Episode 624: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)

Episode Transcript
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(00:05):
Hold your folks, it's show time. People paid good money to see this
movie. When they go out toa theater, they want cold sodas,
look off popcorn, and no monstersin the projection booth. Everyone for tend
podcasting isn't boring, Burn it off. Before the turn of attention and two

(00:46):
of the great nines of old timemet at began adventure that get signal fraud
together brillions and friends their very lives. The Universal presents The seven Percent Solution,

(01:08):
Nicholas Meyer's best selling mystery from thepersonal memoirs of doctor John H.
Watson, Ussimus T I guess thedetens of my life with such uncanny acculacy,
kind of a guess. It isan affording anon in destructive for the
logical package from the contents the sevenPercent Solution, revealing for the first time
the vile and destructive habit that almostdestroyed the world's greatest detective. What's in

(01:32):
the true identity of Sherlock Holmes archnemesis Professor James Moriarty subtlement and the extraordinary
circumstances surrounding the hitherto unknown affair beknown. Every adventure of the seven Percent
Solution, but cry Nichol Williamson isSherlock Holmes, Alan Arkin is doctor Sigmund

(01:53):
Freud. Robert Duval is doctor JohnH. Watson. Bennetta Redbray, who
is the lovely love of Ever,Jeremy Kempet run by Linstore, Joel Gray
is the possibly fictitious low End Steamand Sir Laurence Olivier's professor Moriar prosecuting me.
I can put it persecuting you.I see everything of the case,
and you have faced. Now youmust cover my inspections. Sherlock Holmes Most

(02:16):
Baffling Mystery and mister Sigmund Freud's MostCurious Case. The year's most intriguing motion
picture was Trained originally heading it isnow. There has been no explanation for

(02:44):
the seven percent solution until now.Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your
host. Mike White joined me onceagain. Is mister Aaron Peterson. Thanks,
Framily Beck again also back in thebooth, This is mister David McGregor.
A pleasure to be here. Onceagain, we continue our month of
discussions around the nineteen seventies interpretations ofSir Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective Sherlock Holmes.

(03:10):
On this episode, we are discussingThe Seven Percent Solution from nineteen seventy
six, written by Nicholas Meyer andbased on his first of many Sherlock Holmes
books. The film was directed byHerbert Ross and stars Nicole Williamson as Sherlock
Holmes, Robert Duval as Doctor Watson, and Alan Arkin s Sigmund Freud That

(03:32):
food Dude. The film finds Holmesin the grip of cocaine addiction, while
Watson plans to take his friend toVienna to undergo therapy by Freud. We
will be spoiling this film as wego through, so if he don't want
anything ruined, please just turn offthis podcast. Go out watch the movie

(03:53):
first, find the movie, watchthe movie, come back, turn the
podcast back on, and then listento the discussion. It's just that easy.
David, when was the first timeyou saw the film and what did
you think? Along with the otherfilms that we're discussing this month. I
can't give you an exact date,my guests would be late nineteen eighties early

(04:14):
nineteen nineties as a result of comingacross the Jeremy Brett TV series and kind
of being inspired to search out otherinterpretations of Sherlock Holmes, and when I
saw this, I liked it alot. I read the book. The
book is well for me anyway,incredibly clever and incredibly well informed about the

(04:36):
mythos of Sherlock Holmes. And theway Nicholas Meyer was able to tie together
several of the characteristics that we associatewith the character and then put it in
a way that it gets explained ina logical fashion through psychoanalysis and hypnosis.
It's just really brilliant. It's awell written novel, and the film does

(04:59):
a really good job of capturing whatthe novel is setting out to do,
which is kind of again once again, it's a humanized version of homes kind
of behind the scenes glanced at whatwent into making him the character that he
was, and I think it doesa really effective job of it. So
I enjoyed the film a lot.The only thing that really continually pulled me
out was Robert Duvall's English accent.Other than that, it's a big thumbs

(05:26):
up for me and Aaron about yourselflike his accent, but I'm also American.
I'm just like he did it.I saw this one probably around the
same time as David did. Mymom I talked about this in an earlier
episode. She got me kind ofinto the Sherlock Holmes books, and also
she worked in psychology for thirty years, so when this one was around.
It came out when I was awee little kid, and I didn't see

(05:47):
it until I was a teenager,but she wanted to watch that one with
me because of the because of thetie in to Freud, and it's still
one of my favorites in terms ofhow it captured columns. I agree with
everything David said. It really understoodthe mythos of the character and really brought
in the Freud argument, and reallyit just kind of flushed it out because

(06:10):
at the very end of the movie, where he's talking about, you know,
the unconscious mind and all that sortof thing, and how you can
dress personal issues through hitting your unconsciousmind is very much part of how Freud
went about his practice, So itreally ties in well. I think it's
a very smartly written piece of art. Yeah, I don't remember the first

(06:30):
time I watched this one either.It just seemed to always kind of be
around. I think I've seen bitsand pieces on TV and I didn't really
realize just how clever it was untilI sat down and read the book.
The movie picks up a lot ofthe things that the book does. I
think it's you know, it's goodthat it was an adaptation by Meyer of
his own work, and I thinkthat he's his best friend when it comes

(06:55):
to that, sometimes you can beyour own worst enemy and decide like,
oh, well, I did itthis way in the book, let's do
it this way on film. There'sa couple changes, and we'll talk about
those as we go along, butthere's nothing where I was just like,
oh, wow, you really madea mistake there. So you guys said
it's super clever. Even the openingcredits have all these little asterisks through them,

(07:16):
and you know, they talk aboutlike, you know, Professor James
Moriarty and his paper that was writtenand how it's still being referred to,
and just all these things that Ihave the little thing where it says like
only the facts have been made upabout this story, and just this whole
idea of mixing fiction and fact andtaking loss in the wilderness years of Sherlock

(07:39):
Holmes and mixing that in with whatFreud was doing. I mean just yeah.
I thought it was very, verywell put together, and I don't
think they were going to stop talkingabout how clever it is, because just
as it's more and more clever asthe movie goes through and the end of
it. The first time I sawthis, I was like, well,
I'm not really sure about this end. And then I watched it again the

(08:01):
other day and I was like,oh, wow, yeah, I can
see exactly what he's doing here,and I think he did some really smart
things. And this, like Isaid, written by Nicholas Meyer, based
off of his own book, andnot directed by Meyer though this was Herbert
Ross. But this was right beforeMeyer was going to start his own directing

(08:24):
career. You know, when welose Nicholas Meyer, and I hope it's
no time soon, people really needto step back and just talk about how
damn smart this guy is and justhow great his works are. I mean,
time after time, so fricking good. And then what he ended up
doing for the Star Trek franchise,his mark is indelible. What they're doing

(08:46):
on Picard this year is picking upa lot of stuff that Meyer put forth
back in eighty two. I can'tsay enough good things about Nicholas Meyer.
Another thing about the credits, I'lljust throw this out there. It was
a little tip of the hat toSherlock Holmes fans, as You're right,
they're kind of they're very whimsical thatare a wee bit tongue in cheek.
But the illustrations that accompany the openingcredits are original Sydney Padget drawings from the

(09:11):
Strand magazine stories, and anybody thatis familiar with the stories and those illustrations,
it's like, oh, that's reallycool. It's a nice little detail
which d tells you right from theoutset that the people making the film it's
kind of an homage in a wayto the whole mythology of Sherlock Holmes from
the very beginning. So that wasa nice little touch that I appreciated,

(09:35):
you know, don't I don't knowhow many Sherlock Holmes movies you've watched,
Mike, but I can tell Davidhas seen like me, he's pricing most
of them. When you're watching one, you can tell in the first fifteen
minutes if this is going to bea good interpretation or not. Typically because
you can feel the love, youknow, you can feel, do they
do they appreciate the character, theyjust using it because it's free. Is

(09:56):
it a copyright thing, like theyjust want the cool character name or something?
Or is this some buddy who actuallyappreciates the character. And you can
tell in fifteen minutes this one youcan tell in like the credits, like
you talked about it. I mean, there's just so much love that's put
into this that it's hard not toappreciate it. Even if you don't love
how it plays out, it's hardnot to appreciate the effort. Yeah.

(10:16):
Just for the record, Sherlock Holmesonly became in this country completely copyright free
as of January first. It wasearlier in other countries. It was earlier
in the UK, but since theUnited States has ninety five years and the
last last Sherlock Holmes story was publishedin nineteen twenty seven, it was only
in January first, twenty twenty threethat the entire cannon, as it's called,

(10:39):
became a copyright free. That's whyeverybody makes their Sherlock Holmes movies in
the UK. This was the firstof five so far of these Holmes books
that Meyer has written, and ineach one of these he either takes well
I would say. In each oneof them, he takes historical figures and

(11:01):
mixes them into his fiction. Andit's not that too clever by half type
of thing where it's all like,not in a wink kind of stuff.
He really does a great job ofsaying, oh, in this year,
this person would have been in SherlockHolmes's circle. And I like that even
throughout his five books, he's makingreferences back to the previous book, Like

(11:24):
when he goes on to do IJust listen to the Adventures of the Peculiar
Protocols and he makes a mention ofShaw, and then Shaw has shown up
in the West End Horror, andso you know, at one point Watson
is like, you know, becauseSherlock Holmes doesn't really keep up on the
news sometimes, so Watson's like,well, actually he's gone from critiquing place

(11:46):
now writing place. He's pretty successfulplay right now this George Bernard Shaw guy
that we've met way back when kindof thing. So I really like that
he does that even within his ownbooks, He's making these little nods back
to his own stuff while keeping thatmythology going and just continuously adding to it

(12:09):
and just again super clever with whathe's doing, and that I really liked
The Peculiar Protocols too, because itwas so much based on the story of
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This really horrific racist track or anti
Semitic track, And so he istalking about that while he's also unveiling a

(12:31):
mystery that only Sherlock Holmes could solve. Of the four movies we're covering,
this has the best cast in myopinion, like top to bottom. It's
an all star cast, absolutely,and Williamson is pretty good as Sherlock.
I mean, for the one thatcarries the least amount of weight in terms
of the primary cast. He dida really amiable job. He was a

(12:52):
legend on stage. He was consideredthe Shakespearean actor of the nineteen sixties in
the UK. His Hamlet was acclaimed. You know, they even made a
film of it with him as Hamlet. His his Ophelia was merry and faithful
of all people. So he's areally well regarded stage actor, equally famous

(13:15):
for tantrums and throwing punches at people, and you know, and it goes
hand in hand. Yeah, Well, he was a hard drinking, hard
smoking. He claimed that he wouldsmoke eighty cigarettes a day. Really kind
of tightly wound guy. Actually morerespected from a theatrical perspective than a film
perspective, because the film he's bestremembered for his Excalibur when he played Merlin.

(13:39):
Interesting character, let's put that way. Yeah, but the fact that
they've got Laurence Olivier as Moriarity,the fact that they've got Joel Gray,
Charles Gray. The list goes on. If it's an all star cast year
with Alan Arkin, Yeah, RobertRobert Duvall, sort of with hair,
kind of Nicole Williamson. He willalways be doctor Eric Mason for me.

(14:01):
He was one of to me,one of Colombo's best villains that he had.
He was. I wondered if youwere kid bringing that up. Oh
yeah, because he worked a coupleof times with faulk the same year,
because he was also in The CheapDetective. How did dial a Murder?
Right? Was that the exactly?Yeah? And he's a huge movie fan,
which is great. There's all thistalk about Citizen Kane. His two

(14:24):
dogs are Laurel and Hardy. Yeah, it's so good. I can't wait
to talk about that one way finallyget to it on the Shabby Detective because
yeah, he's great and that voice, that amazing voice, and he really
does a great job of going betweenthat calm, cool, collected Sherlock Holmes

(14:45):
and this drug addict. And Ilove the first time you see him,
how you see the shot of hiseye looking through the crack in the door
and his pupils are huge in that. I was like, oh, that's
really smart that they gave us thatclose up in just to show how strung
out he is, manic and paranoid, just a true addict, like right

(15:07):
off the bat. Yeah, thescene where he meets Freud is great,
and that's what's probably my favorite scenein the movie, in which Freud says,
well, what can you tell me? And he does he does this
Sherlock Holmes thing, Who am Ithat your friends should wish us to meet?
Beyond the fact that you are abrilliant Jewish physician who was born in
Hungary and studied for a one inParis, and the certain radical theories of

(15:28):
yours have alienated the respectable medical communityso that you have severed your connections with
various hospitals and branches of the medicalfraternity. Beyond this, I can deduced
a little. You're married with achild of five, you enjoy Shakespeare and
possessor sense of honor. This thisis wonderful commonplace. I'm still awaiting an
explanation. It's brilliant, it's logical, it's deduction of the highest order.

(15:50):
And yet he's fallen apart because hisaddiction has kicked in, and you can
see him just struggling to do histhing but also fight off the cravings for
cocaine. It's a really vora performance. His hands in that scene. Just
look at it, the way thathe's constantly moving his hands and rubbing his

(16:11):
hands and stuff. It's like,I need something for them to do.
And yet his mind is going asmouth is going. But you just like
see the tension in the anxiety andhis body. Yeah, you can hear
in his voice too, just thestrain of someone. I don't know if
you've ever been in a position whereyou're really conflicted by something but you've got

(16:33):
to focus on something else and talkat the same time. You can hear
the strain in people's voice when they'vegot just so much going on that they're
in danger of getting completely overwhelmed.Yeah, it's called being apparent. I've
been there, I get it,And just that whole thing of Sherlock Holmes
and his way of deducing things,his way of observing things so related to

(16:55):
what Freud is doing, and justto bring these two figures together and realize,
oh, we're not so different toyou and I, and just one
is using his tools for the outsideworld and the other one is exploring the
mind. I'm like, oh,again, very very well done the way
that they're doing this, because aswe go along, Freud seems to be

(17:15):
doing more and more of what Holmesis doing. This almost seems like this
is the moment for Freud to reallykind of come into his own and he
almost needed Holmes as a catalyst inorder to become the signal for it.
That we know they're both trying tohelp people, and they're both using their
intellect and their logic and their instinctsto help people to make the world a

(17:36):
better place. So although they seeminglywhen they meet very different people to very
different characters, they're very much kindredsouls in what drives them and how focused
they are on their own unique professions. I admire how if you just read
the description and you don't really comeinto this film with high expectations. You

(17:57):
could easily look at this, isit going to be a gimmick? Is
it just going to be Freud's agimmick to sell this movie? And to
be fair, if you come intothe expecting that, I totally understand that
that makes total sense. But onceyou're watching the movie, you can tell
the same care that was put intoSherlock Holmes, which is a lot.
There's a lot of Karen Love putin the Sherlock Holmes of this film,

(18:17):
even though they're kind of tweaking alot of mystiques about especially Moriarty, they're
kind of changing that character a lot, but they give Freud just as much
love throughout the film, and reallyhe's a very pivotal character to everything that
happens. And that's what I whatwas needed for this to work. You
have to it can't just be oh, yeah, Sherlock's going to go to
a shrink and it's going to becool because it's Freud and then he's going

(18:38):
to be cured by the end.It has to be something that's really integral
to the plot. And Meyer reallyworked that out. And I'm you know,
for people that aren't fully familiar withthe whole Sherlock Holmes cannon. If
you look at pop culture, it'seasy to get the impression that his drug
addiction is a huge part of thestories, and it's not. It only
pops up very and frequently. Itpops up a couple of times in the

(19:02):
short stories. The story that featuresit most prominently is the second story was
actually a novel novelette, The Signof the Four, and you know that
came out in eighteen ninety and thatwas, you know, really trying to
shape poems. That's not almost akind of decadent hero removed from society,
very esoteric, very eccentric in hisinterests. When Colin Doyle wrote the first

(19:27):
Shrlock Holmes story, it got publishedin eighteen eighty seven in what was called
the Beaten Christmas Annual, and thatwas it no interest. It kind of
kind of sank like a stone.But in eighteen eighty nine he was invited
to meet a editor from the USfrom Lippincott's magazine, a guy named Joseph

(19:47):
Marshall's Stoddard, at the Langham Hotelin London. This guy's looking for stories
from English authors, and the twoauthors that he met were Doyle and Oscar
Wilde. I just think that's oneof the great meetings in literary history.
And he said, I want tocommission stories from both you guys. And
so that's when Conan Doyle went homeand thought, well, revived Slackholm's take

(20:07):
another shot at it. He wrotethe Sign of the Four. Oscar Wilde
came out with a picture of DorianGray. I just loved that story,
the fact, you know, andthe hotel is still there. You can
go as far as I know,you can still go there. You know,
one of the great meets. Ithink August thirtieth, eighteen eighty nine
is a plaque I think on thehotel to commemorate the meeting of those of
those people. The picture of DorianGray, his hero is again he's kind

(20:29):
of a decadent hero. He's fightingagainst time. And both of those came
out. There was a Frenchman,a novelist by the name of yours,
Karl Weisman, who wrote a novelcalled Against Nature in eighteen eighty four,
and it was a new kind ofhero, a decadent hero in full retreat
from civilization. And some people likedthat. Many, you know, commentators

(20:55):
reviewers hated it, like, that'snot a hero, but he was kind
of redefining what a hero could be. And clearly Conon Doyle and Oscar Wild
picked up on that for their respectand stories in eighteen ninety. But the
point I want to make is thatConon Doll did not make him a drug
addict throughout the whole Cannon. Bythe time he gets to there's a story

(21:15):
called The Adventure of the three Quarterin which Watson is writing, well,
by this point, I'd kind ofweaned him off the cocaine. Not that
I was kidding myself. You know, it's never going to fully go away.
It's just sleeping, but it doesn'tform as big a part of the
stories as it does in subsequent interpretationsof the character. The irony is that
Freud was we in n cocaine.Oh yeah, he loves the way it

(21:37):
makes me feel. Well. Ihad jock cancer too, so it takes
a little bit of adge off thepain. Just ironic in terms of how
this particular script worked out well.I even love that the words solution can
have a few different meanings. Youknow, the cocaine this is soluble in
water type of thing. Then thenalso a solution as the the end of

(22:00):
a mystery. You know, Ireally thought that that was nice as well.
I mean, tell me a littlebit more about Moriarty as far as
how many times Moriarty actually shows upin the stories, because I don't imagine
it's a lot. It is thata lot. Moriarty shows up because Arthur
Conegill wanted to kill off Sherlock Holmes. He was sick of it. He

(22:21):
churned out two dozen stories off ofthe Strand magazine. Every time he wanted
to stop, they kept saying,how would you like more money? And
he's like you, okay, I'lltake more money. But by the end
the first Sherlock Holmes short story appearedin the Strand magazine in July of eighteen
ninety one. By the end ofeighteen ninety three, he was done and
he killed him off in the FinalProblem. And if you're going to kill

(22:41):
off Sherlock Holmes, you need aworthy adversary. So that's you know,
Moriarty shows up in that. Moriartyshows up in the Return story. He
brought Sherlock Holmes back to life innineteen oh three in the story called the
Empty House Moriarty also features or wastalked about in the novel of the Valley
at Fear, But is he permanentlypart of the receedings. No, he's

(23:04):
not. He's not mentioned much atall. However, he's such a great
character, you know, an evilmathematics professor who controls crime in London.
As he's described, he's an Napoleonof crime. It's a genius character.
And there's no wonder that in somany film or play versions of the stories,
he's going to get used. He'sgoing to be put into the story

(23:26):
because he's such a great antagonist.He's mentioned more than he's actually a role,
has a role in the stories.Did they try to do the thing
that they did in Sherlock the BBCseries where or suddenly revising the cab driver
that was the murderer? I can'tremember if it's a study in paint or

(23:48):
what it was, but like,oh, he actually was working for Moriarity.
Do they try to tie all thatstuff back together again or is it
just left the way that it is? No, there's no real through line.
There's no real Moriarty through line.You know. When he comes back
in nineteen oh three, Holmes hasto explain his hiatus, his disappearance,

(24:08):
which is what this film is about. If it tries to explain, well,
why did he disappear? And whenhe comes back, well, Moriarty's
dead. But it's Moriarty's henchman,specifically a guy named Colonel Sebastian Moran,
who is now going to try toassassinate Sherlock Holmes to make up for the
death of Moriarity. But it's notsomething that is trailed out through the stories

(24:32):
to stories. By and large,they are discreet entities, self contained,
and you know, they build upthis larger picture of who the character is
story by story and those references backand forth to stories that have already occurred.
But it's not as if Moriarty isa large through line through the whole
cannon. It's like twenty five storiessomething like that before you even hear Moriarty.

(24:55):
And what it is is basically likeit's not so much that he's behind
every case he's solved before. Isit's that he's this you know, this
godfather, this guyfather of crime andwhatnot. So Holmes has just figured it
out, so he basically, youknow, a couple dozen stories in Arthur
Gunnan Doyle is looking at it.Wow, we need a master villain and
maybe we need to take sure likeHolmes out. That's the way we need

(25:17):
to do it. What Conon Doyledoes is he mentions, you know,
there's some historical criminals he won't touch, like Jack the Ripper, but he
does mention Jonathan Wilde. And JonathanWilde was known as the Chief Thieftaker of
England and he was a guy whowas very Moriarity like. He basically organized

(25:38):
the crime in London and then hewas the police too. That was a
very profitable enterprise up until the timehe was caught and hung. You can
still see his skeleton. His skeletonis on display. I can't remember the
name of the museum, but it'son display in London. And if I
remember right, I don't think Watsonever is ever involved directly with Moriarity.

(25:59):
I feel like that that's a pointthat it's Holmes and Moriarty they meet,
so it's never it's really like Watsonhears about him. Yeah, it's Holmes
that has the final confrontation at Rickand back falls with right. But I
mean in general, I mean Idon't I don't think Watson ever comes face
to face with Moriarty. If Iremember right, I don't believe so now
I don't think so. But Sherlockian'saround the world will let me know if

(26:22):
I'm wrong. So this whole ideaof Moriarty not being a figment of Sherlock
Holmes's imagination necessarily, but being builtup in Sherlock Holmes's imagination in this movie,
in this story, to be thisNapoleon of crime. But yet poor
Laurence Olivier is playing this very putupon mathematics teacher who's just like, this

(26:45):
guy is torturing me. He's alwaysoutside my house and he's accusing me being
this napoleon of crime. And amovie, now, if they were going
to make it, he would dowith Kaiser Sozie at end. Yeah,
he would just start why oh,thank you so much, Doctor Watson,
and then like turn around and justlike you know, his whole body change

(27:06):
and he would walk around, yeah, AND's just like, oh, I'm
off to create a whole new webof crime. Consider me the new Doctor
mambousset. You know, But no, that's not the way it is.
And you know, you're talking aboutthe cast and the way that they use
this cast is so smart. LaurenceOlivier isn't in it as much as maybe
he could be. You know,it's a very small role, but he

(27:27):
makes a very big impression. Samethings I would say with Charles Gray as
Mycroft. Homes really like Charles Graywhenever he shows up in anything. And
then you know, I think thatJoel Gray Charles Grays's brother. Right now,
I'm just kidding that Joel Gray isslightly underused as Low and Steam.

(27:48):
He's in here more than I rememberedhim being in here, but it's kind
of a thankless role for Joel Gray, who at this point had already been
I think nominated for an Oscar forCavaree a few years prior. So I'm
like, okay, but Joel Greecesuch an interesting guy that I don't see
him leading a lot of films,but he's good in this type of role.
But I was just like, man, I wish that there was a

(28:11):
little bit more of him. Butthen the one for me that really stands
out is Jeremy Kemp, who wejust talked about top Secret episode a few
months ago, and him is avery baron. Carl von Leinsdorf. Man
I mean, Jeremy Kemp has oneof the great villain faces, and they
just they know how to play thatup. And I don't think we mentioned

(28:33):
earlier Vanessa Redgrave as Lola Devereaux's Ohshe's fantastic, And I didn't realize to
the change that they made to Myer'sbook, or the change that Myers made
to his book. I mean thatshe's the character where things really start to
diverge between book and movie because inthe book she is found she had jumped

(28:57):
off of a bridge. So we'vegot the wet damsel who I think that
we get in a few things,and I think that it was a wet
damsel in the first movie that wetalked about this month. She was also
allegedly conked on the head by theriver. I can't remember she was thrown
into the river or not. Kindof the same thing here if Vanessa Redgrave,

(29:19):
she had been held and you knowthey weren't sure what was going on
with her. In the book,she is the basically new wife of a
recently mysteriously killed or mysteriously died.It's like a baron, I think,
and he is all involved in thearms. Trader makes arms and they kind

(29:44):
of take her and steal her away. She manages to escape. It's this
whole thing of who is this woman? You know, they're trying to get
her to talk, they have toput her on her hypnosis. They're getting
very few clues. She's this womanfrom Providence, Rhode Island, and she's
actually a Quaker, and she wasgoing to pretty much be given over her
husband's estate and then she was goingto dismantle his whole armament business because Quakers

(30:08):
are not into war and why notjust get rid of all of this and
her basically her son in law througha complete fit. And the son in
law would be this Carl von Linestore of character. So there's a little
bit of a difference when it comesto that. And there's no churks,
by the way, there's absolutely nochurks in the book at all. So

(30:29):
I thought it was kind of funnywhen these churchs show up at one point,
and I'm just like, Okay,these are like the six dwarves that
escaped or what missing, Like thesechurchs will show up again, and definitely
they do. So some of thesesame patterns that we're seeing from these other
Sherlock Holmes stories are showing up inthis one as well, which again all
being built off of the same scaffoldingI thought was nice. Well. Vanessa

(30:53):
Redgrave, ironically enough, or coincidentallyenough, has a good Sherlock Holmes pen.
Her grandfather, a guy named RoyRedgrave, the patriarch of the Red
Gray family, wrote and started hisSherlock Holmes play in nineteen oh two,
and then he was Sherlock Holmes inSouth Africa, and he was Sherlock Holmes

(31:14):
in Australia. I'm not sure ofall the details. It was basically either
he was being pursued or pursuing womenthat he was trying to get away from
or was trying to catch, ormaybe they were pregnant. Anyway, he
was apparently a real ladies man,and he was hopping from continent to continent.
But he was playing Sherlock Holmes sporadicallyas he did so. And Vanessa
Redgrave's daughter Natasha actually appears in oneof the episodes of the Jeremy Brett Shrlock

(31:40):
Holmes series, The Copper Beeches,because like her mom, she's got that
amazing red hair, so very striking. So the Red Gray family is well
represented in the annals of Sherlock Holmes. Tim To be fair, most British
actors have done something with Sherlock Holmesand something that's true. Yeah, it's
hard to avoid. Yeah, allBritish actors, Anne Robert duvall I do
really appreciate how Meyer takes her andnow makes her a former patient of Freud's

(32:08):
also a former patient that he managedto get off of drugs. So suddenly
now she has a connection with SherlockHolmes that wasn't there before. And I
like this thing too, of Imean she basically she looks so much like
Ophelia, just laying there and thishospital bed all in white, and the
way that they call her the wasthat the lady of the lilies right,

(32:31):
and then being able to use thelilies later on a gift from Karl von
Lensdorff, and leaving those lilies asa trail. And we've got like the
trail at the beginning, which isthe vanilla that they put onto Moriarty and
they allegedly are tracking him even thoughit's it's really nice. It's Watson and

(32:52):
Microft working together to help save SherlockHolmes, and they bring out Old Toby
the Bloodhound, who think he hadworked in the Hound of the Baskervilles,
so it's just like, oh,it was that Hound of Baskervilles or something
different. Case. Yeah, Ican't remember which story it was, off
the top mic, but yeah,Toby is a character in anytime you add

(33:13):
a dog to a movie, aslong as the dog doesn't die, I'm
on board. I was just soglad that they brought him back at the
end because I was like, man, don't forget about Toby. And then
it was like, oh, here'sold Toby. He's gonna go back to
England with us. Okay. Greatbeing able to have that now connection between
these two characters, so she's notjust Shosha la fem or just like,
oh, here's the kidnapping victim tobe saved. She does end up becoming

(33:36):
like the victim kind of thing.And that's the same thing in the book
too, where she's on this trainand we have this amazing train chase and
that's really like the pinnacle of thethird act for us, as this whole
train chase that they have, thereare so many good moments leading up to
that as well, and who doesn'tlove a good train chase too, So
that was well done too. Yeah, and this whole idea of we're going

(33:59):
to rip apart this car for fueland just yeah, I thought that was
really smart. Toby was signing thefour by the way, oh thank you,
okay, thank you. And alsoit wasn't a Great Mouse Detective?
I think too. Isn't that thename of the basset down? It could
be I hadn't seen Great Mouse Detectivemaybe ever, I just remember the list.

(34:21):
No, it's good, it's good. It is worth watching. I
know it's a cartoon, but theyactually used Basil Rathbone's voice from earlier recordings
that he did Vincent Price is Ratigan. It's worth watching. And if it's
again, as was mentioned, madewith affection for the character and for the
stories. I am a feeling youprobably get a lot more out of these

(34:43):
than I do. Because there aretimes where he's going through his drug withdrawal
and there's all these redheaded people.So I'm just like, oh, it's
the Redheaded League, okay. Andthen this dog comes out of a closet.
I was like, Okay, that'sthe Hound of the Baskerville. But
I'm sure there's so many things orI'm like, I'm not picking up this
reference. But it's like comic bookfans watching a Marvel movie with Easter eggs.

(35:06):
That's really what a lot of itis. But we've into the screenplay,
which works. Yeah. I neverfelt like I was being talked down
to with this, and I neverfelt like, oh, I'm missing a
joke or I'm missing a reference here, even when it comes to like his
speech at the end where he's justlike, oh, you know, tell
them that my mathematics teacher killed me. And then he says something about like

(35:28):
they'll never believe it anyway, andI'm like, okay, so there's that
death and resurrection that you're just talkingabout, David, Like, they don't
believe that Sherlock Holmes. Instead,they have to bring him back, and
he even does the whole you know, look for a violin player named Sigerson.
So well, if it will easeyour mind at all, in the
withdrawal luten togetic sequences, that's allthere is. There's the reference to the

(35:52):
Hound of the Basketball, so there'sthe reference to the Redheaded League, and
there's the reference to when the aspis coming down the chord. That's yet
another Sherlock Holm story. But asfar as other references. I don't know
that there's any in that particular sequenceat all. The ASP is the speckled
band, that's the story. Iwas so surprised because there was that ASP

(36:13):
and there were a lot of othersnakes in this as well. Yeah,
and I just kept waiting for Fredto say, sometimes a snake is just
a snake. Well, they're evendoing nods to other story, Like I
get that Christy was at the OrientExpress h and that was a little on
the nose even for this, butI like that it was in there.
I'm like, all right, that'skind of clever. How did you feel
about Robert Duval as Watson thumbs upfrom sideways, thumbs down, thumbs up

(36:37):
for me, but I'm a bigRobert Duval fan. It's really hard for
me to not get behind him andseeing him in this performance, it's so
removed from anything else he ever didor tried to do. Yeah. Is
this British accent fallible? Probably?But I like that he gave it a
go, and it's always nice whenwe see an American do a British accent.

(36:57):
You know, I'm for it.What I think, Mike, It's
a little disconcerting at first, tohear well, because his voiceover voice doesn't
seem to match his Watson on screenvoice at times, because he does do
a little bit of narration, whichis fine. There's a lot of times
where Robert Duval, like these days, especially Robert Duvall, shows up and

(37:19):
he's a shit kicker. You know. He shows up in Jack Reacher,
he shows up in quite a fewfilms where he just is like, you
know, this good old boy,like kind of like a lonesome dove revisited
type of thing. And I wasjust like, Okay, that works.
Like seeing Robert Duval as a cowboyworks. But I'm sure even the first
time he played a cowboy was probablykind of a weird thing for people that

(37:42):
were used to him as being tokill a mocking bird or the Godfather,
especially where there's there's no accent.He's just you know, it's Tom He's
the Irishman and no accent there oranything, but it's German, Irish German.
Yeah, exactly. Well, Ididn't have a problem with it.
If anything, I thought it waskind of nice to see him doing something
different, and I mean, he'ssuch a solid actor that after a while,

(38:06):
I just yeah, there was noquestion. I would say it took
maybe three minutes before I just completelybought him as Watson, and then seeing
it a second time, I'm justlike, oh, yeah, no,
no issues right here. Since yousaid it, I've just been thinking,
thinking, thinking of every role I'veever seen Robert duval I can't I can't
even fathom him being poor. Imean, I just don't think I can

(38:27):
recall any performance that he gave thatwas anything but entertaining to me. No,
no, even when he shows upfor just a brief second, and
things like the conversation where he justkind of shows up, he does a
little thing, and that he's off. Yeah, he's he nails every performance.
This guy. Maybe a lousy movie, but my god, does Robert
Duvall give you a performance? Well? I agree with you, guys.

(38:50):
I mean, he's one of myfavorite actress. He's just great because he's
not a type. He's just agreat character actor. And I will say
one of the things, like yearsago, there was a DVD Blu Ray
release I think from Shout Factory,I want to say, in which Nicholas
Meyer there's an interview that is accompanyingthe disc and he basically said that Duva

(39:12):
was cast as the anti Nigel Bruceagain with the Nigel Bruce Hayes. I
know because because you're thinking, Okay, this came out in nineteen seventy six.
The last film Nigel Bruce made asWatson was nineteen forty six. Yeah,
it was a while thirty years later. It's like people are shaking their
fist, old, damn you night, Nigel Bruce. He's not He's not
like this, So that cod youknow, Agel Bruce's Watson has legs.

(39:37):
Like him or not. He madea real big impact on the world of
Sherlock Holmes. This Holmes isn't thataction hero that we're talking about when it
comes to Robert Downey Jr. Buthe can do a lot of things.
And just you buy Nicole Williamson asthis more heroic Sherlock Holmes. You by

(40:00):
Duval as being right there helping outas much as possible. You see him
as for me being Holmes as equal, and you don't necessarily see him just
like jaw dropping, just like,oh gosh, Holmes, how did you
do this? He's just like,Yeah, this is my friend, this
is this thing, this is whathe does. And this whole story is

(40:21):
I am here helping out my bestfriend and trying to help save him and
save his sanity, and that really, I just appreciate that so much.
Is Watson is reminiscent of the actor'sname is David Burke, and he appeared
in the first episodes of the JeremyBrett TV series for Granada. And again

(40:42):
it's like, this is a goodpartner for Sherlock Holmes. He's very levelheaded,
he lets his eccentric friend go offon these wild tangents, and he's
kind of our conduit into the character. He's the middle class, normal man
who appreciates the stuff his friend andis a steading influence on him. And

(41:02):
you get done a nice scene ofhim and Samantha Eggar as his wife and
their conversation, and you really andthis is doctor Watson's story sometimes even more
than it is homes. It's moreabout him and his reactions. And I
really appreciate when Holmes is going throughhis hallucinations and going through his withdrawals and
he calls Watson a cripple, andwhen Watson just decks him, and then

(41:28):
you get that great apology scene fromHolmes later on, and it's like This
is really nice to see these twofriends kind of reforming their friendship. I
stable defend Nigel Bruce to the endof the earth because I have a very
personal fondness for those movies. Buton the same token, it is always
nice to see a Watson that ismore formidable because in the stories, I

(41:51):
mean, he was in the army, he's a military man, he's been
trained. He's not he's not he'snot a sissy. He doesn't just sit
there and stand by and get bushall the time. I mean, he's
formidable. He can handle himself,and unfortunately, I think that gets lost
a lot because of the Nigel Brucecharacter, because that became very popular for
a long period time, which isprobably why I dud is talking about your
Lotcheans don't love him. But onthe same token, I mean there's so

(42:14):
many interpretations. A lot of peopledo get it right, and Robert Duval
is more akin to what I wouldpicture John Watson character Martin Freeman too.
I mean he came pretty close.Well. I like Nigel Bruce, I
just do's he solved the problem ofWatson. What do you do with Watson
if he's no longer the narrator ofthe stories. How do you make him

(42:37):
a fit into the narrative? Andthat was a really good solution. And
is it canonical so to speak,Well, no, not so much,
but does it work really well?Yeah, it does work really well.
So I like his interpretation of therole, and that was he was great
at that. You know he inother films, Rebecca, he's the dithering,
self important, ineffectual Englishman. Thatwas, you know, his sweet

(43:00):
spot. You know, last weekwe talked about ciccusin homes and all of
the fencing, and here we haveanother duel going on, but this one
is even more elevated to me.We're not necessarily on the rooftops, but
we are on this train. Andwhat I really liked was that there is
that callback to the earlier duel andjust how clever that whole thing with the

(43:27):
tennis matches. That you think thatthere's going to be you know, pistols
at dawn, but when Fred chooseshis weapons, he chooses a tennis racket,
and that he figures out his opponent'sweaknesses and then plays upon those weaknesses,
and then that weakness comes back toultimately be line store of undoing.

(43:49):
Again, I just keep saying howsmart this movie is. But again,
that's a really smart thing. Well, I love that scene the tennis match
that was. I don't know ifit's still in existence, but the time
it was. That was shot atthe Queen's Club in Kensington, London,
and it was a historic tennis court. That's the way tennis courts used to
look. It's obviously a little bitdifferent than what we're used to today,

(44:12):
but I thought it worked really well. And the whole concept of you know,
in competition, you can face someonewho's better than you and you can
still win if you can figure outhow to exploit their weakness and accentual strength
and look our first rate competitor.And that's what makes Freud such a good
character. He just outwits his opponent. It's not you know that he's bigger

(44:32):
or faster or stronger, he's smarterand that's what allows him to win.
And I like that a lot.Well, that is also talking about the
anti Semitism at the time. Youknow, here we are so many years
before World War Two, of course, but you know, anti Semitism is
not something new to European shore.So this whole thing of von Leinsdorf basically

(44:54):
being like a proto Nazi and comingin and just like, oh, they're
allowing Jews in the school up now, And like when Watson stands up and
he's about to take him on,and then it's like no, no,
you know, I can fight myown battles. And then he fights his
battle and again, you know,Alan Arkin, Jesus Christ. I always
love Alan Arkin again, so solidwith his performances. He can go way

(45:16):
out there and just be you know, wacky as wild as hell. See
our episode on Simon that we didso many years ago. But you know,
he can just bring it. AndI at first was wondering how much
of a comedian he was going tobe in this movie, but he playss
Freud really straight. Yeah. Ithought he did a great job with it.

(45:39):
I mean they I know, theyhad to change up his kid.
They had to change his daughter tohis son because she was going to sue
if they depicted her as a child, so they changed it to his son.
Um No, I think works reallywell. And I'm always somebody I
like spaces, I like room andso when I watched Sherlock Holmes movies,

(46:01):
I'm always interested in how are theygoing to depict the rooms of Sherlock Holmes,
and they do a really nice jobin this film. Obviously they're in
a bit of chaos because Holmes isin chaos, but the same goes for
the rooms of Freud. Really wellappointed. I'm a huge fan of set
decorators and props because they can,as Holmes himself says, a man's study

(46:24):
tells you who he is, andyeah, it's it's just the look of
the film set dressing, the setsthemselves. It's just really well done throughout.
Let me just add one more thingthat I really like, and here
is when they are trying to findthe Vanessa Redgrave character and they eventually this

(46:45):
is Holmes and Watson eventually end upat this brothel that she used to work
at and they open up the room. You know, you've got this great
Stephen Sondheim song, the Madam song. Open up the door to her room
and those Freud sitting on her backand he has deduced where she was going
to be. And it was justlike, that's so nice. It's like

(47:06):
the teacher meets the master type ofthing. I just heard that the pupil
meets the master. I was like, ah, that's really nice. I
like that. Yeah, I agree, that was a great touch. Yeah.
The film is basically, I mean, feel free to disagree or whatever.
To me, it's like almost atwo part film, Like the first
half of it is the reclamation ofhomes, and then once that's been accomplished,

(47:30):
then it shifts into this other narrativeof Okay, now we're going to
see the the you know, thehealed homes in action with not only Watson,
but you know, Sigmund Freud ashis allies. And I like that
a lot. I like the kindof two stories that dovetail together. So
what do you think about the finalhypnosis scene and when we get to find

(47:52):
out what has been giving Homes allthese problems for all of these years.
I think it's great. It's justit worked so well. It's you know,
Sherlock Holmes, it's like, okay, drug problems yep, dark moods
yep, Depression yep, animosity,sometimes outright hostility towards women. Will say,
misogyny in general, as he says, women are never to be trusted,

(48:15):
not the best of them. Sowhere does that come from? And
the solution presented in the film,boy tick tick tick yep, yep,
yep, yep, everything falls intoplace. Dad explains his character and his
neuroses incredibly well. I just thoughtit was very clever and beautifully done.
They changed the movie from the book. You know, in the book,

(48:37):
it's the fact that Sherlock Holmes hismother's having an affair, his dad finds
out, his dad shoots his mother, his dad shoots her lover, his
dad kills himself, and it's themath tutor Moriarity who relates this, you
know, these unhappy events to bothShrlock and Mycroft. Well they up to

(48:58):
Annie. In the film, it'sthat it's Moriarity that relates what happened.
Moriarity is his mother's adulterous lover.And you know, the same thing though,
the father kills the mother, andin fact, as you see in
the film, Alms witness it andis actually splattered with his own mother's blood.
I mean, if that's not goingto traumatize you, I don't know

(49:20):
what is. It's great. Iagree with most of what David said.
I agree that having Mortiarity be thelover was intriguing. The affair portion,
Dad being infuriated, that sort ofthing, The whole murder portion of it.
That's where it kind of lost me, because I don't think that's as
sharp as it could have been whenit comes when it comes to unconscious trauma.
But this comes from my mom.I mean, she's been in psychology

(49:42):
for thirty years. So to me, I've heard this my whole life.
So to me, it's much moresustainable trauma as accomplished by less known facts
and murder as a known fact,which means everybody probably would know about that
even back then. You know,Watson should know that his murdered his mother.
Somebody would know that case. Youknow, somebody on the somebody on

(50:05):
the force would know that that wasthe case. So to me, it
would have been more impactful for mepersonally had it been something along the lines
of his father beat his mother orsomething along those something that wasn't so permanent
and obviously that should have been wellknown. I get what you're saying,
but like nineteenth century, I don'tknow if you guys have ever tried to
do any kind of genealogical research.No, I get it, but I

(50:28):
mean a murder of the guy thatyou're living with, and he's never mentioned
that his mom was murdered, probablyby his dad. I mean, that's
not really a to me, that'snot a subconscious thought. That's more,
he should know that that happened.I'm not making excuses, but he does
not share his family history, veryrandolacence. He hasn't even mentioned Cigarets and
Holmes. By this point, somebodywould know. Somebody, even the idiots

(50:52):
on the force would know that.There was a famous murder case in London
in eighteen twelve that the novelist P. D. James and a historian by
the name of Critchley wrote an accountof called the Mall and the Pear Tree,
in which two families were brutally slaughtered. One of the tools was a
mall that at all sledgehammer, whichwas found at the scene of the crime.

(51:16):
And it's like, who did it? Who did it? What do
we do? What do we do? What do we do? And it
was days later that somebody decided toscrape some of the blood and hair off
weapon and there were initials on it. And that's how slow police forces were.
The idea that a crime scene wasa story to be uncovered and told

(51:37):
that was completely beyond them. Allthey relied on for the most part was
witnesses and offering rewards. So itwas a different era, and all the
stuff that we kind of take forgranted now, like DNA analysis and all
that, actually a lot of thestuff that you saw in the early Sherlock
Holmes stories, fingerprints, blood typing, those were in the stories before they

(51:58):
were even used by the police.And I understand what you're saying in terms
of like investigative techniques understood. Butthe fact that no one in the entire
none of the inspectors or anything else, have heard of this just to me
as a stretch, And I feellike it would be more impactful if it
was entitled a different way, justmy opinion. I'll tell you one of
the things I like about this,and maybe purely coincidental, is there's a

(52:22):
very famous story by the Argentinean writerJorge Luis Bohe called Death and the Compass,
and it kind of traces a plotthat you see here. Where in
the story it's a criminal. Here, it's Freud and Watson, where they
have a brilliant detective and they usehis own brilliance against him to lead him

(52:43):
following a trail. He thinks he'sfollowing clues that he has discovered, but
the clues have been intentionally placed downfor him to discover, and in the
Boree story, it ends up withthe villain kills the detective because he fell
right into the trap by following allthe clues. In this case, happily
enough, it's just, you know, the trap that he falls into is
being in the study of Sigmund Freud, where he can be cured of his

(53:06):
addiction. I'm Mike, you askedus, what about you? What'd you
think of that review? I don'tthink that anything is ever that clean and
clear. Oh, I just happenedto forget the death of my mother,
Like I think I would have justrealized that there was a big gap there.
But I can't speak to somebody's mentalaptitude when it comes to that kind
of stuff. I don't. I'msure there are aligned many things I've hidden

(53:28):
from myself over the years and justnever think to question. So why question?
You know, whatever happened to mymom? Or just like you make
up a story and that's the storythat you live with. Kind of thing
that makes things a lot easier.I thought that was kind of nice.
I wasn't sure with the snakes thatkept coming up if that was going to
have something to do with it.But once we got to that point,

(53:51):
I thought it was really well done. I don't think it was too heavy
handed. I thought the raw shotit very well. And then it really
leads to a great moment when afterHolmes is done with all that and he
says his goodbyes to Watson when he'son that boat, and he happens to
sit down next to Miss Devereaux,next to the Vanessa Redgrave character and her

(54:12):
little thing about you know, hey, what an a coincidence too, addicts
on the road to recovery, it'llprobably seem shorter if there are two of
us, And I was just like, wow, that's really nice and such
a great way to end this wholestory. And you know, it gives
again Meyer so many more stories thathe can tell. I mean, the

(54:37):
next one that he does is rightafter this, we've actually shows Sigerson this
new Holmes character in I think he'sin France and he's trying to be first
violin, and I don't even thinkhe's good enough to become first violin,
but he manages to get involved inan orchestra, so it's pretty darn cool.

(54:57):
I really recommend all of the MyersShow. Like Holmes books, they're
really top notch. He's a goodhe's a smart guy, and he does
some really good stuff absolutely well.Speaking of let's go ahead and hear from
mister Meyer right after these brief messages. Hello, everyone, this is Malcolm

(55:22):
McDowell. I just want to saythat this is a request to listeners of
the Projection Booth podcast to become patronsof the show via Patreon dot com,
pat e o n dot com slashProjection Booth. That's pretty simple. I

(55:45):
think you can do that. It'sa great show and Mike he provides hours
of great entertainment. So now it'stime to give back my little drugs.
Settle down and take a listen andhave a sip of the Malocco and then
you'll be ready for a little ofthe old in out, in out real
horror show. Bye bye. Canyou walk me through a little bit of

(56:13):
that time period in your life,like early seventies going into mid seventies,
just because you were into a lotof things. There was the book writing,
there was television writing, there wasmovie writing. What was that timeline?
Well, I moved out to southernCalifornia in the fall of nineteen seventy

(56:34):
one, and I didn't know anybodyhere in Los Angeles. I hadn't never
been to Los Angeles. I didn'tknow that Los Angeles was by the water.
I guess I didn't know much.I just knew that after three years
in New York following school, Ididn't seem to be getting anywhere. I'd
worked for Paramount Pictures as a publicist. I wasn't sure what that was,

(57:00):
but I did it for a while. I started to make headway by I
guess nineteen seventy three, I waswriting television movies. I got a chance
to write a television movie at ABC, and then I got a chance to
write one at CBS. And Iwas just sort of working up to a

(57:22):
head of steam in that department,my object being to write and direct movies.
And as I say, that wasjust starting to happen for me.
Must beIN sometime in nineteen seventy two, late seventy two, when the Writer's
Guild went on strike. We dothat. We seem to do that a

(57:44):
lot. The Director's Guild, Ithink, has never been on strike.
It's interesting you were allowed to writescreenplays at that time. You had to
pick it every day with a placardoutside the studio where you were designated,
and the rest time you're not supposedto write scripts. And so the Willard

(58:06):
with whom I was living at thetime, said, oh, well,
now is the perfect time to writethat Sherlock Holmes book that you keep talking
about. Now, that Sherlock Holmesbook, which, as you and perhaps
your listeners also no, became theseven percent solution. It originated at a
very long gestation period, starting whenI was about eleven years old, and

(58:31):
my dad gave me the complete SherlockHolmes stories to read, and I gobbled
them up, and I was reallyfascinated and delighted and in love with those
characters and that language. And atthe time, back when I was eleven
or twelve or whatever it was,there was a big hit musical, the

(58:52):
biggest hit musical anybody had ever seen, was called My Fair Lady, and
My Fair Lady was based on aplay by George Bernard Shaw called Pygmalion.
And it was very evident to mewhen I saw the musical and then I
saw or read the play or sawthe movie of Pygmalion, that George Bernard

(59:14):
Shaw was ripping off Arthur Conan Doyle. It was very evident that Professor Henry
Higgins of twenty seven A Wimpole Streetwith Colonel Pickering just back from India wasn't
very far removed from Sherlock Holmes oftwo twenty one B. Baker Street with

(59:36):
Doctor Watson just back from Afghanistan.That Shaw was helping himself. And I
thought, Gee, if Pygmalion madea great musical, Shirley Sherlock Holmes being
the original would make an even bettermusical. So as a teenager, I
was all involved in that, andthen somebody went and did it in all

(01:00:00):
I think of nineteen sixty four andit flopped. And I was at school
at the University of Iowa at thetime, and I believe that my father
then sent me a telegram saying congratulations, knew they couldn't do it without you,
or words to that effect, andthat sort of put me off homes
for a long time. But thenanother stream of associations sort of fit into

(01:00:25):
that, and that had to dowith when I was in high school and
people would say, oh, yourold man's a shrink? Is he a
Freudian? And I didn't know,so I said Pap are you a Freudian?
And he said, well, it'sa silly question. And I didn't
understand. Why is it a sillyquestion? And he said, because it's

(01:00:46):
no more possible to discuss the historyof psychoanalysis and not start with Sigmund Freud
than it is to discuss the discoveryof the Western hemisphere by Europe without starting
with Columbus or the Vikings, takeyour pick. But to suppose that nothing
has happened since Columbus, that's beingpretty doctrinaire. When a patient comes to

(01:01:13):
see me, I listen to whatthey say, I listen to how they
say it. I'm very interested inwhat they don't say. I'm listening.
I'm looking at how they're addressed.I'm curious, are they on time,
what's the body language? I am, in short searching for clues from them
as to why they're not happy.And I said, gee, I'm now
maybe fourteen. He said, well, now that you mentioned it, I

(01:01:37):
guess it is like detective work.And a little light bulb went off in
my head again. We're talking aboutyears years thinking about all this. I'm
wondering how much Arthur Conan Doyle knewabout the life and writing of Sigmund Freud.
Freud knew about Holms all right.He liked Sherlock Holmes stories, has

(01:01:58):
his bedtime reading. He knew hehad been compared to Sherlock Holmes. He
compared himself at one point to HerlockHolmes. Freud and Doyle were both doctors.
That was interesting. They both diedin the same town within nine years
of each other. How it's startingto get very interest. Then you learn

(01:02:22):
that Holmes was a cocaine addict,and so for a time was Sigmund Freud.
And you learn that Arthur Conan Doylestudied ophthalmology in Vienna for six months.
An Ophthalmology was where Freud was introducedto cocaine when he wrote a paper

(01:02:42):
with Kernigstein and Curler, two eyedoctors, on the uses of cocaine is
an anesthetic during eye surgery. Soall this stuff is burbling around and burbling
around. And now it's nineteen seventytwo or whatever it is. The writers
Guild is on strike. My girlfriendsays, now you can write that Holmes
book that you keep going on about, and she was right. I had

(01:03:06):
nothing else going on. So that'show I came to sit down and write
it in the midst of pursuing careerin the movie industry. Did you write
that before you were writing the JudgeD movie? Or is that after the
Judge D film? It was after, as I say, I started to
write a couple of television movies,and Judge D was one, and The

(01:03:29):
Night That Panicked America, which Ioriginally titled The Night the Martians landed Hie,
I thought was a much better title. Those were two movies that I
hadn't under my belt. I believewhen I sat down to write the seven
percentage, how quickly after you writeit does it get picked up for publishing?
Ah? Well, when I wrotethis seven percent so that I finished

(01:03:53):
it and I thought this has gotto be publishable. I read so much
crappy stuff this is I thought thisis the least publishable, and I sent
it. This is probably early nineteenseventy three. I'm guessing. I'm guessing
to my agent, my literary agentsin New York, because I had West

(01:04:15):
Coast office, same branch, andthey declined to read the book. Lady
said, she said to me,well, I've never read any Sherlock Holmes,
so how could I tell if thisis any good, and I guess
I have a short fuse. AndI said, well, putting aside the
fact that you call yourself a literaryagent and you've never read any Arthur Conan

(01:04:40):
Doyle, I would have to saythat if my book depends on another book,
it's already a flop, which struckme as an invincible line of argument.
But she'd hung up long before Igot that far. So I knew
one person in the publishing business fromgrowing up and living in New York.
So I took my manuscript and Iflew to New York. I arrived there,

(01:05:04):
it was pissing rain. It didnot occur to me to phone ahead.
I walked into the offices of McMillanand I said, as Jim Needlan
there, and they said, no, he doesn't work here anymore. This
had not occurred to me, alongwith everything else. And I stood there,
dripping in their lobby and said,but but, but he's still in

(01:05:27):
the publishing business, isn't he.And they said, well, let me
check, and they go, oh, yes, he's over here at this
and named another company. And Isaid, you have the address, and
they scribbled it on a piece ofpaper and I tromped back into Madison Avenue
or wherever it was and found wherehe worked, and he came out to
see me a little befuddled, andI explained that I'd written a novel and

(01:05:53):
he said, oh, well,this is a non fiction house. I've
had five novels here and I can'tget one published. And I said,
look, Jim, I don't reallyhave a choice. I'm getting on a
plane. I'm fun back to LA. Here's the book. And I gave

(01:06:14):
it to him and sort of forgotabout it. I'm not forgot, but
I just assumed that that was adead end. So I was surprised when
several days later he called me upand said, this one they'll publish,
and I said oh. And atthat point I said, well, I'm
damned if my agency I don't rememberwhat they were called, Ashley Famous.

(01:06:39):
I think I was gonna get tenpercent for negotiating this contract. So I
went to I. By this timeI had a lawyer, a showbiz lawyer,
very lovely man, and I said, Tom, when you I said,
I don't want them making money offsomething that they had nothing to do
with. And he said, great, we'll get a release from your literary

(01:07:01):
works, and I'll represent this,and which unhesitatingly granted me my literary works.
And Tom, who by the way, subsequently went on to be the
president of Universal Pictures, was areally wonderful man, no longer with us
Alas he said, well, hesaid, well, now, let me

(01:07:23):
read this book. So he readthe book and he said, listen,
you can do much better than thishouse. They're a non fiction house.
Your book is going to get lostthere. And I said, but what
about my friend Jim, And hesaid, he'll understand, believe me,
he's waiting for this call, whichwas more or less true. I then
got into a long tug of warwith the Conan Doyle estate, and that

(01:07:48):
took such a long time that Iwound up writing another book. I got
so bored I wrote a novel calledTarget Practice that actually came out first.
It was written second. But bynineteen seventy four or August whenever it was,
I think it was August, mattershad been resolved with the Doyle estate

(01:08:11):
and the seven percent Solution was published. I imagined that Sherlike almost was not
in the public domain by that time. He was not in the public domain.
Somebody said, where ignorance is blisstis folly to be wise. If
I had done my research and learnedthat he was not in the public domain,
I would not have written the book. So it was great that I

(01:08:34):
was stupid. By the way,nothing has changed. I wound up making
a deal with them that was Imay say, no seven percent solution.
They made money off this. Theestate has gone through so many permutations and
convulsions. It's a rather sordid taleof cupidity and greed. And what they

(01:09:00):
basically do at this point is theywait for a movie about to come out
or a book about to be published, and then they pounce and they try
to get you to pay them offrather than take them to court. So
a big studio like Warner Brothers willsay here's ten thousand dollars, go away,

(01:09:20):
and they go away because that makesmore sense to them than taking them
to court. But a man namedLes Clinger, who is a Sherlockean scholar
and happens to be a lawyer,he did take them to court and he
busted it wide open. And nowSherlock Holmes, for all practical purposes,

(01:09:40):
is in the public domain. Howwas your relationship with them when you did
the West End Horror, because thatwas only what two years afterwards, if
even that long. Because of theweird timeline here, I'm thinking that I
must have still paid them something.But I'm not one hundred percent. I
have a good, but not perfectmemory. I make weird mistakes. This

(01:10:03):
is your first novel, even thoughtarget practice comes out beforehand. Correct and
your first novel gets onto the NewYork Times bestseller list, Yes it does.
Wow exactly took a word right outof my mouth. How long after
that happens or how long after youpublish until the rights get sold? It

(01:10:27):
was within a year in nineteen seventyfour. It was really weird. Nineteen
seventy four was the year of theoil embargo and the endless gas lines around
the block. The whole country wassuffering except me. I had the number
one best selling novel in the UnitedStates, and I had a movie I

(01:10:48):
think Judge d got On the yearthat year, or maybe it was the
other one, the Night that PanickedAmerica, And I was doing really well
then. I By this time Ihad a different agent, a lovely young
man who was too smart and tooserious and loved books too much to be

(01:11:10):
an agent. Very long. Buthe had a mom who was in the
movie business, and he settled thebook to his mom. And a lot
of people at the agency criticized himfor the deal he made, but I
think they missed the point. Hesold the damn book and it became a
movie, and all these people hadbeen too busier, too snotty or something

(01:11:36):
to pay any attention to Sherlock Holmes. And as part of the deal that
you get to write the screenplay.Was there on the talk of you directing
At that point I hadn't directed afeature film yet. I didn't want to
that. I didn't want to dothat. It was certainly a condition that
the only way I would sell itis if I got to write the script.

(01:11:58):
How was it adapting your own aren'twell? That is an interesting question,
and there a couple of things.You have to be prepared when writing
a movie or doing a work ofart. Anything. I suppose to be
sort of ruthless. And I sawwriting the screenplay as an opportunity to improve

(01:12:23):
the book. I felt, andartists, I should say, at the
outset, are not the best judgestheir own work. It's it's not possible.
There's a Robert Burns poem that goes, I would to God the gifty
gee us to see ourselves as otherssee us. We can't. You can't

(01:12:45):
judge your you know, or atleast you have to know that your opinion
is simply one more opinion. Atthis point, the book is out in
the wide world. It's on thelist for forty weeks. People love it,
They're going crazy for it. Sobut what was my opinion? My
opinion was that the book had certainstrong points. Its language, its imitation

(01:13:10):
of Doyle was pretty good. Itscentral conceit Holmes meets Freud. Freud cures
Holmes of his cocaine addiction, andHolmes puts Freud's feet on the path to
psychoanalysis with deductive reasoning. Why.But the mechanism through which this happens is
that Freud and Holmes wind up collaboratingon the solution to a mystery. And

(01:13:33):
that's where I thought the book gotweaker, that the mystery was not first
class, and I saw writing themovie as an opportunity to make it better.
I also saw it as an opportunityto do something else, and that
is when you have a mystery storythat's a famous mystery and then you make

(01:13:57):
it into a movie. Everybody who'sread the book already knows who done it.
Case in point, Scott Tarrow's bookPresumed Innocent. When I read Presumed
Innocent, we're all shocked when welearn who done it. But when we
go to the movie, having readthe book, we already know who done
it. So I thought maybe Icould kill two birds with one stone.

(01:14:20):
I could make a better mystery,and I could surprise an audience that thought
they could sort of sit back andrelax and something. And so that's what
I did. I still think thatthe movie is too wordy, there's too
much talk in it, and Ikept cutting things down, and I kept

(01:14:44):
trying to cut them in the evenin the editing room with the director,
Herb Russ, and Herb was very, very protective of all the words.
No one would have believed that here'sthe writers saying, geez, Herb,
we got to cut this out.We don't need it the audiences ahead of
us, and him saying, no, you're debawling your own script. There's

(01:15:04):
a scene in the movie where twopeople in the movie I don't want to
give away things, but wind upplaying tennis. And the way that scene
came to be written, was thatthe book itself was finished. It was
at the publisher, and I hada dream. I woke up there were
two characters in my movie playing tennis. And I lay in bed and figured
out why that was cool, andcalled my editor and said, you gotta

(01:15:27):
put this in. And now I'mtelling her Bross, you got to take
this out. Nobody wants to seetwo guys playing a set of tennis,
unless it's Alfred Hitchcock, strangers ona train and somebody's going to plant the
cigarette lighter as murder evidence. Nobodywants to see the movie stop while these
two guys play tennis. And herbsaid, you're wrong. Everybody loves the
tennis scene. We have to keepit. And he was right. He

(01:15:51):
was right on that one. Theylike that one. Maybe they talk too
much in the movie, but it'ssmart talk, it's good talk. The
acting is terrific, the music isthe movie is really good to look at,
and so forth. So. Butyes, I had wanted to cut
things out, cut things down,sharpen them. It was a do over

(01:16:15):
in a way. Must be veryinteresting to be able to revisit and revisit
so close to publishing. You're onlylike a year out when you're able to
look back at this work that youhad obviously you had lived with it for
a long time, but that youhad just written well, I guess two
years prior with the whole battles withthe estate. Yeah. I mean again,

(01:16:38):
this is all sort of lattened outin a sort of telescopic hindsight.
What was going on at different atdifferent times. But that's that's pretty much
my recollection of events. What wasthat relationship like with Herbert Ross? It
was very close and very lovely.I liked him, adored his wife,

(01:17:00):
Nora Kay, who was America's mostfamous dramatic ballerina. She had long since
retired, but she was a remarkablewoman, a remarkable helpmate, had incredible
taste. They really sort of justincluded me. I said, you know,
I want to direct a movie andI want to watch how one has

(01:17:23):
made. And he was very,very solicitous and careful about dealing with me,
and as I say, more oftenthan not, he was protective of
the book and its movie incarnation.At one point I said to me,
we should cut this out. AndI remember because it was so unusual the

(01:17:45):
words he said, you're debawling yourown book. I think he meant castrating,
but he used debawling, which Iremember. You know, I don't
think I was, but I thinkyou have to be ruthless. Maybe there's
only two rules in show business.You know, if it works, leave
it in and variety is the spiceof life. And try not to repeat

(01:18:09):
yourself. Henry James said that theleast demand that you can make of a
work of art is that it beinteresting, and the most demand is that
it be moving. And I justkept saying, this has to click along
faster than it does. The endresult is it's a terrific movie. I've
seen it since and you look atit and go, wow, this is

(01:18:32):
really good. But at the timeyou just, you know, remember the
birthing struggles. Well, the castis amazing. You cannot get better actors
altogether one place. At this time, two of the three leads were my
idea. My idea was Alan Arkinas Freud, and my idea was Robert

(01:18:53):
Duval as Watson. And he becamemy idea when I heard somewhere along the
line that he was interested in playingWatson. And one of the things about
the novel is seven percent solution isthat, at least as intended by me,
it was a revisionist look at theSherlock Holmes that we had seen in

(01:19:15):
other books and other movies, whichI mainly hated because I never understood why
Watson is portrayed as a jerk,because I didn't understand why a genius wants
to hang out with a jerk.That just didn't compute for me. When

(01:19:35):
we cast Watson, I didn't wantanother Nigel Bruce, another Colonel Blimp.
And when I heard that Robert Duvaland somebody says not English, I said,
you're missing the point. This isa great actor, this is one
of America's greatest actor, and hewants to play doctor Watson in our movie.
Come on. So I fought veryhard to get him. Vanessa Redgrave

(01:19:59):
at the time, I think nobodywanted to hire her because of what they
took to be her pro Palestinian sentiments. So she certainly, you know,
wanted to work. That's my recollection. How she got cast. Lawrence Olivier,
who was my idol from the timeI was about five years old and

(01:20:21):
saw him in the first movie everso, and I just was fixated on
him and He was one of thebiggest influences in my life. When I
was I don't know about fourteen,I'm guessing I saw played hooky from school
to go to a revival movie theaterand see him in a movie that I

(01:20:43):
thought was called Henry V. Andit had pictures of you know, guys
on horses and armor with swords,and but it never said Shakespeare. So
you know, I just walked in. I didn't know what I was.
I thought I was seeing the swordsand the and the and the horses,
which I got out all of that, but I also got like the greatest
movie I'd ever seen in my life. I got the greatest actor, I

(01:21:04):
got the greatest writer. So Iwas totally fixated on Lauren Silia from that
point on. And then while we'recasting the movie, her Bras says to
me, what do you think aboutLaurence Olivia is Professor Moriarty and like,
oh, my wiring is shorting out. I'm thinking be cool, normal,

(01:21:26):
and I go, yes, that'sreally really empty. Yeah it looks good,
it's good good, you know,and I'm thinking, oh my god,
this will never happen, but itdid. What did you think of
Nicole Williamson. Nicole Williamson was herbrass's idea. We had both seen him
on Broadway doing Hamlet, and myfirst idea was Peter O'Toole. Herb had

(01:21:51):
made a movie with Peter O'Toole,a musical version of Goodbye Mister Chips,
and they had not got on.Sol was not in the running. He
mentioned Nicole Williamson, and I thought, that's either a brilliant idea or a
terrible idea. And it turned outit was a brilliant idea because it was

(01:22:11):
such a curve bootle. But thenagain, we weren't making a Sherlock Holmes
movie. We're making a movie aboutSherlock Holmes, and that was different,
and Nicol was different. He threwquit a curveball with the idea of Moriarty
not being the Napoleon of crime.Other people have made similar suggestions. And

(01:22:33):
one of the things that I discoveredwhen I was unemployed and at the beginning
of my Hollywood career, I stumbledonto all the books about Sherlock Holmes written
by other people. There is justvolume after volume after volume of books on
every aspect about Sherlock Holmes. SherlockHolmes and music, Sherlock Holmes, and

(01:22:58):
women, Sherlock Holmes, And howdid he go to the bathroom? Sherlock
Holmes in cocaine? Sherlock Holmes andeverything. And there was a series of
essays by a gun named Trevor Hall. But a lot of people have pointed
out that Moriarty isn't seen by anybodyexcept Sherlock Holmes. No, Watson takes

(01:23:19):
the whole story at face value,but he never all he sees is a
guy shaking his fist at a departingtrain. I'm sure there's a lot of
pissed off guys who have missed trainswound up shaking their fist off and the
goddab train or the engineer who lefton time. And I also never liked

(01:23:39):
the Moriarty idea because what I reallyloved as an eleven or twelve year old
kid reading those stories was how realthey seemed to me. Whether they would
seem as real now, I don'tknow, but what I glimbed on to
at the time was the little thingsthat the stories were about. The kidnapped

(01:24:01):
Raceforce, the people who swallowed LSDand lost their marbles, the Speckled Band,
the Redheaded League, all that kindof real stuff, or real enough
real to me, as opposed tothe Napoleon of Crime, which struck me
as sort of the prototype for LexLuthor or something, and I didn't buy

(01:24:27):
it. And somewhere, you know, later I understood, Okay, he
created this guy because he wanted tokill off Sherlock, and this is what
he dredged up to do it.Somewhere I read this theory that Moriarty had
been the math tutor, and Itook that idea and ran with it.
Well, I do love how youset all of these stories in the real

(01:24:48):
world, and like in the WestEnd Horror, having George Bernard Shaw there
or brom Stoker and just interacting withhistorical figures and just capturing that age so
well, or with Canary Trainer whenhe goes to Paris and just hearing about
what was happening at that time,and you know, what was going on

(01:25:09):
in the world of opera at thatpoint. I mean, just setting things
in that real world and then alsohaving you be this poor guy. By
the third book that I'm reading,where it's just like, ah, here's
another manuscript that I got a holdof. I almost feel bad for you
because people keep sending you to thesemanuscripts somehow. Yeah, it's a terrible

(01:25:30):
burden. How has your approach towriting Sherlock Holmes changed over the years,
or if you remain pretty steady.I read Doyle less often than I formerly
did. I've got the thing somuch in my DNA at this point,
and I know that I'm pushing theenvelope. When I wrote The seven Percent

(01:25:54):
Solution. There had been Holmes imitationsbefore, and I had read some of
them, but I basically had thefields to myself. This was just boom.
Holmes suddenly was everywhere thanks to thisbook, and in the wake of
that, this whole cottage Sherlock Holmesindustry has cropped up. If I read

(01:26:18):
nothing but Holmes imitations between now andthe time I dropped dead, I wouldn't
have time to read anything else that. That's how much there is on the
market. Holmes's daughter, Holmes's brother, Holmes's father's sister, and on and
on and on. And I don'tread a lot of the imitations because I

(01:26:38):
guess I'm insecure enough that I worriedthat those imitations would be better than my
imitations. I'm insecure, so Idon't want to read. But even worse
is that I might wind up tryingto imitate those imitations instead of my own
version of Doyle. And I've gottenbolder as I've become older, and there

(01:27:04):
are certain paths that are open tome that we're not exactly open before,
by which I mean, since mystories pretty much advanced the Holmesyan chronology.
By the time we get to mynew one, The Return of the Pharaoh,
we're into nineteen eleven. He's different, language is different. There's telephones

(01:27:29):
where they're only used to be telegraphs, and there's motor cars where they're only
used to be carriages, So thatsort of frees me up. Also,
the social world has changed the roleof women in it. And the other
thing I found, and I foundthis with the seven Percent Solution and all
the others, with the exception ofthe West End Horror, which does take

(01:27:54):
place in London in England, isthat getting home out of town freeze me
up. Whether I'm putting in Paris, in Russia, in Egypt. Those
trips abroad make him a sort offish out of Thames water and allow me
to sort of experiment with his charactera little bit, raise his game occasionally

(01:28:18):
I go back and sit down andreread one of the stories, whether it's
The Devil's Foot or the Bruce PartinsonPlans or Silver Blaze, or you know,
once in a while, just tosort of get it in my bloodstream
again. But I've become a supposedboulder. And the thing that I guess

(01:28:42):
I'm working my way up to sayinghere is that if the imitations become too
slavish, and I've noticed this whenI occasionally do open one of these other
pastiches and start reading them, itstarts to resemble Taxidermy's. It starts to
feel like a stuffed moosehead s something. And then I think it may be

(01:29:04):
very accurate. The author may neverhave used a word that Doyle didn't use,
but somehow it comes out lifeless.Not all of them, as I
say, some of them are betterthan mine. I have to admit I
do appreciate how you have the bitabout americanisms in your openings that I was

(01:29:27):
a good kind of caveat in thereas well. It's a caveat or a
cop out the caveaut. Do youhave any favorite adaptations of Holmes? Do
you have any particular ones that yousay, oh, they did a good
job, or I really like thatactor's interpretation of this. I confess I
have a real soft spot for thePrivate Life of Sherlock Holmes, the Billy

(01:29:48):
Wiler movie, which I realized alot of people have a lot of difficulties
with, and I suppose I couldsay yes, but I really love it.
I love the look of it.I love the crazy story that they
dreamt up for it. I realizedthat there were other stories that it was

(01:30:11):
an anthology, but I have tosay, not having seen those other parts
of it, I don't miss them. I love the music, which is
the Miklos Roja Violin Concerto, whichI think is great. It's the only
Billy Wilder movie that I know ofwithout a trace of cynicism, not a
trace. It's a side of himthat you don't see anywhere else. I

(01:30:33):
love one, a funny one calledWithout a Clue, where Holmes is the
dummy and Watson is the smart one. I think that's great. I really
love that. I love the PeterCushing Hound of the Baskerville's pretty straight ahead
Sherlock Holmes. I think that's verygood. And there was an old television

(01:30:54):
series with Ronald Howard, where Iguess is the son of Leslie Howard as
Sherlock Holmes and an actor named hMarion Crawford as Watson. And I thought
those were pretty good. I don'tknow if they're still good, but time
I liked them a lot. ButI was not a fan of Basil Rathbone

(01:31:15):
and Nigel Bruce, and I'm andI'm not a fan of movies where there's
some moriarty like sinister world plot equivalent. That isn't what I liked about Holmes.
I like those stories, those skookiecrazy stories, the Red Headed League,
Silver Blade, the Devil's Foot,the Bruce Partins and Plans, the

(01:31:40):
Greek conterpreter of the Naval Treaty,and even the ones I like that.
Sometimes Holmes is wrong the Yellow Face. It's a good will. So how
do you keep coming up with theseideas, because over the last what four
years, you've done at least twomore books, The Adventures of Peculiar Protocols
and the Return of the Pharaoh.Well, the short answers, I don't
come up with them very often.It's unusual for me. I mean,

(01:32:04):
think between the West End Horror andthe Canary Trainer was I don't know,
fifteen sixteen years, and then there'slike twenty three years between, when you
can count the rings on my treetrunk to find out how long this has
been going on. I write themwhen I get an idea, or when

(01:32:24):
I'm given an idea that will notlet go. The Canary Trainer was written
after a long hiatus because the moviedeal that I'd been anticipating had fallen apart,
and so had my income for thatyear, and I was very distressed

(01:32:44):
or distraught. And I was ina bookstore, which is place I like
the haunt, if there are any, and I saw a copy of The
Phantom of the Opera, the novel, which I realized I had never read,
and I was thumbing reading the introduction, and somebody's that, wow,
it's kind of amazing that Holmes nevercrosses paths with the Phantom because the dates
work out. And I remember juststanding there looking around and saying, is

(01:33:09):
anybody else like seeing this idea onthis page? So that's how I wrote
that one. And then the Protocolscame about twenty some odd years later,
But I had really been thinking aboutit for at least ten years, because
I realized at a certain point thatwhen it comes to the Holmes books,
I'm a forger. I forge,whether you want to call it Watson or

(01:33:32):
Doyle, but I'm forging. Andthen I started getting interested in forgery and
collecting a library about forgery. Andwhen you start studying forgery, and I
include paintings, music, book whatever, it isn't long before you come across
the biggest, baddest, most viciousforgery of all time, which is the

(01:33:54):
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. And that's a mind or I mean,
your listeners can google it. Beingdistressed and astounded as I was,
and somewhere I thought, how doI should Holmes try to expose the Protocols

(01:34:15):
of the Learned Elders of Zion?And I was thinking about that for ten
years before I found my way intoit. And then my agent and my
friend Alan Gasmer, I don't knowafter the book came out or when it
was coming out, he said whatabout Holmes in Egypt? And that instantly
took root. And I have anidea of you know, I'm working on

(01:34:35):
another one, which again is slightlyweird to have them in quick succession like
this but it'll take me a while. Can you talk a little bit about
how the seven percent solution helped tobed to time after time? When the
book came out, I can't rememberwhether it was the book or the movie,

(01:34:56):
but I think it was the book. I was contacted I a friend
of mine from the University of Iowawho had been at graduate school there when
I was an undergrad, and hesaid, I have I'm writing a novel
which is more or less inspired byyours. I have sixty five pages and
an outline. Would you read whatI've written and tell me which you think?

(01:35:20):
And in those days I had timeto do that, so I said
sure, and I read his sixtyfive pages, which was about young H.
G. Wells, who, havinginvented a time machine, hasn't quite
worked up the nerve to use it. And then Jack the Ripper escapes to
the future from the police using it, etc. And I gave him my

(01:35:45):
notes and I found, you know, what I thought, and what I
thought would be useful and so forth. And then I didn't think anything more
about it, except that I couldn'tstop thinking about it. What a cool
idea. I would never have hadsuch an idea in a million years.
But it also struck me, asI would like lie awake thinking about this,

(01:36:09):
that it was really a much morevisual idea than it was a verbal
one. That it was two guysin Victorian outfits running around a modern world
that seemed like a movie to me, A world in which everything they saw
we would see through their eyes.A bag of doritos would be sci fi.
I don't think very quickly, soit was maybe a couple months later

(01:36:34):
I woke up in the middle ofthe night and thought, you're an idiot.
Why you just option his book,which is what I did, and
then I wrote the screenplay and that'show the movie got made. What else
are you up to these days?I am working on a podcast series with
Paramount Pictures. I am working Idid the Medici with Frank Spotnitz. Frank

(01:36:55):
and I are working on two othertelevision series. There's not enough time in
the day. Well, I'm gladthat you're working with Frank. We had
him on a show a long timeago, and such a nice guy.
He's not only nice, he's amazinglytalented. Those don't always go together,
but he is great, you know, he's terrific. Mister Maya Thank you

(01:37:18):
so much for your time. Thishas been such a pleasure talking with you
again. Thanks for coming back formore. All right, guys, we

(01:37:58):
are back and we're talking about sevenpercent solution. And the one thing,
you know, I brought this upin our first episode. I was talking
about how for me growing up inthe seventies, and I think you guys
are somewhat similar ages. Sherlock Holmeswas everywhere, and it just seemed to
be the thing. And then lastweek, David, you mentioned how there
seemed to be like this proliferation ofhomes in the seventies, and I just

(01:38:24):
kept wondering why that is. Andthe reason I keep coming back to is
the nineteen seventies things were still insuch turmoil, at least here in the
United States, if not the world. I mean, I got I think
of nineteen sixty eight. Of course, I always talk about France and just
there were movements in Japan and justsome of the different countries. Of course,
there's the product spring. All thisstuff is going out in sixty eight.

(01:38:46):
Sixties are rough. Seventies don't reallystart off too much better, especially
here when we've got Watergate, andone of the things that Watergate brought around
for us and conspiracy theories and all. This is the rise of the investigative
reporter and the rise of just thisreporter as hero. And I'm wondering,

(01:39:06):
and feel free to shoot me downon this, but I'm wondering if Holmes
having this resurgence of popularity had somethingto do with this need to have somebody
who can put order to all ofthis chaos that we re seeing. Well,
the one the films that we're lookingat, Smarter Brother accepted because that's

(01:39:27):
kind of a comedy. The threefilms that we're looking at, ordered by
Decree seven percent Solution in Private Life, they all represent under the umbrella term
of humanized. It's a humanized Holmes. He is not the hero of the
books anymore. He is disillusioned,he is a drug addict. He is
kind of broken in many ways,and he's reimagined as a different kind of

(01:39:54):
hero, a hero that is,as they say, as they say in
this film from the we're talking about, the most heroic thing that Watson ever
saw him do was kicked the cocainehabit. The whole notion of what it
means to be a hero is reimagined, and that's quite in keeping with the
kind of anti heroic tone of alot of the cultural production of the nineteen

(01:40:16):
seventies. I'm not sure if youguys are baseball fans at all, but
there was a book published in nineteenseventy called Ball four I Got named Jim
Boughton, which was a behind thescenes diary of a season where he pitched
from the Seattle pilots, and hehad previously been on the Great Yankee teams,

(01:40:38):
and it was this kind of tellall and a lot of people involved
with baseball they were absolutely horrified.He's telling you this is what Mickey Mannel
would do in the dugout, andit wasn't particularly savory. And so the
great heroes were systematically kind of beingtrashed one after the other. But in
a way we're made even more endearingbecause they were more human and they were

(01:41:01):
able to overcome the various foibles andissues that human beings have. So it
really was the celebration not the pureas the driven snow type of hero.
Not not Sean Wayne as a hero, Clint Eastwood as a cowboy hero.
And that's not a good guy.Clint Eastwood, you know, the spaghetti
Western cowboy he shoots people. HeI think one of the films he rapes

(01:41:24):
a woman. He's not a goodguy. And James Bond, you know,
was a kind of anti hero aswell. He's a professional assassin who's
a hero. So you saw thiskind of sweeping change with Watergate, with
Vietnam, with this understanding that afterthe love generation of the sixties, you
know, the Summer of Love sixtyseven, everything was kind of starting to

(01:41:45):
go sideways in Downhill, and yousaw art and films responding to that zeitgeist.
The seventies are kind of a decadewhere everything went edgy, right,
all of film, all of artwent Really they were trying to go against
tropes. They were trying to youknow, anti heroes were huge at that
point, and I feel like ifyou really read the stories, you know

(01:42:06):
Sherlock is kind of an anti hero. And also I think they wanted to
experiment with going a different way becausein previous decades he was kind of known
as this stalwart hero and they wantedto turn that on its axis. I
mean, it really felt like theywanted to take Sherlock Holmes and use him
as a way to show that,hey, even heroes are fallible and kind

(01:42:30):
of illustrate that through different various formsof art. And I feel like that
was a character that's so well known. It's instant capitalism, I mean to
instant name recognition. They can usethat and also turn the tropes on their
ear, which is what they didmost of the films were talking about.
Yeah, I don't think it's anycoincidence. David, you mentioned baul Ford.
I believe it was the author ofthat who ended up being Terry.

(01:42:55):
I can't remember his last name.In the Long Goodbye the Altman film,
which again is taking Raymond Chandler PhilipMarlow and taking that character and making him
pretty dirty, you know if literallyin some parts with the ink on his
face and all this, and justalso shooting this. I know it's not
Terry Bradshaw because it's the football player, but I can't remember the character's last

(01:43:19):
name. But killing his friend becausehis friend is just you know, it's
kind of a wild dog. Hesaid he's a bad guy, and Marlow
asked to write the world and thatsame thing. It's kind of that Forgetta
Jake. It's Chinatown type of thingtoo, where it's like this is the
era where the bad guys can winand get away with that. But it

(01:43:42):
feels like Sherlock Holmes is trying toput things back to the right when it
comes to what we saw in theprivate life of Sherlock Holmes while we're seeing
now and the seventh Percent Solution.Even the book The seventh Percent Solution,
I found it interesting because, likeI was saying, it was this person
who was basically an arms manufacturer.And the plot that Holmes is really unraveling

(01:44:13):
has to do with the Chancellor ofGermany. It has to do with arc
Duke friends Ferdinand, and just basicallyhe's trying to stop World War One.
He doesn't have a name for it. He doesn't call it World War one.
Of course they didn't call it WorldWar one. And when it was
World War One because we didn't knowthere was going to be a second one,
the Great War. We didn't knowthat that was going to happen.

(01:44:35):
So here he is in eighteen eightynine or whatever, working at this and
seeing in his Sherlock Holmes way,he's able to take here's this woman who
has counked on the head and youknow, we jumped down in the river
and has all these bruises and allthese things that is able to take her
in her relationship with this man whomanufactures arms and just spin this whole tale

(01:45:00):
of oh, this is what's happening. He deduces all of the stuff to
the point where it's if we don'tsay this woman, if we don't make
this case, this war is goingto break out. And then at the
end of the book he's basically,well, we might have forestalled it,
but that war is probably still coming, you know. Even when it comes
to the Peculiar protocols, Well,we stopped the protocols from being printed and

(01:45:25):
we got this confession, but itdoesn't change anything because it's already being translated
into all these different languages, includingGerman, and we know how that is
going to turn out when it comesto the Jews and the protocols of the
Elders of Zion and how they're perceivedin Germany. So there is a lot
of hubrist to these stories. Hedoesn't set everything completely right. If anything,

(01:45:48):
he just pretty much forestalls the inevitable. Well, I mean, if
you guys have ever seen like theoriginal films the Mayor Brothers did, like
eighteen ninety five, eighteen ninety six. What's striking is the number of the
films that feature the military, andboy do they look great. Oh they
look great. The horses look great, the uniforms look great. Everyone's got

(01:46:10):
big feathers in their hats and youcan see, I mean, Europe was
an armed camp and anybody with anyability to look around new something's gotta set
this off. Because people love war. It's great, it's wonderful, it's
romantic, and it's always going tobe short and you're always going to come
home in one piece. And thenit happens and it ends up horrifically tragic,

(01:46:31):
and then we go, oh,maybe that wasn't such a good idea.
Then a few years passed and it'slike, wow, it's yeah,
it's going to be great again.We keep going down that road over and
over and so yeah, it isthere. You can see the foreshadow of
what's coming down, and unfortunately itjust keeps, you know, occurring over
and over. You know, humanbeings are a sad bunch but also a

(01:46:56):
wonderful bunch. I feel, youknow, I got to mention that I
because you know, I don't knowabout you guys, but some of the
stuff you get immersed in media onsocial media, and you just want to
commit seppuku. But then it's likewe're putting machines on Mars and we're figuring
out how to cure this type ofcancer or whatever, and it's like wow,
it's like almost two different species ofhumanity occupy the planet and you just

(01:47:17):
try to navigate between the two ofthem. Yeah. I want to mention
the horses because we didn't even talkabout that, the stallions. How do
we not talk about that? Becausethat whole scene, I'm like, is
he under hypnosis? Because I didn'tI couldn't see these fins in this most
since I was a kid, andI'm watching going is he under hypnosis in
the scene? Is this? Ishe basically remembering his drug addiction? Because
horses are white, it's cocaine.Is that what's going on here? I

(01:47:40):
don't know, they're killer horses.What more do you need to know?
I don't know, But what he'sgot a cocaine addiction? I can't.
I can't help but look at thatas like a possibility. Well, if
you're going to ride ride the whitepony, he's going to snore the lippings
on her stallion and then he confrontsit head on, and then they get
out of the way and it runsaway. His addiction runs away. You
don't you see I'm saying it's ametaphor. We got psychoanalysts in the crowd,

(01:48:04):
Holmes, these horses were trained tokill. Yeah, who does that?
Who trains horses to kill? Seriously, it's a metaphor. They're running
like crazy, and then he finallyfaces him, and then he gets out
of the way and they run away, just like he conquered his addiction.
All right, guys, let's goahead and take another break, and we're
going to play a preview for nextweek's show, Murder by Decree, and

(01:48:26):
the critics overwhelming choice is the bestthriller of the year. Rex Reid calls
it the most gripping and totally fascinatingquality who've done it in years? Bruce
Williamson of Playboy says a smashing,seweebul thriller. A crimebus should re joice,
heading shoulders above what is masquerading hisentertainment today, Vincent can be New
York Times After Dark seventeen and CosmopolitanMagazines at All made it their Movie of

(01:48:46):
the March. Murder by Decree rtdBG. That's right. We conclude our
Sherlock Holmes Monk next week with alook at Bob Clark's murder by Decree.
Until then, what is the Ladieswith You wearing? Well? I started
out rereading some Sherlock Holmes stories becauseI haven't read in them a few years,
so that's a positive that came outof this. But also been doing

(01:49:10):
the Hollywood Outsider podcast, which Ido every week on film and television.
By the time you listen to this, it will be a few weeks past
it. But the south By SouthwestFilm and TV Festival episode that we've did,
we covered over twenty five films,and a lot of them more independent
features that might not even be outyet, so it's definitely worth checking out.
You can go to the Hollywood Ousidedot com and also presenting Hitchcock,

(01:49:31):
which I do every month where welook at a film in the Hitchcock catalog
and David, what's the latest withyou? Sir? I am heading to
beautiful Daton, Ohio and a coupleof days to give a presentation on my
three Sherlock Holmes plays. I wasvery kindly invited to come chat about them,
so I will do that, andall three of the plays are being

(01:49:56):
produced next year at Stage one inFort Worth, Texas, according to my
publisher at any rate, so Iwill probably venture down there to check at
least one of those out. Congratulationson that. That's awesome. Can I
ask you a question, Daby beforewe sign off? You were talking about
your set design love earlier, whichI agree and especially I think if you're

(01:50:16):
a fan of Shallock Holmes, andeverybody is a fan in different ways.
Some people are more fan of thecharacter, some people are more fan of
the mysteries portion whatever you're a fanof. When you watch a film or
a TV show that's based on ShallockHolmes and you know it so well,
does it infuriate you when you seebooks on the shelf that you know shouldn't
be there, like he wouldn't readthose. Well, let me put it
this way. I try to beas open minded and forgiving as I can.

(01:50:42):
On the other hand, when it'sa play of mind that's going up,
I stalk the set. The premiersare all at a theater that's only
forty five minutes from me, thePurple Rose Theater and Chelsea, Michigan,
and the set designers are great.Prop designers are great. But yeah,
I will walk aroun round and makea menace of myself and say, I
don't want that book there that youknow that would book? Would it be

(01:51:04):
there exactly? And they are.They tolerate my presence reasonably well, but
yeah, you know I should stayin my lane. But you know it's
your baby, and then you wantit to be perfect and pristine. So
I get very prisnickety about stuff.I'm trying to be better about it,
but yeah, I do. It'smy stuff especially I want to be right.

(01:51:26):
But when you're when you're looking atit from you know, trying to
be objective. It kind of goesback to what I was talking about at
the very beginning, where I said, you can tell in the first fifteen
minutes whether somebody really loves his propertyor not. That's something that I noticed
right away. If I'm watching somethingand I feel like they didn't even take
the time to think about that,that aspect of the room, how the
room is set up, how itlooks, you know, certain things that

(01:51:47):
Sherlock wouldn't allow. Those are thoseare the kinds of And I was curious,
since you're talking about set design,if that really gets on you.
The only ones that really really irritateme are where they represent the rooms as
a maculate and pristine and there's noindication of chaos or indolence or laziness,
you know, cigarette ashes or disheslaying around. I mean, Sherlock Holmes

(01:52:09):
was so absorbed in his work hedidn't have time to keep everything nice and
tied up all the time. Thereshould be some degree of disarray, but
it also needs to feel very livedin. You know, you do want
books, you do want a bigarmchair, you do want to fire,
you do want a chemical set.You know, it's that's part of Sherlock
Holmes is the surroundings. And evenin a film like you know, the

(01:52:33):
Basil Rathbone films, all the Universalfilms, they're updated, they're modernized,
but his rooms they could just aswell be from eighteen ninety and that's part
of the appeal of those films.Well, thank you so much guys for
being on the show. Thanks everybodyfor listening. If you want to hear
more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows
that I work on. They areall available over at weirdingweightmedia dot com.

(01:52:56):
Thanks especially to our Patreon community.If you want to join the community,
visit patreon dot com slash projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the Projection
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Episode 624: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)

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