Hold your folks, it's show time. People paid good money to see this
movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas,
look off popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone for tend
podcasting isn't boring, Burn it off. Before the turn of attention and two
of the great nines of old time met at began adventure that get signal fraud
together brillions and friends their very lives. The Universal presents The seven Percent Solution,
Nicholas Meyer's best selling mystery from the personal memoirs of doctor John H.
Watson, Ussimus T I guess the detens of my life with such uncanny acculacy,
kind of a guess. It is an affording anon in destructive for the
logical package from the contents the seven Percent Solution, revealing for the first time
the vile and destructive habit that almost destroyed the world's greatest detective. What's in
the true identity of Sherlock Holmes arch nemesis Professor James Moriarty subtlement and the extraordinary
circumstances surrounding the hitherto unknown affair be known. Every adventure of the seven Percent
Solution, but cry Nichol Williamson is Sherlock Holmes, Alan Arkin is doctor Sigmund
Freud. Robert Duval is doctor John H. Watson. Bennetta Redbray, who
is the lovely love of Ever, Jeremy Kempet run by Linstore, Joel Gray
is the possibly fictitious low End Steam and 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 you must cover my inspections. Sherlock Holmes Most
Baffling Mystery and mister Sigmund Freud's Most Curious Case. The year's most intriguing motion
picture was Trained originally heading it is now. There has been no explanation for
the seven percent solution until now. Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your
host. Mike White joined me once again. Is mister Aaron Peterson. Thanks,
Framily Beck again also back in the booth, This is mister David McGregor.
A pleasure to be here. Once again, we continue our month of
discussions around the nineteen seventies interpretations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective Sherlock Holmes.
On this episode, we are discussing The Seven Percent Solution from nineteen seventy
six, written by Nicholas Meyer and based on his first of many Sherlock Holmes
books. The film was directed by Herbert Ross and stars Nicole Williamson as Sherlock
Holmes, Robert Duval as Doctor Watson, and Alan Arkin s Sigmund Freud That
food Dude. The film finds Holmes in the grip of cocaine addiction, while
Watson plans to take his friend to Vienna to undergo therapy by Freud. We
will be spoiling this film as we go through, so if he don't want
anything ruined, please just turn off this podcast. Go out watch the movie
first, find the movie, watch the movie, come back, turn the
podcast back on, and then listen to the discussion. It's just that easy.
David, when was the first time you saw the film and what did
you think? Along with the other films that we're discussing this month. I
can't give you an exact date, my guests would be late nineteen eighties early
nineteen nineties as a result of coming across the Jeremy Brett TV series and kind
of being inspired to search out other interpretations of Sherlock Holmes, and when I
saw this, I liked it a lot. I read the book. The
book is well for me anyway, incredibly clever and incredibly well informed about the
mythos of Sherlock Holmes. And the way Nicholas Meyer was able to tie together
several of the characteristics that we associate with the character and then put it in
a way that it gets explained in a logical fashion through psychoanalysis and hypnosis.
It's just really brilliant. It's a well written novel, and the film does
a really good job of capturing what the 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 what went into making him the character that he
was, and I think it does a 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
up for me and Aaron about yourself like 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. My mom I talked about this in an earlier
episode. She got me kind of into 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 a wee little kid, and I didn't see
it until I was a teenager, but she wanted to watch that one with
me because of the because of the tie in to Freud, and it's still
one of my favorites in terms of how it captured columns. I agree with
everything David said. It really understood the mythos of the character and really brought
in the Freud argument, and really it just kind of flushed it out because
at the very end of the movie, where he's talking about, you know,
the unconscious mind and all that sort of thing, and how you can
dress personal issues through hitting your unconscious mind is very much part of how Freud
went about his practice, So it really ties in well. I think it's
a very smartly written piece of art. Yeah, I don't remember the first
time I watched this one either. It just seemed to always kind of be
around. I think I've seen bits and pieces on TV and I didn't really
realize just how clever it was until I sat down and read the book.
The movie picks up a lot of the things that the book does. I
think it's you know, it's good that it was an adaptation by Meyer of
his own work, and I think that he's his best friend when it comes
to that, sometimes you can be your own worst enemy and decide like,
oh, well, I did it this way in the book, let's do
it this way on film. There's a couple changes, and we'll talk about
those as we go along, but there's nothing where I was just like,
oh, wow, you really made a mistake there. So you guys said
it's super clever. Even the opening credits have all these little asterisks through them,
and you know, they talk about like, you know, Professor James
Moriarty and his paper that was written and how it's still being referred to,
and just all these things that I have the little thing where it says like
only the facts have been made up about this story, and just this whole
idea of mixing fiction and fact and taking loss in the wilderness years of Sherlock
Holmes and mixing that in with what Freud was doing. I mean just yeah.
I thought it was very, very well put together, and I don't
think they were going to stop talking about how clever it is, because just
as it's more and more clever as the movie goes through and the end of
it. The first time I saw this, I was like, well,
I'm not really sure about this end. And then I watched it again the
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 I said, written by Nicholas Meyer, based
off of his own book, and not directed by Meyer though this was Herbert
Ross. But this was right before Meyer was going to start his own directing
career. You know, when we lose Nicholas Meyer, and I hope it's
no time soon, people really need to step back and just talk about how
damn smart this guy is and just how 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
on Picard this year is picking up a lot of stuff that Meyer put forth
back in eighty two. I can't say enough good things about Nicholas Meyer.
Another thing about the credits, I'll just throw this out there. It was
a little tip of the hat to Sherlock Holmes fans, as You're right,
they're kind of they're very whimsical that are a wee bit tongue in cheek.
But the illustrations that accompany the opening credits are original Sydney Padget drawings from the
Strand magazine stories, and anybody that is familiar with the stories and those illustrations,
it's like, oh, that's really cool. It's a nice little detail
which d tells you right from the outset that the people making the film it's
kind of an homage in a way to the whole mythology of Sherlock Holmes from
the very beginning. So that was a nice little touch that I appreciated,
you know, don't I don't know how many Sherlock Holmes movies you've watched,
Mike, but I can tell David has 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 be a good interpretation or not. Typically because
you can feel the love, you know, you can feel, do they
do they appreciate the character, they just using it because it's free. Is
it a copyright thing, like they just want the cool character name or something?
Or is this some buddy who actually appreciates the character. And you can
tell in fifteen minutes this one you can 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 to appreciate it. Even if you don't love
how it plays out, it's hard not to appreciate the effort. Yeah.
Just for the record, Sherlock Holmes only became in this country completely copyright free
as of January first. It was earlier in other countries. It was earlier
in the UK, but since the United States has ninety five years and the
last last Sherlock Holmes story was published in nineteen twenty seven, it was only
in January first, twenty twenty three that the entire cannon, as it's called,
became a copyright free. That's why everybody makes their Sherlock Holmes movies in
the UK. This was the first of five so far of these Holmes books
that Meyer has written, and in each one of these he either takes well
I would say. In each one of them, he takes historical figures and
mixes them into his fiction. And it'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 of saying, oh, in this year,
this person would have been in Sherlock Holmes's circle. And I like that even
throughout his five books, he's making references back to the previous book, Like
when he goes on to do I Just listen to the Adventures of the Peculiar
Protocols and he makes a mention of Shaw, and then Shaw has shown up
in the West End Horror, and so you know, at one point Watson
is like, you know, because Sherlock Holmes doesn't really keep up on the
news sometimes, so Watson's like, well, actually he's gone from critiquing place
now writing place. He's pretty successful play right now this George Bernard Shaw guy
that we've met way back when kind of thing. So I really like that
he does that even within his own books, He's making these little nods back
to his own stuff while keeping that mythology going and just continuously adding to it
and just again super clever with what he's doing, and that I really liked
The Peculiar Protocols too, because it was 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 is talking about that while he's also unveiling a
mystery that only Sherlock Holmes could solve. Of the four movies we're covering,
this has the best cast in my opinion, like top to bottom. It's
an all star cast, absolutely, and Williamson is pretty good as Sherlock.
I mean, for the one that carries the least amount of weight in terms
of the primary cast. He did a really amiable job. He was a
legend on stage. He was considered the 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 a really well regarded stage actor, equally famous
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 would smoke eighty cigarettes a day. Really kind
of tightly wound guy. Actually more respected from a theatrical perspective than a film
perspective, because the film he's best remembered for his Excalibur when he played Merlin.
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, Robert Robert Duvall, sort of with hair,
kind of Nicole Williamson. He will always be doctor Eric Mason for me.
He was one of to me, one of Colombo's best villains that he had.
He was. I wondered if you were kid bringing that up. Oh
yeah, because he worked a couple of times with faulk the same year,
because he was also in The Cheap Detective. How did dial a Murder?
Right? Was that the exactly? Yeah? And he's a huge movie fan,
which is great. There's all this talk about Citizen Kane. His two
dogs are Laurel and Hardy. Yeah, it's so good. I can't wait
to talk about that one way finally get 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 between that calm, cool, collected Sherlock Holmes
and this drug addict. And I love the first time you see him,
how you see the shot of his eye 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 that close up in just to show how strung
out he is, manic and paranoid, just a true addict, like right
off the bat. Yeah, the scene where he meets Freud is great,
and that's what's probably my favorite scene in the movie, in which Freud says,
well, what can you tell me? And he does he does this
Sherlock Holmes thing, Who am I that your friends should wish us to meet?
Beyond the fact that you are a brilliant Jewish physician who was born in
Hungary and studied for a one in Paris, and the certain radical theories of
yours have alienated the respectable medical community so that you have severed your connections with
various hospitals and branches of the medical fraternity. Beyond this, I can deduced
a little. You're married with a child of five, you enjoy Shakespeare and
possessor sense of honor. This this is wonderful commonplace. I'm still awaiting an
explanation. It's brilliant, it's logical, it's deduction of the highest order.
And yet he's fallen apart because his addiction has kicked in, and you can
see him just struggling to do his thing 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 that he's constantly moving his hands and rubbing his
hands and stuff. It's like, I need something for them to do.
And yet his mind is going as mouth is going. But you just like
see the tension in the anxiety and his body. Yeah, you can hear
in his voice too, just the strain of someone. I don't know if
you've ever been in a position where you're really conflicted by something but you've got
to focus on something else and talk at the same time. You can hear
the strain in people's voice when they've got 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
what Freud is doing, and just to bring these two figures together and realize,
oh, we're not so different to you and I, and just one
is using his tools for the outside world 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 as we go along, Freud seems to be
doing more and more of what Holmes is doing. This almost seems like this
is the moment for Freud to really kind of come into his own and he
almost needed Holmes as a catalyst in order to become the signal for it.
That we know they're both trying to help people, and they're both using their
intellect and their logic and their instincts to help people to make the world a
better place. So although they seemingly when they meet very different people to very
different characters, they're very much kindred souls 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 come into this film with high expectations. You
could easily look at this, is it going to be a gimmick? Is
it just going to be Freud's a gimmick to sell this movie? And to
be fair, if you come into the expecting that, I totally understand that
that makes total sense. But once you're watching the movie, you can tell
the same care that was put into Sherlock Holmes, which is a lot.
There's a lot of Karen Love put in the Sherlock Holmes of this film,
even though they're kind of tweaking a lot 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 really he's a very pivotal character to everything that
happens. And that's what I what was 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 be cool because it's Freud and then he's going
to be cured by the end. It has to be something that's really integral
to the plot. And Meyer really worked that out. And I'm you know,
for people that aren't fully familiar with the whole Sherlock Holmes cannon. If
you look at pop culture, it's easy to get the impression that his drug
addiction is a huge part of the stories, and it's not. It only
pops up very and frequently. It pops up a couple of times in the
short stories. The story that features it most prominently is the second story was
actually a novel novelette, The Sign of the Four, and you know that
came out in eighteen ninety and that was, you know, really trying to
shape poems. That's not almost a kind of decadent hero removed from society,
very esoteric, very eccentric in his interests. When Colin Doyle wrote the first
Shrlock Holmes story, it got published in eighteen eighty seven in what was called
the Beaten Christmas Annual, and that was 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 US from Lippincott's magazine, a guy named Joseph
Marshall's Stoddard, at the Langham Hotel in London. This guy's looking for stories
from English authors, and the two authors that he met were Doyle and Oscar
Wilde. I just think that's one of the great meetings in literary history.
And he said, I want to commission stories from both you guys. And
so that's when Conan Doyle went home and thought, well, revived Slackholm's take
another shot at it. He wrote the Sign of the Four. Oscar Wilde
came out with a picture of Dorian Gray. I just loved that story,
the fact, you know, and the hotel is still there. You can
go as far as I know, you can still go there. You know,
one of the great meets. I think August thirtieth, eighteen eighty nine
is a plaque I think on the hotel to commemorate the meeting of those of
those people. The picture of Dorian Gray, his hero is again he's kind
of a decadent hero. He's fighting against time. And both of those came
out. There was a Frenchman, a novelist by the name of yours,
Karl Weisman, who wrote a novel called Against Nature in eighteen eighty four,
and it was a new kind of hero, a decadent hero in full retreat
from civilization. And some people liked that. Many, you know, commentators
reviewers hated it, like, that's not 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 respect and stories in eighteen ninety. But the
point I want to make is that Conon Doll did not make him a drug
addict throughout the whole Cannon. By the time he gets to there's a story
called The Adventure of the three Quarter in which Watson is writing, well,
by this point, I'd kind of weaned 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't form as big a part of the
stories as it does in subsequent interpretations of the character. The irony is that
Freud was we in n cocaine. Oh yeah, he loves the way it
makes me feel. Well. I had jock cancer too, so it takes
a little bit of adge off the pain. 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. You know, the cocaine this is soluble in
water type of thing. Then then also a solution as the the end of
a mystery. You know, I really thought that that was nice as well.
I mean, tell me a little bit more about Moriarty as far as
how many times Moriarty actually shows up in the stories, because I don't imagine
it's a lot. It is that a lot. Moriarty shows up because Arthur
Conegill wanted to kill off Sherlock Holmes. He was sick of it. He
churned out two dozen stories off of the Strand magazine. Every time he wanted
to stop, they kept saying, how would you like more money? And
he's like you, okay, I'll take more money. But by the end
the first Sherlock Holmes short story appeared in the Strand magazine in July of eighteen
ninety one. By the end of eighteen ninety three, he was done and
he killed him off in the Final Problem. And if you're going to kill
off Sherlock Holmes, you need a worthy adversary. So that's you know,
Moriarty shows up in that. Moriarty shows up in the Return story. He
brought Sherlock Holmes back to life in nineteen oh three in the story called the
Empty House Moriarty also features or was talked about in the novel of the Valley
at Fear, But is he permanently part of the receedings. No, he's
not. He's not mentioned much at all. However, he's such a great
character, you know, an evil mathematics professor who controls crime in London.
As he's described, he's an Napoleon of crime. It's a genius character.
And there's no wonder that in so many film or play versions of the stories,
he's going to get used. He's going to be put into the story
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 BBC series where or suddenly revising the cab driver
that was the murderer? I can't remember if it's a study in paint or
what it was, but like, oh, he actually was working for Moriarity.
Do they try to tie all that stuff 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 has to explain his hiatus, his disappearance,
which is what this film is about. If it tries to explain, well,
why did he disappear? And when he 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 to assassinate Sherlock Holmes to make up for the
death of Moriarity. But it's not something that is trailed out through the stories
to stories. By and large, they are discreet entities, self contained,
and you know, they build up this larger picture of who the character is
story by story and those references back and forth to stories that have already occurred.
But it's not as if Moriarty is a large through line through the whole
cannon. It's like twenty five stories something like that before you even hear Moriarty.
And what it is is basically like it's not so much that he's behind
every case he's solved before. Is it's that he's this you know, this
godfather, this guyfather of crime and whatnot. So Holmes has just figured it
out, so he basically, you know, 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 like Holmes out. That's the way we need
to do it. What Conon Doyle does 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 Jonathan Wilde was known as the Chief Thieftaker of
England and he was a guy who was very Moriarity like. He basically organized
the crime in London and then he was the police too. That was a
very profitable enterprise up until the time he was caught and hung. You can
still see his skeleton. His skeleton is on display. I can't remember the
name of the museum, but it's on display in London. And if I
remember right, I don't think Watson ever is ever involved directly with Moriarity.
I feel like that that's a point that it's Holmes and Moriarty they meet,
so it's never it's really like Watson hears about him. Yeah, it's Holmes
that has the final confrontation at Rick and back falls with right. But I
mean in general, I mean I don't I don't think Watson ever comes face
to face with Moriarty. If I remember right, I don't believe so now
I don't think so. But Sherlockian's around the world will let me know if
I'm wrong. So this whole idea of Moriarty not being a figment of Sherlock
Holmes's imagination necessarily, but being built up in Sherlock Holmes's imagination in this movie,
in this story, to be this Napoleon of crime. But yet poor
Laurence Olivier is playing this very put upon mathematics teacher who's just like, this
guy is torturing me. He's always outside my house and he's accusing me being
this napoleon of crime. And a movie, now, if they were going
to make it, he would do with Kaiser Sozie at end. Yeah,
he would just start why oh, thank you so much, Doctor Watson,
and then like turn around and just like you know, his whole body change
and he would walk around, yeah, AND's just like, oh, I'm
off to create a whole new web of crime. Consider me the new Doctor
mambousset. You know, But no, that's not the way it is.
And you know, you're talking about the cast and the way that they use
this cast is so smart. Laurence Olivier isn't in it as much as maybe
he could be. You know, it's a very small role, but he
makes a very big impression. Same things I would say with Charles Gray as
Mycroft. Homes really like Charles Gray whenever he shows up in anything. And
then you know, I think that Joel Gray Charles Grays's brother. Right now,
I'm just kidding that Joel Gray is slightly underused as Low and Steam.
He's in here more than I remembered him 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 for Cavaree a few years prior. So I'm
like, okay, but Joel Greece such 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
little bit more of him. But then the one for me that really stands
out is Jeremy Kemp, who we just talked about top Secret episode a few
months ago, and him is a very baron. Carl von Leinsdorf. Man
I mean, Jeremy Kemp has one of the great villain faces, and they
just they know how to play that up. And I don't think we mentioned
earlier Vanessa Redgrave as Lola Devereaux's Oh she's fantastic, And I didn't realize to
the change that they made to Myer's book, or the change that Myers made
to his book. I mean that she's the character where things really start to
diverge between book and movie because in the book she is found she had jumped
off of a bridge. So we've got 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 we talked about this month. She was also
allegedly conked on the head by the river. I can't remember she was thrown
into the river or not. Kind of the same thing here if Vanessa Redgrave,
she had been held and you know they 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 the arms. Trader makes arms and they kind
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 to put her on her hypnosis. They're getting
very few clues. She's this woman from Providence, Rhode Island, and she's
actually a Quaker, and she was going to pretty much be given over her
husband's estate and then she was going to dismantle his whole armament business because Quakers
are not into war and why not just get rid of all of this and
her basically her son in law through a complete fit. And the son in
law would be this Carl von Line store of character. So there's a little
bit of a difference when it comes to that. And there's no churks,
by the way, there's absolutely no churks in the book at all. So
I thought it was kind of funny when 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 these churchs will show up again, and definitely
they do. So some of these same patterns that we're seeing from these other
Sherlock Holmes stories are showing up in this one as well, which again all
being built off of the same scaffolding I thought was nice. Well. Vanessa
Redgrave, ironically enough, or coincidentally enough, has a good Sherlock Holmes pen.
Her grandfather, a guy named Roy Redgrave, the patriarch of the Red
Gray family, wrote and started his Sherlock Holmes play in nineteen oh two,
and then he was Sherlock Holmes in South Africa, and he was Sherlock Holmes
in Australia. I'm not sure of all the details. It was basically either
he was being pursued or pursuing women that he was trying to get away from
or was trying to catch, or maybe 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 sporadically as he did so. And Vanessa
Redgrave's daughter Natasha actually appears in one of the episodes of the Jeremy Brett Shrlock
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 Holmes and something that's true. Yeah, it's
hard to avoid. Yeah, all British actors, Anne Robert duvall I do
really appreciate how Meyer takes her and now makes her a former patient of Freud's
also a former patient that he managed to get off of drugs. So suddenly
now she has a connection with Sherlock Holmes that wasn't there before. And I
like this thing too, of I mean she basically she looks so much like
Ophelia, just laying there and this hospital bed all in white, and the
way that they call her the was that the lady of the lilies right,
and then being able to use the lilies later on a gift from Karl von
Lensdorff, and leaving those lilies as a trail. And we've got like the
trail at the beginning, which is the vanilla that they put onto Moriarty and
they allegedly are tracking him even though it's it's really nice. It's Watson and
Microft working together to help save Sherlock Holmes, and they bring out Old Toby
the Bloodhound, who think he had worked in the Hound of the Baskervilles,
so it's just like, oh, it was that Hound of Baskervilles or something
different. Case. Yeah, I can't remember which story it was, off
the top mic, but yeah, Toby is a character in anytime you add
a dog to a movie, as long as the dog doesn't die, I'm
on board. I was just so glad 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's old Toby. He's gonna go back to
England with us. Okay. Great being able to have that now connection between
these two characters, so she's not just Shosha la fem or just like,
oh, here's the kidnapping victim to be saved. She does end up becoming
like the victim kind of thing. And that's the same thing in the book
too, where she's on this train and we have this amazing train chase and
that's really like the pinnacle of the third act for us, as this whole
train chase that they have, there are so many good moments leading up to
that as well, and who doesn't love a good train chase too, So
that was well done too. Yeah, and this whole idea of we're going
to rip apart this car for fuel and just yeah, I thought that was
really smart. Toby was signing the four by the way, oh thank you,
okay, thank you. And also it wasn't a Great Mouse Detective?
I think too. Isn't that the name of the basset down? It could
be I hadn't seen Great Mouse Detective maybe ever, I just remember the list.
No, it's good, it's good. It is worth watching. I
know it's a cartoon, but they actually 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, made with affection for the character and for the
stories. I am a feeling you probably get a lot more out of these
than I do. Because there are times 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. And then this dog comes out of a closet.
I was like, Okay, that's the Hound of the Baskerville. But
I'm sure there's so many things or I'm like, I'm not picking up this
reference. But it's like comic book fans watching a Marvel movie with Easter eggs.
That's really what a lot of it is. But we've into the screenplay,
which works. Yeah. I never felt like I was being talked down
to with this, and I never felt 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 just like, oh, you know, tell
them that my mathematics teacher killed me. And then he says something about like
they'll never believe it anyway, and I'm like, okay, so there's that
death and resurrection that you're just talking about, 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 ease your mind at all, in the
withdrawal luten togetic sequences, that's all there is. There's the reference to the
Hound of the Basketball, so there's the reference to the Redheaded League, and
there's the reference to when the asp is coming down the chord. That's yet
another Sherlock Holm story. But as far as other references. I don't know
that there's any in that particular sequence at all. The ASP is the speckled
band, that's the story. I was so surprised because there was that ASP
and there were a lot of other snakes in this as well. Yeah,
and I just kept waiting for Fred to say, sometimes a snake is just
a snake. Well, they're even doing nods to other story, Like I
get that Christy was at the Orient Express h and that was a little on
the nose even for this, but I like that it was in there.
I'm like, all right, that's kind of clever. How did you feel
about Robert Duval as Watson thumbs up from sideways, thumbs down, thumbs up
for me, but I'm a big Robert Duval fan. It's really hard for
me to not get behind him and seeing him in this performance, it's so
removed from anything else he ever did or tried to do. Yeah. Is
this British accent fallible? Probably? But I like that he gave it a
go, and it's always nice when we see an American do a British accent.
You know, I'm for it. What I think, Mike, It's
a little disconcerting at first, to hear well, because his voiceover voice doesn't
seem to match his Watson on screen voice at times, because he does do
a little bit of narration, which is fine. There's a lot of times
where Robert Duval, like these days, especially Robert Duvall, shows up and
he's a shit kicker. You know. He shows up in Jack Reacher,
he shows up in quite a few films where he just is like, you
know, this good old boy, like kind of like a lonesome dove revisited
type of thing. And I was just like, Okay, that works.
Like seeing Robert Duval as a cowboy works. But I'm sure even the first
time he played a cowboy was probably kind of a weird thing for people that
were used to him as being to kill 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 or anything, but it's German, Irish German.
Yeah, exactly. Well, I didn't have a problem with it.
If anything, I thought it was kind of nice to see him doing something
different, and I mean, he's such a solid actor that after a while,
I just yeah, there was no question. I would say it took
maybe three minutes before I just completely bought him as Watson, and then seeing
it a second time, I'm just like, oh, yeah, no,
no issues right here. Since you said it, I've just been thinking,
thinking, thinking of every role I've ever seen Robert duval I can't I can't
even fathom him being poor. I mean, I just don't think I can
recall any performance that he gave that was anything but entertaining to me. No,
no, even when he shows up for just a brief second, and
things like the conversation where he just kind 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.
I mean, he's one of my favorite actress. He's just great because he's
not a type. He's just a great character actor. And I will say
one of the things, like years ago, 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 accompanying the disc and he basically said that Duva
was cast as the anti Nigel Bruce again 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 as Watson 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 you know, Agel Bruce's Watson has legs.
Like him or not. He made a real big impact on the world of
Sherlock Holmes. This Holmes isn't that action hero that we're talking about when it
comes to Robert Downey Jr. But he can do a lot of things.
And just you buy Nicole Williamson as this more heroic Sherlock Holmes. You by
Duval as being right there helping out as 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 what he does. And this whole story is
I am here helping out my best friend 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's name is David Burke, and he appeared
in the first episodes of the Jeremy Brett TV series for Granada. And again
it's like, this is a good partner for Sherlock Holmes. He's very levelheaded,
he lets his eccentric friend go off on 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 and is a steading influence on him. And
you get done a nice scene of him and Samantha Eggar as his wife and
their conversation, and you really and this is doctor Watson's story sometimes even more
than it is homes. It's more about him and his reactions. And I
really appreciate when Holmes is going through his hallucinations and going through his withdrawals and
he calls Watson a cripple, and when Watson just decks him, and then
you get that great apology scene from Holmes later on, and it's like This
is really nice to see these two friends kind of reforming their friendship. I
stable defend Nigel Bruce to the end of the earth because I have a very
personal fondness for those movies. But on the same token, it is always
nice to see a Watson that is more formidable because in the stories, I
mean, he was in the army, he's a military man, he's been
trained. He's not he's not he's not a sissy. He doesn't just sit
there and stand by and get bush all the time. I mean, he's
formidable. He can handle himself, and unfortunately, I think that gets lost
a lot because of the Nigel Bruce character, because that became very popular for
a long period time, which is probably why I dud is talking about your
Lotcheans don't love him. But on the same token, I mean there's so
many interpretations. A lot of people do get it right, and Robert Duval
is more akin to what I would picture 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 of Watson. What do you do with Watson
if he's no longer the narrator of the stories. How do you make him
a fit into the narrative? And that 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 the role, and that was he was great
at that. You know he in other films, Rebecca, he's the dithering,
self important, ineffectual Englishman. That was, you know, his sweet
spot. You know, last week we talked about ciccusin homes and all of
the fencing, and here we have another 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. And what I really liked was that there is
that callback to the earlier duel and just how clever that whole thing with the
tennis matches. That you think that there's going to be you know, pistols
at dawn, but when Fred chooses his weapons, he chooses a tennis racket,
and that he figures out his opponent's weaknesses and then plays upon those weaknesses,
and then that weakness comes back to ultimately be line store of undoing.
Again, I just keep saying how smart 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 if it's still in existence, but the time
it was. That was shot at the 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 bit different than what we're used to today,
but I thought it worked really well. And the whole concept of you know,
in competition, you can face someone who's better than you and you can
still win if you can figure out how 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
or faster or stronger, he's smarter and 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. You know, 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
being like a proto Nazi and coming in 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 my own battles. And then he fights his
battle and again, you know, Alan Arkin, Jesus Christ. I always
love Alan Arkin again, so solid with his performances. He can go way
out there and just be you know, wacky as wild as hell. See
our episode on Simon that we did so many years ago. But you know,
he can just bring it. And I at first was wondering how much
of a comedian he was going to be in this movie, but he playss
Freud really straight. Yeah. I thought he did a great job with it.
I mean they I know, they had to change up his kid.
They had to change his daughter to his 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 really well. And I'm always somebody I
like spaces, I like room and so when I watched Sherlock Holmes movies,
I'm always interested in how are they going to depict the rooms of Sherlock Holmes,
and they do a really nice job in this film. Obviously they're in
a bit of chaos because Holmes is in chaos, but the same goes for
the rooms of Freud. Really well appointed. I'm a huge fan of set
decorators and props because they can, as Holmes himself says, a man's study
tells you who he is, and yeah, it's it's just the look of
the film set dressing, the sets themselves. It's just really well done throughout.
Let me just add one more thing that I really like, and here
is when they are trying to find the Vanessa Redgrave character and they eventually this
is Holmes and Watson eventually end up at 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 back and he has deduced where she was going
to be. And it was just like, that's so nice. It's like
the teacher meets the master type of thing. 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 a two part film, Like the first
half of it is the reclamation of homes, and then once that's been accomplished,
then it shifts into this other narrative of Okay, now we're going to
see the the you know, the healed homes in action with not only Watson,
but you know, Sigmund Freud as his allies. And I like that
a lot. I like the kind of two stories that dovetail together. So
what do you think about the final hypnosis scene and when we get to find
out what has been giving Homes all these problems for all of these years.
I think it's great. It's just it 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,
not the best of them. So where does that come from? And
the solution presented in the film, boy tick tick tick yep, yep,
yep, yep, everything falls into place. Dad explains his character and his
neuroses incredibly well. I just thought it was very clever and beautifully done.
They changed the movie from the book. You know, in the book,
it's the fact that Sherlock Holmes his mother'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 the math tutor Moriarity who relates this, you
know, these unhappy events to both Shrlock and Mycroft. Well they up to
Annie. In the film, it's that 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, and in fact, as you see in
the film, Alms witness it and is actually splattered with his own mother's blood.
I mean, if that's not going to traumatize you, I don't know
what is. It's great. I agree with most of what David said.
I agree that having Mortiarity be the lover was intriguing. The affair portion,
Dad being infuriated, that sort of thing, 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 when it comes when it comes to unconscious trauma.
But this comes from my mom. I mean, she's been in psychology
for thirty years. So to me, I've heard this my whole life.
So to me, it's much more sustainable 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. You know, somebody on the somebody on
the force would know that that was the case. So to me, it
would have been more impactful for me personally had it been something along the lines
of his father beat his mother or something along those something that wasn't so permanent
and obviously that should have been well known. I get what you're saying,
but like nineteenth century, I don't know if you guys have ever tried to
do any kind of genealogical research. No, I get it, but I
mean a murder of the guy that you're living with, and he's never mentioned
that his mom was murdered, probably by his dad. I mean, that's
not really a to me, that's not 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, very randolacence. He hasn't even mentioned Cigarets and
Holmes. By this point, somebody would know. Somebody, even the idiots
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 account of 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, which was found at the scene of the crime.
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 to scrape 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 was a story to be uncovered and told
that was completely beyond them. All they relied on for the most part was
witnesses and offering rewards. So it was a different era, and all the
stuff that we kind of take for granted now, like DNA analysis and all
that, actually a lot of the stuff that you saw in the early Sherlock
Holmes stories, fingerprints, blood typing, those were in the stories before they
were even used by the police. And I understand what you're saying in terms
of like investigative techniques understood. But the 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 feel like it would be more impactful if it
was entitled a different way, just my opinion. I'll tell you one of
the things I like about this, and maybe purely coincidental, is there's a
very famous story by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Bohe called Death and the Compass,
and it kind of traces a plot that 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 use his own brilliance against him to lead him
following a trail. He thinks he's following clues that he has discovered, but
the clues have been intentionally placed down for him to discover, and in the
Boree story, it ends up with the villain kills the detective because he fell
right into the trap by following all the 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
addiction. I'm Mike, you asked us, what about you? What'd you
think of that review? I don't think that anything is ever that clean and
clear. Oh, I just happened to forget the death of my mother,
Like I think I would have just realized that there was a big gap there.
But I can't speak to somebody's mental aptitude when it comes to that kind
of stuff. I don't. I'm sure there are aligned many things I've hidden
from myself over the years and just never think to question. So why question?
You know, whatever happened to my mom? Or just like you make
up a story and that's the story that 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 that kept coming up if that was going to
have something to do with it. But once we got to that point,
I thought it was really well done. I don't think it was too heavy
handed. I thought the raw shot it very well. And then it really
leads to a great moment when after Holmes is done with all that and he
says his goodbyes to Watson when he's on that boat, and he happens to
sit down next to Miss Devereaux, next to the Vanessa Redgrave character and her
little thing about you know, hey, what an a coincidence too, addicts
on the road to recovery, it'll probably 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 whole story. And you know, it gives
again Meyer so many more stories that he can tell. I mean, the
next one that he does is right after this, we've actually shows Sigerson this
new Holmes character in I think he's in France and he's trying to be first
violin, and I don't even think he's good enough to become first violin,
but he manages to get involved in an orchestra, so it's pretty darn cool.
I really recommend all of the Myers Show. Like Holmes books, they're
really top notch. He's a good he'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
McDowell. I just want to say that this is a request to listeners of
the Projection Booth podcast to become patrons of the show via Patreon dot com,
pat e o n dot com slash Projection Booth. That's pretty simple. I
think you can do that. It's a great show and Mike he provides hours
of great entertainment. So now it's time to give back my little drugs.
Settle down and take a listen and have a sip of the Malocco and then
you'll be ready for a little of the old in out, in out real
horror show. Bye bye. Can you walk me through a little bit of
that time period in your life, like early seventies going into mid seventies,
just because you were into a lot of things. There was the book writing,
there was television writing, there was movie writing. What was that timeline?
Well, I moved out to southern California in the fall of nineteen seventy
one, and I didn't know anybody here in Los Angeles. I hadn't never
been to Los Angeles. I didn't know 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, I didn't seem to be getting anywhere. I'd
worked for Paramount Pictures as a publicist. I wasn't sure what that was,
but I did it for a while. I started to make headway by I
guess nineteen seventy three, I was writing 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 I was just sort of working up to a
head of steam in that department, my object being to write and direct movies.
And as I say, that was just starting to happen for me.
Must beIN sometime in nineteen seventy two, late seventy two, when the Writer's
Guild went on strike. We do that. We seem to do that a
lot. The Director's Guild, I think, has never been on strike.
It's interesting you were allowed to write screenplays at that time. You had to
pick it every day with a placard outside the studio where you were designated,
and the rest time you're not supposed to write scripts. And so the Willard
with whom I was living at the time, said, oh, well,
now is the perfect time to write that Sherlock Holmes book that you keep talking
about. Now, that Sherlock Holmes book, which, as you and perhaps
your listeners also no, became the seven percent solution. It originated at a
very long gestation period, starting when I was about eleven years old, and
my dad gave me the complete Sherlock Holmes stories to read, and I gobbled
them up, and I was really fascinated and delighted and in love with those
characters and that language. And at the time, back when I was eleven
or twelve or whatever it was, there was a big hit musical, the
biggest hit musical anybody had ever seen, was called My Fair Lady, and
My Fair Lady was based on a play by George Bernard Shaw called Pygmalion.
And it was very evident to me when I saw the musical and then I
saw or read the play or saw the movie of Pygmalion, that George Bernard
Shaw was ripping off Arthur Conan Doyle. It was very evident that Professor Henry
Higgins of twenty seven A Wimpole Street with Colonel Pickering just back from India wasn't
very far removed from Sherlock Holmes of two twenty one B. Baker Street with
Doctor Watson just back from Afghanistan. That Shaw was helping himself. And I
thought, Gee, if Pygmalion made a great musical, Shirley Sherlock Holmes being
the original would make an even better musical. So as a teenager, I
was all involved in that, and then somebody went and did it in all
I think of nineteen sixty four and it flopped. And I was at school
at the University of Iowa at the time, 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, and that sort of put me off homes
for a long time. But then another stream of associations sort of fit into
that, and that had to do with when I was in high school and
people would say, oh, your old 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's a silly question. And I didn't
understand. Why is it a silly question? And he said, because it's
no more possible to discuss the history of psychoanalysis and not start with Sigmund Freud
than it is to discuss the discovery of the Western hemisphere by Europe without starting
with Columbus or the Vikings, take your pick. But to suppose that nothing
has happened since Columbus, that's being pretty doctrinaire. When a patient comes to
see me, I listen to what they say, I listen to how they
say it. I'm very interested in what 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
guess it is like detective work. And a little light bulb went off in
my head again. We're talking about years years thinking about all this. I'm
wondering how much Arthur Conan Doyle knew about the life and writing of Sigmund Freud.
Freud knew about Holms all right. He liked Sherlock Holmes stories, has
his bedtime reading. He knew he had been compared to Sherlock Holmes. He
compared himself at one point to Herlock Holmes. Freud and Doyle were both doctors.
That was interesting. They both died in the same town within nine years
of each other. How it's starting to get very interest. Then you learn
that Holmes was a cocaine addict, and so for a time was Sigmund Freud.
And you learn that Arthur Conan Doyle studied ophthalmology in Vienna for six months.
An Ophthalmology was where Freud was introduced to cocaine when he wrote a paper
with Kernigstein and Curler, two eye doctors, on the uses of cocaine is
an anesthetic during eye surgery. So all this stuff is burbling around and burbling
around. And now it's nineteen seventy two or whatever it is. The writers
Guild is on strike. My girlfriend says, now you can write that Holmes
book that you keep going on about, and she was right. I had
nothing else going on. So that's how I came to sit down and write
it in the midst of pursuing career in the movie industry. Did you write
that before you were writing the Judge D 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
Night That Panicked America, which I originally 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 believe when I sat down to write the seven
percentage, how quickly after you write it does it get picked up for publishing?
Ah? Well, when I wrote this seven percent so that I finished
it and I thought this has got to be publishable. I read so much
crappy stuff this is I thought this is the least publishable, and I sent
it. This is probably early nineteen seventy three. I'm guessing. I'm guessing
to my agent, my literary agents in New York, because I had West
Coast office, same branch, and they 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 this is any good, and I guess
I have a short fuse. And I said, well, putting aside the
fact that you call yourself a literary agent and you've never read any Arthur Conan
Doyle, I would have to say that if my book depends on another book,
it's already a flop, which struck me as an invincible line of argument.
But she'd hung up long before I got that far. So I knew
one person in the publishing business from growing up and living in New York.
So I took my manuscript and I flew to New York. I arrived there,
it was pissing rain. It did not occur to me to phone ahead.
I walked into the offices of McMillan and I said, as Jim Needlan
there, and they said, no, he doesn't work here anymore. This
had not occurred to me, along with everything else. And I stood there,
dripping in their lobby and said, but but, but he's still in
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 I said, you have the address, and
they scribbled it on a piece of paper and I tromped back into Madison Avenue
or wherever it was and found where he worked, and he came out to
see me a little befuddled, and I explained that I'd written a novel and
he said, oh, well, this is a non fiction house. I've
had five novels here and I can't get one published. And I said,
look, Jim, I don't really have a choice. I'm getting on a
plane. I'm fun back to LA. Here's the book. And I gave
it to him and sort of forgot about it. I'm not forgot, but
I just assumed that that was a dead end. So I was surprised when
several days later he called me up and said, this one they'll publish,
and I said oh. And at that point I said, well, I'm
damned if my agency I don't remember what they were called, Ashley Famous.
I think I was gonna get ten percent for negotiating this contract. So I
went to I. By this time I had a lawyer, a showbiz lawyer,
very lovely man, and I said, Tom, when you I said,
I don't want them making money off something that they had nothing to do
with. And he said, great, we'll get a release from your literary
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 a really wonderful man, no longer with us
Alas he said, well, he said, well, now, let me
read this book. So he read the book and he said, listen,
you can do much better than this house. They're a non fiction house.
Your book is going to get lost there. And I said, but what
about my friend Jim, And he said, he'll understand, believe me,
he's waiting for this call, which was more or less true. I then
got into a long tug of war with the Conan Doyle estate, and that
took such a long time that I wound up writing another book. I got
so bored I wrote a novel called Target Practice that actually came out first.
It was written second. But by nineteen seventy four or August whenever it was,
I think it was August, matters had been resolved with the Doyle estate
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 bliss tis folly to be wise. If
I had done my research and learned that he was not in the public domain,
I would not have written the book. So it was great that I
was stupid. By the way, nothing has changed. I wound up making
a deal with them that was I may say, no seven percent solution.
They made money off this. The estate has gone through so many permutations and
convulsions. It's a rather sordid tale of cupidity and greed. And what they
basically do at this point is they wait 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 off rather than take them to court. So
a big studio like Warner Brothers will say here's ten thousand dollars, go away,
and they go away because that makes more sense to them than taking them
to court. But a man named Les 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 now Sherlock Holmes, for all practical purposes,
is in the public domain. How was your relationship with them when you did
the West End Horror, because that was only what two years afterwards, if
even that long. Because of the weird 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 perfect memory. I make weird mistakes. This
is your first novel, even though target practice comes out beforehand. Correct and
your first novel gets onto the New York Times bestseller list, Yes it does.
Wow exactly took a word right out of my mouth. How long after
that happens or how long after you publish until the rights get sold? It
was within a year in nineteen seventy four. It was really weird. Nineteen
seventy four was the year of the oil embargo and the endless gas lines around
the block. The whole country was suffering except me. I had the number
one best selling novel in the United States, and I had a movie I
think Judge d got On the year that year, or maybe it was the
other one, the Night that Panicked America, And I was doing really well
then. I By this time I had a different agent, a lovely young
man who was too smart and too serious and loved books too much to be
an agent. Very long. But he had a mom who was in the
movie business, and he settled the book to his mom. And a lot
of people at the agency criticized him for the deal he made, but I
think they missed the point. He sold the damn book and it became a
movie, and all these people had been too busier, too snotty or something
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 a feature film yet. I didn't want to
that. I didn't want to do that. It was certainly a condition that
the only way I would sell it is if I got to write the script.
How was it adapting your own aren't well? That is an interesting question,
and there a couple of things. You have to be prepared when writing
a movie or doing a work of art. Anything. I suppose to be
sort of ruthless. And I saw writing the screenplay as an opportunity to improve
the book. I felt, and artists, I should say, at the
outset, are not the best judges their 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 others see us. We can't. You can't
judge your you know, or at least you have to know that your opinion
is simply one more opinion. At this point, the book is out in
the wide world. It's on the list for forty weeks. People love it,
They're going crazy for it. So but what was my opinion? My
opinion was that the book had certain strong points. Its language, its imitation
of Doyle was pretty good. Its central conceit Holmes meets Freud. Freud cures
Holmes of his cocaine addiction, and Holmes 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 collaborating on the solution to a mystery. And
that's where I thought the book got weaker, that the mystery was not first
class, and I saw writing the movie as an opportunity to make it better.
I also saw it as an opportunity to do something else, and that
is when you have a mystery story that's a famous mystery and then you make
it into a movie. Everybody who's read the book already knows who done it.
Case in point, Scott Tarrow's book Presumed Innocent. When I read Presumed
Innocent, we're all shocked when we learn who done it. But when we
go to the movie, having read the book, we already know who done
it. So I thought maybe I could kill two birds with one stone.
I could make a better mystery, and I could surprise an audience that thought
they could sort of sit back and relax and something. And so that's what
I did. I still think that the movie is too wordy, there's too
much talk in it, and I kept cutting things down, and I kept
trying to cut them in the even in 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's the 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
a scene in the movie where two people in the movie I don't want to
give away things, but wind up playing tennis. And the way that scene
came to be written, was that the book itself was finished. It was
at the publisher, and I had a 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, and called my editor and said, you gotta
put this in. And now I'm telling her Bross, you got to take
this out. Nobody wants to see two guys playing a set of tennis,
unless it's Alfred Hitchcock, strangers on a train and somebody's going to plant the
cigarette lighter as murder evidence. Nobody wants to see the movie stop while these
two guys play tennis. And herb said, you're wrong. Everybody loves the
tennis scene. We have to keep it. And he was right. He
was right on that one. They like that one. Maybe they talk too
much in the movie, but it's smart talk, it's good talk. The
acting is terrific, the music is the movie is really good to look at,
and so forth. So. But yes, I had wanted to cut
things out, cut things down, sharpen them. It was a do over
in a way. Must be very interesting to be able to revisit and revisit
so close to publishing. You're only like a year out when you're able to
look back at this work that you had obviously you had lived with it for
a long time, but that you had just written well, I guess two
years prior with the whole battles with the estate. Yeah. I mean again,
this is all sort of lattened out in a sort of telescopic hindsight.
What was going on at different at different times. But that's that's pretty much
my recollection of events. What was that relationship like with Herbert Ross? It
was very close and very lovely. I liked him, adored his wife,
Nora Kay, who was America's most famous dramatic ballerina. She had long since
retired, but she was a remarkable woman, a remarkable helpmate, had incredible
taste. They really sort of just included me. I said, you know,
I want to direct a movie and I want to watch how one has
made. And he was very, very solicitous and careful about dealing with me,
and as I say, more often than not, he was protective of
the book and its movie incarnation. At one point I said to me,
we should cut this out. And I remember because it was so unusual the
words he said, you're debawling your own book. I think he meant castrating,
but he used debawling, which I remember. You know, I don't
think I was, but I think you 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 spice of life. And try not to repeat
yourself. Henry James said that the least demand that you can make of a
work of art is that it be interesting, and the most demand is that
it be moving. And I just kept saying, this has to click along
faster than it does. The end result is it's a terrific movie. I've
seen it since and you look at it and go, wow, this is
really good. But at the time you just, you know, remember the
birthing struggles. Well, the cast is amazing. You cannot get better actors
altogether one place. At this time, two of the three leads were my
idea. My idea was Alan Arkin as Freud, and my idea was Robert
Duval as Watson. And he became my idea when I heard somewhere along the
line that he was interested in playing Watson. And one of the things about
the novel is seven percent solution is that, at least as intended by me,
it was a revisionist look at the Sherlock Holmes that we had seen in
other books and other movies, which I 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
we cast Watson, I didn't want another Nigel Bruce, another Colonel Blimp.
And when I heard that Robert Duval and somebody says not English, I said,
you're missing the point. This is a great actor, this is one
of America's greatest actor, and he wants to play doctor Watson in our movie.
Come on. So I fought very hard to get him. Vanessa Redgrave
at the time, I think nobody wanted 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 time I was about five years old and
saw him in the first movie ever so, and I just was fixated on
him and He was one of the biggest 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 theater and see him in a movie that I
thought was called Henry V. And it 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 swords and 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
got the greatest writer. So I was totally fixated on Lauren Silia from that
point on. And then while we're casting the movie, her Bras says to
me, what do you think about Laurence Olivia is Professor Moriarty and like,
oh, my wiring is shorting out. I'm thinking be cool, normal,
and I go, yes, that's really really empty. Yeah it looks good,
it's good good, you know, and I'm thinking, oh my god,
this will never happen, but it did. What did you think of
Nicole Williamson. Nicole Williamson was her brass's idea. We had both seen him
on Broadway doing Hamlet, and my first idea was Peter O'Toole. Herb had
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 out it was a brilliant idea because it was
such a curve bootle. But then again, we weren't making a Sherlock Holmes
movie. We're making a movie about Sherlock Holmes, and that was different,
and Nicol was different. He threw quit a curveball with the idea of Moriarty
not being the Napoleon of crime. Other people have made similar suggestions. And
one of the things that I discovered when I was unemployed and at the beginning
of my Hollywood career, I stumbled onto all the books about Sherlock Holmes written
by other people. There is just volume after volume after volume of books on
every aspect about Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes and music, Sherlock Holmes, and
women, Sherlock Holmes, And how did he go to the bathroom? Sherlock
Holmes in cocaine? Sherlock Holmes and everything. 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 anybody except Sherlock Holmes. No, Watson takes
the whole story at face value, but he never all he sees is a
guy shaking his fist at a departing train. I'm sure there's a lot of
pissed off guys who have missed trains wound up shaking their fist off and the
goddab train or the engineer who left on time. And I also never liked
the Moriarty idea because what I really loved as an eleven or twelve year old
kid reading those stories was how real they seemed to me. Whether they would
seem as real now, I don't know, but what I glimbed on to
at the time was the little things that the stories were about. The kidnapped
Raceforce, the people who swallowed LSD and lost their marbles, the Speckled Band,
the Redheaded League, all that kind of real stuff, or real enough
real to me, as opposed to the Napoleon of Crime, which struck me
as sort of the prototype for Lex Luthor or something, and I didn't buy
it. And somewhere, you know, later I understood, Okay, he
created this guy because he wanted to kill 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 I took that idea and ran with it.
Well, I do love how you set all of these stories in the real
world, and like in the West End Horror, having George Bernard Shaw there
or brom Stoker and just interacting with historical figures and just capturing that age so
well, or with Canary Trainer when he goes to Paris and just hearing about
what was happening at that time, and you know, what was going on
in the world of opera at that point. I mean, just setting things
in that real world and then also having 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 hold of. I almost feel bad for you
because people keep sending you to these manuscripts somehow. Yeah, it's a terrible
burden. How has your approach to writing 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 so much in my DNA at this point,
and I know that I'm pushing the envelope. When I wrote The seven Percent
Solution. There had been Holmes imitations before, and I had read some of
them, but I basically had the fields to myself. This was just boom.
Holmes suddenly was everywhere thanks to this book, and in the wake of
that, this whole cottage Sherlock Holmes industry has cropped up. If I read
nothing but Holmes imitations between now and the 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't read a lot of the imitations because I
guess I'm insecure enough that I worried that those imitations would be better than my
imitations. I'm insecure, so I don't want to read. But even worse
is that I might wind up trying to imitate those imitations instead of my own
version of Doyle. And I've gotten bolder as I've become older, and there
are certain paths that are open to me that we're not exactly open before,
by which I mean, since my stories pretty much advanced the Holmesyan chronology.
By the time we get to my new one, The Return of the Pharaoh,
we're into nineteen eleven. He's different, language is different. There's telephones
where they're only used to be telegraphs, and there's motor cars where they're only
used to be carriages, So that sort of frees me up. Also,
the social world has changed the role of women in it. And the other
thing I found, and I found this with the seven Percent Solution and all
the others, with the exception of the West End Horror, which does take
place in London in England, is that 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 of fish out of Thames water and allow me
to sort of experiment with his character a little bit, raise his game occasionally
I go back and sit down and reread one of the stories, whether it's
The Devil's Foot or the Bruce Partinson Plans or Silver Blaze, or you know,
once in a while, just to sort of get it in my bloodstream
again. But I've become a supposed boulder. And the thing that I guess
I'm working my way up to saying here is that if the imitations become too
slavish, and I've noticed this when I occasionally do open one of these other
pastiches and start reading them, it starts to resemble Taxidermy's. It starts to
feel like a stuffed moosehead s something. And then I think it may be
very accurate. The author may never have 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 better than mine. I have to admit I
do appreciate how you have the bit about americanisms in your openings that I was
a good kind of caveat in there as well. It's a caveat or a
cop out the caveaut. Do you have any favorite adaptations of Holmes? Do
you have any particular ones that you say, oh, they did a good
job, or I really like that actor's interpretation of this. I confess I
have a real soft spot for the Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, the Billy
Wiler movie, which I realized a lot of people have a lot of difficulties
with, and I suppose I could say yes, but I really love it.
I love the look of it. I love the crazy story that they
dreamt up for it. I realized that there were other stories that it was
an anthology, but I have to say, not having seen those other parts
of it, I don't miss them. I love the music, which is
the Miklos Roja Violin Concerto, which I think is great. It's the only
Billy Wilder movie that I know of without a trace of cynicism, not a
trace. It's a side of him that you don't see anywhere else. I
love one, a funny one called Without 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 Peter Cushing Hound of the Baskerville's pretty straight ahead
Sherlock Holmes. I think that's very good. And there was an old television
series with Ronald Howard, where I guess is the son of Leslie Howard as
Sherlock Holmes and an actor named h Marion Crawford as Watson. And I thought
those were pretty good. I don't know if they're still good, but time
I liked them a lot. But I was not a fan of Basil Rathbone
and Nigel Bruce, and I'm and I'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 skookie crazy stories, the Red Headed League,
Silver Blade, the Devil's Foot, the Bruce Partins and Plans, the
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 these ideas, because over the last what four
years, you've done at least two more 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,
think between the West End Horror and the Canary Trainer was I don't know,
fifteen sixteen years, and then there's like twenty three years between, when you
can count the rings on my tree trunk to find out how long this has
been going on. I write them when I get an idea, or when
I'm given an idea that will not let go. The Canary Trainer was written
after a long hiatus because the movie deal that I'd been anticipating had fallen apart,
and so had my income for that year, and I was very distressed
or distraught. And I was in a 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 never crosses paths with the Phantom because the dates
work out. And I remember just standing there looking around and saying, is
anybody else like seeing this idea on this page? So that's how I wrote
that one. And then the Protocols came about twenty some odd years later,
But I had really been thinking about it for at least ten years, because
I realized at a certain point that when it comes to the Holmes books,
I'm a forger. I forge, whether you want to call it Watson or
Doyle, but I'm forging. And then I started getting interested in forgery and
collecting a library about forgery. And when you start studying forgery, and I
include paintings, music, book whatever, it isn't long before you come across
the biggest, baddest, most vicious forgery of all time, which is the
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. And that's a mind or I mean,
your listeners can google it. Being distressed and astounded as I was,
and somewhere I thought, how do I should Holmes try to expose the Protocols
of the Learned Elders of Zion? And I was thinking about that for ten
years before I found my way into it. And then my agent and my
friend Alan Gasmer, I don't know after the book came out or when it
was coming out, he said what about Holmes in Egypt? And that instantly
took root. And I have an idea of you know, I'm working on
another one, which again is slightly weird 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 to bed to time after time? When the
book came out, I can't remember whether it was the book or the movie,
but I think it was the book. I was contacted I a friend
of mine from the University of Iowa who had been at graduate school there when
I was an undergrad, and he said, I have I'm writing a novel
which is more or less inspired by yours. I have sixty five pages and
an outline. Would you read what I've written and tell me which you think?
And in those days I had time to do that, so I said
sure, and I read his sixty five pages, which was about young H.
G. Wells, who, having invented 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
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't stop thinking about it. What a cool
idea. I would never have had such an idea in a million years.
But it also struck me, as I would like lie awake thinking about this,
that it was really a much more visual idea than it was a verbal
one. That it was two guys in 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, so it was maybe a couple months later
I woke up in the middle of the 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's how 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 I did the Medici with Frank Spotnitz. Frank
and I are working on two other television series. There's not enough time in
the day. Well, I'm glad that you're working with Frank. We had
him on a show a long time ago, and such a nice guy.
He's not only nice, he's amazingly talented. Those don't always go together,
but he is great, you know, he's terrific. Mister Maya Thank you
so much for your time. This has been such a pleasure talking with you
again. Thanks for coming back for more. All right, guys, we
are back and we're talking about seven percent solution. And the one thing,
you know, I brought this up in our first episode. I was talking
about how for me growing up in the seventies, and I think you guys
are somewhat similar ages. Sherlock Holmes was everywhere, and it just seemed to
be the thing. And then last week, David, you mentioned how there
seemed to be like this proliferation of homes in the seventies, and I just
kept wondering why that is. And the reason I keep coming back to is
the nineteen seventies things were still in such 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 just some of the different countries. Of course,
there's the product spring. All this stuff is going out in sixty eight.
Sixties are rough. Seventies don't really start off too much better, especially
here when we've got Watergate, and one 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 this reporter as hero. And I'm wondering,
and feel free to shoot me down on this, but I'm wondering if Holmes
having this resurgence of popularity had something to do with this need to have somebody
who can put order to all of this chaos that we re seeing. Well,
the one the films that we're looking at, Smarter Brother accepted because that's
kind of a comedy. The three films 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
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 cocaine habit. 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 a lot of the cultural production of the nineteen
seventies. I'm not sure if you guys are baseball fans at all, but
there was a book published in nineteen seventy called Ball four I Got named Jim
Boughton, which was a behind the scenes diary of a season where he pitched
from the Seattle pilots, and he had previously been on the Great Yankee teams,
and it was this kind of tell all 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, and it wasn't particularly savory. And so the
great heroes were systematically kind of being trashed one after the other. But in
a way we're made even more endearing because they were more human and they were
able to overcome the various foibles and issues that human beings have. So it
really was the celebration not the pure as 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. He I think one of the films he rapes
a woman. He's not a good guy. And James Bond, you know,
was a kind of anti hero as well. He's a professional assassin who's
a hero. So you saw this kind of sweeping change with Watergate, with
Vietnam, with this understanding that after the love generation of the sixties, you
know, the Summer of Love sixty seven, everything was kind of starting to
go sideways in Downhill, and you saw art and films responding to that zeitgeist.
The seventies are kind of a decade where everything went edgy, right,
all of film, all of art went Really they were trying to go against
tropes. They were trying to you know, anti heroes were huge at that
point, and I feel like if you really read the stories, you know
Sherlock is kind of an anti hero. And also I think they wanted to
experiment with going a different way because in previous decades he was kind of known
as this stalwart hero and they wanted to turn that on its axis. I
mean, it really felt like they wanted to take Sherlock Holmes and use him
as a way to show that, hey, even heroes are fallible and kind
of illustrate that through different various forms of 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 use that and also turn the tropes on their
ear, which is what they did most of the films were talking about.
Yeah, I don't think it's any coincidence. David, you mentioned baul Ford.
I believe it was the author of that who ended up being Terry.
I can't remember his last name. In the Long Goodbye the Altman film,
which again is taking Raymond Chandler Philip Marlow and taking that character and making him
pretty dirty, you know if literally in some parts with the ink on his
face and all this, and just also shooting this. I know it's not
Terry Bradshaw because it's the football player, but I can't remember the character's last
name. But killing his friend because his friend is just you know, it's
kind of a wild dog. He said he's a bad guy, and Marlow
asked to write the world and that same thing. It's kind of that Forgetta
Jake. It's Chinatown type of thing too, where it's like this is the
era where the bad guys can win and get away with that. But it
feels like Sherlock Holmes is trying to put things back to the right when it
comes to what we saw in the private 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, like I was saying, it was this person
who was basically an arms manufacturer. And the plot that Holmes is really unraveling
has to do with the Chancellor of Germany. It has to do with arc
Duke friends Ferdinand, and just basically he'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 World War one. And when it was
World War One because we didn't know there was going to be a second one,
the Great War. We didn't know that that was going to happen.
So here he is in eighteen eighty nine 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 you know, we jumped down in the river
and has all these bruises and all these things that is able to take her
in her relationship with this man who manufactures arms and just spin this whole tale
of oh, this is what's happening. He deduces all of the stuff to
the point where it's if we don't say this woman, if we don't make
this case, this war is going to 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
we got this confession, but it doesn't change anything because it's already being translated
into all these different languages, including German, and we know how that is
going to turn out when it comes to the Jews and the protocols of the
Elders of Zion and how they're perceived in Germany. So there is a lot
of hubrist to these stories. He doesn't set everything completely right. If anything,
he just pretty much forestalls the inevitable. Well, I mean, if
you guys have ever seen like the original 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, and boy do they look great. Oh they
look great. The horses look great, the uniforms look great. Everyone's got
big feathers in their hats and you can see, I mean, Europe was
an armed camp and anybody with any ability 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 to be short and you're always going to come
home in one piece. And then it happens and it ends up horrifically tragic,
and then we go, oh, maybe that wasn't such a good idea.
Then a few years passed and it's like, wow, it's yeah,
it's going to be great again. We keep going down that road over and
over and so yeah, it is there. You can see the foreshadow of
what's coming down, and unfortunately it just keeps, you know, occurring over
and over. You know, human beings are a sad bunch but also a
wonderful bunch. I feel, you know, I got to mention that I
because you know, I don't know about you guys, but some of the
stuff you get immersed in media on social media, and you just want to
commit seppuku. But then it's like we're putting machines on Mars and we're figuring
out how to cure this type of cancer or whatever, and it's like wow,
it's like almost two different species of humanity occupy the planet and you just
try to navigate between the two of them. Yeah. I want to mention
the horses because we didn't even talk about that, the stallions. How do
we not talk about that? Because that whole scene, I'm like, is
he under hypnosis? Because I didn't I couldn't see these fins in this most
since I was a kid, and I'm watching going is he under hypnosis in
the scene? Is this? Is he basically remembering his drug addiction? Because
horses are white, it's cocaine. Is that what's going on here? I
don't know, they're killer horses. What more do you need to know?
I don't know, But what he's got a cocaine addiction? I can't.
I can't help but look at that as like a possibility. Well, if
you're going to ride ride the white pony, he's going to snore the lippings
on her stallion and then he confronts it head on, and then they get
out of the way and it runs away. His addiction runs away. You
don't you see I'm saying it's a metaphor. We got psychoanalysts in the crowd,
Holmes, these horses were trained to kill. Yeah, who does that?
Who trains horses to kill? Seriously, it's a metaphor. They're running
like crazy, and then he finally faces him, and then he gets out
of the way and they run away, just like he conquered his addiction.
All right, guys, let's go ahead and take another break, and we're
going to play a preview for next week's show, Murder by Decree, and
the critics overwhelming choice is the best thriller of the year. Rex Reid calls
it the most gripping and totally fascinating quality 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 his entertainment today, Vincent can be New
York Times After Dark seventeen and Cosmopolitan Magazines at All made it their Movie of
the March. Murder by Decree rtd BG. That's right. We conclude our
Sherlock Holmes Monk next week with a look at Bob Clark's murder by Decree.
Until then, what is the Ladies with You wearing? Well? I started
out rereading some Sherlock Holmes stories because I haven't read in them a few years,
so that's a positive that came out of this. But also been doing
the Hollywood Outsider podcast, which I do 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 Southwest Film 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 out yet, so it's definitely worth checking out.
You can go to the Hollywood Ouside dot com and also presenting Hitchcock,
which I do every month where we look at a film in the Hitchcock catalog
and David, what's the latest with you? Sir? I am heading to
beautiful Daton, Ohio and a couple of days to give a presentation on my
three Sherlock Holmes plays. I was very kindly invited to come chat about them,
so I will do that, and all three of the plays are being
produced next year at Stage one in Fort Worth, Texas, according to my
publisher at any rate, so I will probably venture down there to check at
least one of those out. Congratulations on that. That's awesome. Can I
ask you a question, Daby before we sign off? You were talking about
your set design love earlier, which I agree and especially I think if you're
a fan of Shallock Holmes, and everybody is a fan in different ways.
Some people are more fan of the character, some people are more fan of
the mysteries portion whatever you're a fan of. When you watch a film or
a TV show that's based on Shallock Holmes and you know it so well,
does it infuriate you when you see books on the shelf that you know shouldn't
be there, like he wouldn't read those. Well, let me put it
this way. I try to be as open minded and forgiving as I can.
On the other hand, when it's a play of mind that's going up,
I stalk the set. The premiers are all at a theater that's only
forty five minutes from me, the Purple Rose Theater and Chelsea, Michigan,
and the set designers are great. Prop designers are great. But yeah,
I will walk aroun round and make a menace of myself and say, I
don't want that book there that you know that would book? Would it be
there exactly? And they are. They tolerate my presence reasonably well, but
yeah, you know I should stay in my lane. But you know it's
your baby, and then you want it 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's my stuff especially I want to be right.
But when you're when you're looking at it from you know, trying to
be objective. It kind of goes back 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 property or not. That's something that I noticed
right away. If I'm watching something and 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 it looks, you know, certain things that
Sherlock wouldn't allow. Those are those are 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 irritate me are where they represent the rooms as
a maculate and pristine and there's no indication of chaos or indolence or laziness,
you know, cigarette ashes or dishes laying around. I mean, Sherlock Holmes
was so absorbed in his work he didn't have time to keep everything nice and
tied up all the time. There should be some degree of disarray, but
it also needs to feel very lived in. You know, you do want
books, you do want a big armchair, 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 even in a film like you know, the
Basil Rathbone films, all the Universal films, they're updated, they're modernized,
but his rooms they could just as well 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 everybody for 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 are all available over at weirdingweightmedia dot com.
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