Filmmaker Meyer Signs Memoir

A trip through ‘time after time’ making movies. That describes the scene at Village Books on Swarthmore last Thursday evening when filmmaker Nicholas Meyer discussed his memoir, ‘The View From the Bridge: Memories of ‘Star Trek’ and a Life in Hollywood’ (Viking), which recounts, with detail and humor, his perspective as a writer and director on the original (and successful) ‘Star Trek’ movies. ‘View’ also offers Meyer’s experiences creating the off-kilter 1970s thrillers ‘The Seven-Percent Solution’ and ‘Time After Time.’ ‘It’s hard to speak of it without giving away a lot of it,’ Meyer said of ‘View’ by way of prefacing a humorous excerpt he read about ‘the most watched movie ever made for TV,’ the controversial nuclear war drama ‘The Day After,’ which he directed in 1983. The anecdote involved how that film intersected with his dashed hopes to jumpstart his pet project, ‘Conjuring,’ based on ‘Fifth Business’ by Robinson Davies, which Meyer shepherded for six years to no avail. ‘Everyone kept saying that my [‘Conjuring’] screenplay was ‘well-written,” Meyer told 40 audience members, eliciting laughter. ‘It took me years to figure out that this was not a compliment. In Hollywood, ‘well-written’ is code for ‘I don’t love you.” Beforehand, a Palisadian-Post reporter asked if there are too many chefs in the Hollywood kitchen. ‘It’s not that there’s too many chefs,’ Meyer, a Pacific Palisades resident, said. ‘They’re the wrong chefs. It’s marketing, not movie-making.’   Originally from New York, Meyer, 63, graduated from the University of Iowa with a theater and filmmaking degree. His ‘Trek’ work aside, Meyer’s films have centered on 19th-century literary characters and personages. In 1977, Meyer was nominated for an Academy Award in the Adapted Screenplay category for translating his own 1974 novel, the revisionist Sherlock Holmes novel ‘Seven-Percent Solution,’ starring Robert Duvall (as Dr. Watson) and Alan Arkin (as Sigmund Freud). Meyer wrote two ‘Solution’ sequels, which have not been made into films. Meyer wrote and directed the Jack the Ripper thriller ‘Time After Time’ (1979), in which a time-traveling H.G. Wells pursues the notorious serial killer in modern-day San Francisco. Next month will mark the film’s 30th anniversary. ‘It holds up pretty well,’ Meyer said, shunning the idea of a Blu-Ray release for it. ‘Do you want to put a Renoir in focus?’ For ‘Trek’ movie fans, Meyer is the series’ messiah, as he wrote and/or directed the even-numbered sequels, considered the best ones: ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan’ (1982), ‘Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home’ (1986), and ‘Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country’ (1991), the last film featuring the original ‘Trek’ characters to reach theaters before J.J. Abrams’ reboot this summer. Meyer has been credited with saving a sinking ‘enterprise’ after Robert Wise’s original ‘Star Trek’ disappointed in 1979. ‘Wrath’ memorably starred Ricardo Montalban as the titular villain. Meyer was brought in to salvage the oft-rewritten screenplay, even though he had never seen an episode of the TV series. He revised it uncredited and, while ‘Trek’ creator Gene Roddenberry disagreed with Khan’s Captain Ahab undertones, ‘Wrath,’ directed by Meyer, grossed $97-million worldwide, setting a first-day box office-gross record In ‘View,’ Meyer writes he lifted ‘Trek IV”s subtitle from Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy (‘the undiscovered country’ refers to death): ‘After all, Spock would die in the movie.’ Then he learned star William Shatner ‘hates the script!’ One of several turbulent rides aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise described in Meyer’s book. Waiting in line to meet Meyer was Laird Malamed.   ”Wrath of Khan’ is at the beginning of a chain of events that affected my life and led me to an entertainment career,’ Malamed said. As a teenager, Malamed picked up on ‘Wrath”s ‘Moby Dick’ references. Amazingly, his junior high English teacher let him write a paper analyzing the film’s embedded allusions to Herman Melville’s novel. Today an Activision executive heading the phenomenally successful video game franchise ‘Guitar Hero,’ Malamed indeed showed the Post his 27-year-old book report, marked with an ‘A’ and laudatory teacher’s notes. A Pacific Palisades resident since 1990, Meyer moved to town after ‘many years in Laurel Canyon. I was raising two children and looking for somewhere that was kid friendly. I like the air here and the retro quality. I have a fantasy of [Norris Hardware] going back to being a movie theater.’ Meyer praised the efforts of another Palisadian now associated with ‘Trek’ movies. ‘I thought it was an exciting reboot of the franchise,’ he said of Abrams’ feature. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.’ Meyer has more often worked as screenwriter than director, admitting ‘by the end of filming, I’m all burned out. But I’ll probably go back to directing. I’ve got grown-up kids now so there’s no stopping me.’ When asked for an update on the progress of his Theodore Roosevelt screenplay for Martin Scorsese, Meyer replied cryptically, ‘If you live long enough, you’ll see your movies get made.’