Jones loves spies and stories about spies so much that he’s created two shows, written on another, and named his immersive theatre company after the genre.
With Cold War Lounge: The Asset, his latest authorial effort, opening this week and Safehouse ’82 — the sequel to Safehouse ’77 — slated for November, we wanted to ask Nick just what it was about him and spies.
No Proscenium: Okay, Nick — two Safehouse shows. The Cold War Lounge. A review for us about Secret Cinema’s Casino Royale: what is it about the spy genre that does it for you?
Nick Rheinwald-Jones: Okay, first of all, let’s make it personal: I literally experienced a James Bond movie while in the womb. My parents went to see The Spy Who Loved Me at the Harvard Square Theater in late 1977, when my mom was somewhere in her first trimester, so those seeds got planted early. I saw the movie as a fully-formed human when I was probably 13, and it blew me away. I didn’t see it as over-the-top or campy in any way at that point; I just thought it was the coolest thing imaginable. (And I was watching it on a 13” TV.)
Over the years, as I’ve gobbled up more and more spy tales — and written some myself — one of the things I’ve come to appreciate most about this genre is just how vast it is. Spy films and shows can be action epics, psychological thrillers, romantic comedies, small-scale human dramas, and any combination of the above. They can be escapist to the extreme, like Kingsman or most of the Bond films, or they can cut very close to reality, like The Americans or Deutschland ’83. What ties all these stories together are the concepts of deception and secrecy, and those can be explored in a tremendous number of ways.
And that’s where I think the genre fits so well into the immersive world. Almost every immersive experience I can think of is based on bringing the audience into a secret world. You buy your ticket and you walk through the door and you instantly become part of a privileged and elite group. By the time you leave, you have accumulated knowledge and experiences that are exclusive to you and the rest of the people who have seen the show — and in many cases, even other audience members will not have had quite the same journey as you, so you are truly imparted with something special and unique. These same elements are also a big part of what makes spy stories so engaging — except that with films, TV shows, and books, you’re living vicariously through the characters who are discovering the secrets, whereas in an immersive show, you get to discover them yourself.
NP: Best spy of all time?
NR-J: Since the actual best spy of all time is, as we all know, someone none of us has ever heard of, I’ll skip past that part and talk about my personal favorite: Lily Sergieuw, who served as a double agent during World War II. She worked for German intelligence while reporting back to MI5 in England, and her work was crucial to the Bletchley Park decryption project. But she had one condition that she wouldn’t budge on: she wanted to be able to travel with her dog. And when the British wouldn’t come through on that, she threatened to expose herself to the Germans. Her handler was an older British intelligence officer named Mary Sherer, who described Lily as “exceptionally temperamental and troublesome.” I guess what I’m saying is that this needs to be a movie starring Marion Cotillard and Helen Mirren, and someone please let me write it. (Correction: Let Phoebe Waller-Bridge write it. Along with everything else.)
NP: What would be the essential element of your dream spy immersive — whether to make or just be a part of?
NR-J: I’d really love to make a show that spans multiple locations, or even takes place over the course of multiple days. So if I had a limitless budget, I’d probably create something like the spy-immersive version of The Amazing Race, where you’re hopping on planes and trains and traveling to exotic locales, encountering different characters, ordering drinks in other languages, and, oh, can there also be skiing? I’ll probably have to wait until we have those Black Mirror white-disc implants before I can create something like this, but I can be patient.
On the more achievable end of things, it would be great to create something like a Secret Cinema experience that both honors and expands on the world of a specific spy film or series.
NP: Best Bond?
NR-J: Daniel Craig, just for how completely he nails it in Casino Royale (it’s a shame the rest of the movies haven’t been nearly as good). You could watch that film with the sound off and just marvel in how well he sells the character in his face and his body. There’s not a single second that feels phoned-in. Timothy Dalton is a close runner-up. He’s the only other actor who really dug deep and tried to find the soul of the character, and I enjoy both the films he was in, though neither of them quite lived up to his potential. (I don’t hate Sean Connery — except as a human being, since he’s a horrible misogynist — but he’s just not in the same category.)
NP: What’s eluded you so far about capturing the “magic” of a good spy story?
NR-J: One of the things I struggle with most as a writer is creating meaningful stakes that will propel the plot and characters and make the audience truly care about the outcome. That’s an essential element of not just spy stories, but all kinds of stories. One of the things I got dinged for in Safehouse ’77 was the fact that the story and the experience more or less followed the same path no matter what the audience did or didn’t do. That was a deliberate choice, because I wanted to ensure that every audience member got a complete and satisfying narrative experience, and I was worried that too much agency or branching could lead to unsatisfying outcomes. Now that I have that show and a few others under my belt, I feel more comfortable loosening my directorial grip on the audience experience, and hopefully that’s going to enable us to deliver something that feels more dangerous and unpredictable in Safehouse ’82.
NP: Most underrated spy story?
NR-J: The 1998 movie Ronin. Part spy film, part heist film, incredible cast and performances, a script written (mostly) by David Mamet, and some of the best car chases ever put on camera (with zero CGI). It’s damn near perfect and I watch it at least as often as any of the Bond films, which is saying a lot.
NP: You’ve made a lot of work in the past two years — along with the spy material, you’ve written The Sideshow and co-created The Pod — what have you learned doing all that which is informing the next step: Safehouse ‘82?
NR-J: I always see every immersive show as a testbed for future immersive shows, kind of like how Pixar uses their shorts to try out new animation techniques. With The Sideshow, Lyndsie Scoggin and I really wanted to experiment with something that we weren’t able to pull off in Safehouse ’77: the concept of multiple endings that could be influenced by the audience. When Katelyn Schiller and I made The Pod, we did a lot of research on scientific details that could inform not just individual scenes and moments, but the entire world of the show; we wanted the audience to feel like everything they were experiencing could really happen.
Now, as the three of us work on Safehouse ’82, Lyndsie and Katelyn and I are trying to bring all these elements to bear. As I mentioned, we’re aiming to give the audience more agency and investment in the outcome, and we’ve done a lot of specialized research to make the story, plot, and characters more grounded in reality (while still ensuring that the experience is at least as fun, thrilling, and cocktail-soaked as Safehouse ‘77).
Beyond those specific aspects, making all these shows has also just given us a lot more confidence in our instincts and our ability to problem-solve. We don’t need to spend a lot of time second-guessing ourselves as to what will engage an audience; we can just trust that if we’re passionate about something, then that will come through in the experience. That confidence has been especially important in building Safehouse ’82, because — and I’m sure this will shock absolutely no one — it’s very hard to rehearse this kind of show without an audience. You have to use your imagination to picture where the guests are going to go and what they’re going to do, and the more shows you’ve done, the more audiences you’ve watched, the easier it is to formulate a plan that accounts for a variety of possible behaviors and reactions.
NP: British Spy TV Series: Sandbaggers or Spooks (aka MI-5)?
NR-J: Since I am years behind everyone else on most TV shows, I’m going to have to turn the clock back a half-century and switch this to a choice between The Saint and The Avengers. And that’s a tough call, because Diana Rigg was a flawless queen (seriously, if you only know her as the one who poisoned Joffrey, you need to hop on Amazon and watch a few episodes) but I’m still going to have to go with The Saint. I only needed to watch a few minutes of that show to understand why Roger Moore was Ian Fleming’s first choice to play 007 (seriously). He did a fine job as Bond, mostly, but Moore in the early ’60s as a mysterious problem-solving gentleman COULD GET IT.
NP: You work with a steady team, some who have their own producing shingles: any thought you might merge into one supergroup?
NR-J: What I think is so great about the immersive community, especially here in Los Angeles, is that for the most part, creators and companies are incredibly supportive of each other. We talk, we drink, we see each other’s shows, we root for each other’s success. In some other industries, including creative ones, people end up joining forces to avoid being competitors. But I really don’t see any of us here as being in competition with each other — we all have the shared goal of putting more and better immersive out there — and because of that, I think we can have this great landscape where everyone has their own company or collective that represents their particular vision, but we can also collaborate if the project is right. Cold War Lounge is a joint venture among Spy Brunch, CoAct, and Sampson Creative Enterprises, and the experience of making the show has been incredibly smooth because we understand what each of us and our companies brings to the table. To be able to have that experience, and then also go off and make things that speak more to our individual goals and passions, feels like the perfect setup.
NP: The world is in peril, Bond is incapacitated. You’re heading up the special NATO intelligence directive and you can only field a team of four: who gets called up — real or fiction, living or dead? Who does what?
NR-J: Feels like I need to go Suicide Squad on this thing, so here goes: Villanelle from Killing Eve is our James Bond/Ethan Hunt-esque point person. She might kill more people than strictly necessary, but you can’t save the world without breaking a few eggs. Blofeld is running things, except it’s specifically the Blofeld in From Russia With Love, the super-smart puppet master whose face you never see, not one of the later Blofelds who became a caricature of a caricature. Then I’ll go ahead and un-singe Varys from Game of Thrones, because the bad guys might have already knocked out the Internet and the Spider can easily get messages across the world using nothing more than urchins and birds. Finally, we probably need one unabashedly good person to keep the rest of these shady folks in line and create all the crazy weapons required to get the job done, so for that I shall enlist Shuri from Black Panther.
NP: Could you ever get tired of spies?
NR-J: I don’t think so. I was writing spy scripts that nobody wanted to read for ten years before I discovered the immersive world, so I’m pretty much in this for the long haul. There’s still so much to be discovered about how to create different kinds of spy-themed immersive experiences. Safehouse ’82 is a wildly different show than Safehouse ’77 was, and Cold War Lounge is a different beast than either of them.
I’m also thrilled to start doing more shows that are collaborations, and to discover what riches can come from having different voices and skillsets in the mix. With Cold War Lounge, I’ve written the script but Lyndsie Scoggin and Payden Ackerman are executing the show as directors, and both of them have unique artistic brains that enable them to work with the actors and build the experience in ways that I couldn’t possibly have done alone. On top of that, we get to do the show in a real working bar, and that’s thanks to our art director/co-producer Cam Sampson and the fantastic job that she and Payden did in crafting Grunge Shop Tavern earlier this year, which convinced the ownership at Brack Shop Tavern that doing immersive events at their bar was a great idea and should happen more often.
But none of this means that Spy Brunch is ever going to make spy shows exclusively. We’ve already played with sci-fi in The Pod, and as Katelyn and I look ahead to where the company will go in 2020 and beyond, we’re very excited to keep venturing into new genres.
Cold War Lounge: The Asset runs September 6–8 in Downtown Los Angeles. Tickets are sold out.
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