This week on the blog, a podcast interview with writer/director Nicholas Meyer about his work on the Adrian Brody “Houdini” mini-series, as well as thoughts on Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, Time After Time and more.
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Behind the Page Nicholas Meyer Interview Part One: https://tinyurl.com/3f7mbzer
Behind the Page Nicholas Meyer Interview Part Two: https://tinyurl.com/ms3tm45f
Nicholas Meyer website: https://www.nicholas-meyer.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
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Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos
John Sayles: Writing to your resources
Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes
John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots
Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals
George Romero: Casting
Kevin Smith: Skipping film school
Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection
Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity
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John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.
The book covers (among other topics):
Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories
Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature
Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period
George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget
Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories
Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations
Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive
Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous
Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget
Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget
Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror
Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget
Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting
L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting
Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing
Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres
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Nicholas Meyer – Transcript
John Gaspard: Do you remember what it was that caused your dad to write that book?
Nicholas Meyer: I know something about it. He was interested, the subjects that kind of absorbed his attention were the sons of passive or absent fathers. This was a topic which probably originated from his experiences with his own father, my grandfather, who was a very interesting man and a kind of a world beater, but who spent so much of his time doing what they said in The Wizard of Oz—being a philip, philip, philip, a good deed doer—that he didn't have enough time for fathering. He was not a bad man at all, quite a conscientious one. But the parenting was left to his wife and I think my father missed and was affected by not having an involved father. And I think that a colleague of my dad's said to him Houdini, that's the guy for you. And that's how he did it. I'm only sorry that he didn't live to see the two-night television series based on his book.
Jim Cunningham: I enjoyed it immensely as a Houdini fan. It was fascinating and fun and Adrian Brody is terrific, as is the woman who plays Bess. I thought I knew a lot about Houdini and there was a lot in there that I did not know. And I really enjoyed the opening to it, which suggests that it's all fact and all fiction, and it's our job to figure out which is which. How did you come to being involved with the TV mini-series about your dad's book?
Nicholas Meyer: I have been friends and worked for many years with a television producer named Jerry Abrams. I started working with Jerry in 1973 with the first teleplay that I wrote was for a television movie called Judge Dee in the Haunted Monastery. There was a—China apparently invented everything first, including detective stories—and a circuit court judge in the seventh century, Judge Dee Jen Jay, solved mysteries and people wrote detective stories about him and now there are movies about him.
But back in 1972, or something like that, and I had just come to Hollywood and was looking for work and didn't know anybody. And I met Jerry Abrams and I met a director named Jeremy Kagan and I'm happy to say both of these gentlemen are alive and still my friends. They gave me a shot to write this Judge Dee in the Haunted Monastery because I think ABC thought they were going to get a Kung Fu movie out of it, which it wasn't. But it was a television movie with an all Asian cast. The monastery in question was the old Camelot castle on the Warner Brothers lot and that's where I met Jerry. And Jerry and I've been friends ever since. Jerry’s son is JJ Abrams, who directs movies.
Anyway, Jerry said to me a couple of years ago, let's do Houdini and I said, Oh, funny, you should say that because my dad wrote a very interesting book about Houdini. I would be interested if it were based on his book. I would only be interested and that's how it got made.
John Gaspard: What was your process? Did you know it would be two nights going in? Did you know it's going to be that long? How did you get started and what other resources did you use, because I know there's stuff mentioned in the movie that I don't remember being in your dad's books. You must have had to dig a little bit.
Nicholas Meyer: There's a lot of books about Houdini, that I read many, many books, because my dad's book is distinguished—if one could call it that—by being the only book of all the books about Houdini that attempts some inner explanation of his psychological process. The why? Why would you do this? Why do you feel the need to do this? Other books will tell you what Houdini did, and some will tell you how he did it. But my dad's book, as I say, it kind of explores the why of it.
And so I read these other books to supplement the rest of the how and the why and I've amassed quite a large Houdini library. When I say large, probably compared to yours not so much, but I must have like 10 books about Houdini and flying aeroplanes and Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle and spiritualism and so forth. So, yes, I read all those to supplement what I was trying to condense.
I don't remember whether at this point whether it was proposed as two nights or three nights or whatever. I also know that if it hadn't been for Adrian Brody agreeing to play Houdini, it never would have happened. They weren't going to do it without a star.
Jim Cunningham: He's great.
John Gaspard: I was telling Jim earlier, before you got on, that my wife was kind enough to sit down and watch it with me. She's always worried in things like this, that she’s going see how something's done. She doesn't want to know how magic is done at all. And when we got to the end, she said, “Houdini seems so nice. He's such a likeable guy.” And I think that's really more Adrian Brody.
Nicholas Meyer: Oh, yeah. The Adrian Brody. As I say, the movie would not have got made without Adrian. I'm not sure that he wasn't to a large degree cast against type. I think Houdini was a guy with ants in his pants, a kind of frenetic character. And I don't think when you read about him in any detail, that he was what you'd call nice. I think he was a person who had a lot of charm that he could switch on and off like a tap.
And I think this is one of the things that my dad's book brings out, and we tried to bring it out in the movie: that Houdini's whose own father was a failure of flop and absent parent. So, I think Houdini spent a lot of his life looking for substitutes or alternative father figures. And I think the first one he probably stumbled on was the French magician Robert-Houdin, from whom he took his name. And I think Houdini's pattern, at least according to my dad's reading of it, was to find father figures and fall hard for them, only to ultimately become disenchanted and alienated and furious with them. Probably, because ultimately, they weren't his real father. But I think there was something like that going on.
John Gaspard: Yes, it's pretty clear that's what happened with Doyle as well.
Nicholas Meyer: Yes, but he had better reason than in some other cases to be disenchanted with Doyle because Doyle's Atlantic City séance with Lady Doyle, Houdini ultimately regarded as a real betrayal. Because he decided, probably correctly, that the contact with his mother via Lady Doyle doing spirit writing was fake.
And by the way, it's not that Mrs. Doyle or Lady Doyle might not have believed what she was doing. It just didn't track for two reasons: Houdini experienced this contact with his mother, and he was as obsessed with her as he was with the fact of an absent father. And he was so overcome when she spoke to him via the spirit writing that it was a couple of days before he realized that his mother didn't speak a word of English. And she had communicated via lady Doyle in English, she only spoke Yiddish. Doyle got around this difficulty by explaining that the medium in this case, Lady Doyle, worked as a kind of simultaneous translator.
And Houdini said, yeah, but—and this was the second item—it was his birthday. And she never mentioned it and she always sent him something on his birthday. And he then denounced Doyle and Lady Doyle, as quote, menaces to mankind.
John Gaspard: So, were you involved in a day-to-day way with production? And I'm wondering why you didn't direct it?
Nicholas Meyer: I was involved. The whole movie was shot in Budapest, everything and I was involved. I was not invited to direct. I have not directed really since the death of my wife in 1993. I had two small children to raise and by the time it was, like, possible for me to go back since they are now grown up and busy. I was sort of out of a game.
John Gaspard: Oh, that's too bad. You're a terrific director.
Nicholas Meyer: I'm not arguing with you.
John Gaspard: So, once you were scripting it, and you were using other sources, how concerned were you about this is fact, this is fiction?
Nicholas Meyer: That's a very good question and it doesn't just apply to Houdini. It applies largely to the whole issue of dramatizing the stories based on real events.
And by the way, you could make the case in a way that there's no such thing as fiction; that all fiction ultimately can be traced back to something real. I'll give you two examples off the top of my head: one, Moby Dick was based on a real Whale called Mocha Dick because of his color; and, as Heinrich Schliemann proved, when he discovered Troy, most legends, most myths have their origins somewhere in the mists of time, in some kind of reality. It turns out there was a place called Troy. So, he was not far off the mark.
It's a knotty question with a “k” how much we owe to fact and how much we get to mush around and dramatize? And the answer has to be inevitably elastic. The problem is that people are neither taught, nor do they read history anymore. We are not taught civics. We are not taught history.
Nobody knows anything and so by default, movies and television are where we get our history, and that history is not always truthful. It is dramatized for example, in that Academy Award winning movie, The Deer Hunter, we learn that the North Vietnamese made American prisoners of war in Vietnam, play Russian roulette. There is no evidence, no historical evidence that they ever did any such thing. And yet, if you're getting your history from the movies, that's what you see and someone said that seeing is believing. In any case, you have to sort of always be looking over your own shoulder when you are dramatizing history and realizing that, yes, you can tell a story with scope, dates and characters. But what's the point where you cross a line and start inventing things out of whole cloth?
I’ll give you another example: was Richard the Third really the monster that Shakespeare portrays? Now, remember, Shakespeare is writing for the granddaughter of the man who killed Richard the Third and usurped his throne and called himself king. You could make a very different case that that guy was a scumbag and that Richard was not, but you know, Shakespeare was in business. The Globe Theatre was a money-making operation and Henry the Seventh’s granddaughter was the Queen of England. So, there are a lot of variables here.
When you sit down to dramatize, I've worked for the History Channel and I can tell you the history channel will not make a movie where Americans look bad. The History Channel will not make a movie that questions any point in our own history. Our right to the moral high ground. It's a point of view and they have a demographic and Americans don't want to be shown any of their own flaws or asked to think about them.
Jim Cunningham; Well, who does? Can I ask questions about the espionage? Part of what I witnessed last night, although I had sort of a vague memory, that there is some espionage connection or perhaps connection? In the first episode that he was working for at least the American government and perhaps the English government as well. Is there evidence for that?
Nicholas Meyer: Circumstantial evidence.
Jim Cunningham: Yes, and I suppose that it could still be even at this late date protected in some way in terms of, I don't know them, not admitting, or maybe no real hard evidence exists anymore, right?
Nicholas Meyer: I'm more inclined to think that no real hard evidence exists. Although we all know that somebody said, truth is the daughter of time. But a lot of evidence has for a lot of things, not merely in this country, but also England has been redacted and eliminated and buried. You know, how many of your listeners know the story of Alan Turing?
Alan Turing may have shortened World War Two by as much as two years by inventing the computer that helped break the German Enigma code. Alan Turing signed the Official Secrets Act which meant that his wartime work could never be revealed. Alan Turing was gay. After the war was over, Alan Turing was arrested on a morals and decency charge and he could not tell the world who he was and so he was sentenced to some kind of chemical castration, I believe and he killed himself.
And all of this remained a secret for the next 55 years before the world's, you know, learned and suddenly there was a play called Breaking the Code and then there was the Enigma novel by Robert Harris and then there was the movie, which is very inaccurate, and very troublesome to me, The Imitation Game. Because in The Imitation Game, the first thing he does when he's arrested, is tell the cop who he is. With a crushing irony, as well as inaccuracy, is it there's no way he was allowed to tell. That was the price you pay when you sign the Official Secrets Act. So that movie kind of bugged me.
Whereas for example, Enigma, which I think is one of my favorite movies, doesn't bug me at all because it doesn't call him Alan Turing and therefore, he's not gay, and it's a different story entirely spun out of inspired by, but not pretending to be Alan Turing.
Jim Cunningham: Well, now I'm gonna have to watch that movie because I don't think I've seen it.
Nicholas Meyer: You never saw Enigma?
Jim Cunningham: I don't believe I saw Enigma.
Nicholas Meyer: It's the only movie produced by Mick Jagger and Lorne Michaels, written by Tom Stoppard. Kate Winslet, Dougray, Scott, Jeremy Northam. Anyway, it's a fantastic movie, but you have to watch it like five times in order to understand everything that's going on because Tom Stoppard is not going to make it easy.
John Gaspard: Just a quick side note here. I remember reading somewhere that Mick Jagger was a possible first choice for Time After Time.
Nicholas Meyer: Yeah, for Jack the Ripper.
John Gaspard: Okay, interesting. I prefer the choice you came up with.
Nicholas Meyer: Well, when they—Warner Brothers—were trying to sort of figure out how to make this movie, quote, commercial (they were so surprised when it was a hit), they suggested Mick Jagger as Jack the Ripper. And he was in LA at the time touring and I really didn't understand the politics of not just filmmaking, but you know, sort of office politics generally. And my first reply was no, you know, you might believe him as the Ripper, but you'd never believe him—or I didn't think you would believe him—as a Harley Street surgeon. And they said, You mean you won't even meet him? And that's when I said, oh, okay, I get it. I have to agree to meet. So I met him and then I said, fellas, I still don't, you know, think this can work. And so we went on to David Warner.
Jim Cunningham: I think that was the first film I became aware of David Warner and of course, it colored my opinion of David Warner for everything I've seen him in since, including him as Bob Cratchit in a version of A Christmas Carol. I kept thinking to myself, don't turn your back on him. He's a killer. He's a stone-cold killer, because of Time After Time, which is still one of my favorite movies.
Nicholas Meyer: Oh, thank you so much.
John Gaspard: We promised not to geek out too much. But I have to tell you that the hotel room scene between him and McDowell, I still pull up once or twice a year to look at the writing and the acting in that scene. “You're literally the last person on Earth expected to see.” They're both so good in that scene.
Nicholas Meyer: They are that, they are.
John Gaspard: I think you mentioned in your memoir in passing that when you did The 7% Solutionthere was some back and forth with the Doyle estate. We—Jim and I—have a friend, Jeff Hatcher, who wrote the screenplay for Mr. Holmes, which is based on a book. Once the movie came out, it did run into some issues with the Doyle estate, because the writer had taken some characteristics of Holmes from the later books …
Nicholas Meyer: It's all bullshit. All that is bullshit. The Doyle estate, which was once the richest literary estate in the world, was run into the ground by his descendants and their in laws and they don't care anything about Sherlock Holmes. All they care about is money. And what they try to do is to stick up movie companies and book companies and say you've got to pay. And back when Holmes legitimately fell into copyright, which is when I wrote The 7% Solution, yes, I had to pay and I understood that. I mean, I didn't understand it when I wrote the book because I was a kid. But I understood it when it was explained to me.
What since happened is they continue, even though he's out of copyright, to try to pretend that he is or that one or two stories are etc. My friend, Les Clinger, who is a business manager but also happens to be a lawyer and a Holmes’ enthusiast, took the estate to court and won. He broke that bullshit stranglehold that they were trying to exercise on anybody who wanted to write or create or make a movie about Holmes.
Now, it's also true that big companies like Warner Brothers, or Paramount or something, if they make a Sherlock Holmes movie, and the Doyle estate comes sniffling to their door, find it cheaper to say, here's $10,000, Go away, than it is to bother to do what Les did, which was take them to court. It's just, it's blackmail, you've all seen the Godfather, you know, give me a little something to wet my beak is what this is all about. I have nothing good to say about them and what they did with Mr. Holmes, your friend's movie, was they waited until the movie was about to come out before they hit him.
John Gaspard: Jim, I should mention, you probably don't know this, that and this is the truth, the man we're talking to is the man for whom the thing at the beginning of a DVD that says the opinions expressed here are not those of this company. He's the reason that's on DVDs.
Jim Cunningham: Is that right?
Nicholas Meyer: Yes, I will explain because I'm very proud of it.
I've made a couple of contributions to civilization. One of them is the movie The Day After, it's my nuclear war movie. And the other is this little sign. And it happened when they were preparing the DVD release of Star Trek Two: the Wrath of Khan. I was interviewed and asked to explain my contributions to the making the movie, the script, the directing, etc. So, I told the story about how I came to write the script. And the DVD lady who subsequently became a very good friend of mine said, “Gee, the lawyers say we can't use any of what you told us.” And I said, “And why is that?” And she said, Paramount was worried about getting in trouble with the Writers Guild, because you are not credited as the author and you wrote this sort of under the table, the script. And I said, Well, why don't you just take me out of the whole DVD? Because if I can't tell the truth about it, I don't want to be in it.
And she said, “That's what I hoped you would say. Now, I've got some ammo.” So, she went back and she came back and she said, okay, here's the deal. And the deal now applies to every studio. “The opinions expressed in this interview, are not those of Paramount Pictures, its employees or affiliates.”
What this does is it stops those interviews from being bullshit puff pieces and allows them to become oral histories. Now, different people may have different oral histories of the same thing. You put them all on the DVD, but suddenly, you've opened up a whole world to telling things that really happened or that the tellers think really happened, or are their opinions without the studio, worried that they're going to be sued, because of that little disclaimer. And they all have that now and that's my contribution.
Jim Cunningham: It's great. Now, I promised John before this interview that I would not talk Star Trekwith you, but since you've opened the door a little bit here. Now, that you say that you wrote Wrath of Khan under the table, can you just flesh that out for me? It might not ever be in the podcast, but I'm an incredible Star Trek fan. So, I'm interested in this story.
Nicholas Meyer: Well, very quickly, I knew nothing about Star Trek when I met Harve Bennett, the producer of what was going to be the second Star Trek movie. He showed me the first movie. He showed me some of the episodes and I got kind of a jones to make an outer space, a space opera. And I realized once I started to familiarize myself with Captain Kirk that he reminded me of Captain Hornblower, which were the books by CS Forester that I read when I was a kid, about a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, who had adventures and a girl in every port, which sounded good to me. I was 12. I think it was 13 or something and so I thought, “Oh, this is Hornblower and outer space. This is destroyers. This is submarines.”
So, I made a deal with Paramount and Harve Bennett to direct a Star Trek movie for them, which was going to be their second movie. And Harve said, draft five of the script is coming in. So, I went home and waited for draft five. And, you know, I looked up and it was three or four weeks later and wondered whatever happened, because I was starting to think about spaceships and stuff like that. And he said, “Oh, I can't send you the script. It's not good. I can't.” I said, “Well, what about draft four, draft three, whatever?” And he said, “You don't understand. All these different drafts are simply separate attempts to get another Star Trek movie. They're unrelated.”
And I said, “Well send them all to me. I want to read them.” And he said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah.”
And in those days, you didn't hit Send. A truck, drove up, a van, and it had a lot of scripts. And I'm a very slow reader and I started. I read all these scripts and then I said, “Why don't you and your producing partner, Robert Salem, come up to my house and let's have a chat about this because I have an idea.” And so they showed up, and I had my ubiquitous legal pad and I said, “Why don't we make a list of everything we like in these five scripts? It could be a major plot. It could be a subplot. It could be a sequence. It could be a scene. It could be a character, it could be a line of dialogue, I don't care. Let's just make the list and then I'll try to write a new screenplay that incorporates as many of these elements as we pick.” And they didn't look happy and I thought, I don't get a lot of ideas. This was my idea and I said, “What’s wrong? What's wrong with that?”
And they said, “Well, the problem is that if we don't have a screenplay within 12 days, Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects house for the movie, say they can't deliver the shots in time for the June opening.” And I said, “What June opening? “And I only directed one movie in my life, and these guys had booked the theatres for a movie that didn't exist. And I said, “Well, okay, I'll try to do this in 12 days, but we got to pick the stuff now.”
And they still weren't happy. And I said, “So, what is it? What's the problem?” And they said, “Well, you know, let's be honest, we couldn't even make your deal in 12 days.” And at this point, I was like, foaming at the mouth. I said, “Look, guys, forget the deal. Forget the money. Forget the credit. I'm not talking about directing. We've already got that signed, sealed and delivered. But if we don't do this, now, there's gonna be no movie, yes or no?”
And I was an idiot, because I at that point gave away you know, what turned out to be significant. So, I didn't invent Kirk meets his son. I didn't invent Khan. I didn't invent Savak. I didn't invent the Genesis Planet. I didn't invent any of those things. I just took them and played with them like a Rubik's Cube and poured my, essentially it's all my dialogue, Harve wrote a few lines, but I wrote most of it.
John Gaspard: Well, it certainly worked.
Jim Cunningham: Oh, boy. Yeah, absolutely. And I will not bring up The Undiscovered Countrybecause I promised John I wouldn't. The 7% Solution is very interesting. You took one thing, and you extrapolated out from that an entire kind of reality about Holmes that had not been explored. And it's similar to kind of what your father did with Houdini. And did that ever occur to you that there was there's a similarity there somehow?
Nicholas Meyer: Well, I did 7% before he did Houdini.
Jim Cunningham: He owes you then.
Nicholas Meyer: Oh, yeah. He does. It's interesting. I was not the first person to put together Holmes and Freud. In fact, Freud knew that he'd been compared to Holmes. Freud loved to read Sherlock Holmes stories. That was his bedtime reading and at some point, he even wrote in one of his case histories, “I follow the labyrinth of her mind, Sherlock Holmes-like until it led me to…” So he knew about this comparison.
And there was a doctor at Yale, a famous psychiatrist/drug expert, who wrote a paper that my father gave me to read about Holmes, Freud and the cocaine connection. Because Holmes is a cocaine user and for a time, so was Freud. And when my book came out and was the number one best-selling novel in the United States for 40 weeks, I got sued by this doctor at Yale for plagiarism. This is like the first successful thing I'd ever done in my life and this guy was saying I ripped him off. Because he was probably walking across campus and people were saying, “Hey, doc, hey, professor, that guy in the New York Times you ripped you off.”
So, I got sued. This is how you know you're hot is when you get sued. But it was devastating to me. It was devastating and it was expensive, because I had to defend myself. I had a lawyer and the lawyer said, “They have no case. We will ask for something called summary judgment.” And I said, “Does that mean we have to wait till July?” And he goes, no, no, no, it's not about that x couldn't resist summary judgment. Yeah, that happened in the summertime.
Summary judgment turns out to mean that the facts of the case are not in dispute. No one can dispute that I read his essay. I put it in my acknowledgments. I thanked him. I read it. The question is, what is the definition of plagiarism? It turns out, you cannot copyright an idea. You can only copyright the expression of an idea. The words. I hadn't used his words. I haven't used any of his. I didn't write an academic paper. I wrote a novel. I wrote a story. So, I won and then he appealed and I won again, end of story.
So, it didn't originate with me, nothing originates with me. Moby Dick was based on another whale. Emma Bovary was a real person, on and on and on.
If you read the history or a biography, you understand that in good faith, efforts have been made to lay out the facts. But when you read a historical novel, you understand that the facts have been mushed around and dramatized, that the author has assumed the dramatist’s privilege, his prerogative, to help things along.
There's an Italian phrase, se non è vero, è ben trovato. If it didn't happen that way, it should have.
I’ll give you another example: Queen Elizabeth the first and her cousin and rival Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth subsequently had beheaded, never met in real life. They'd never met. But of all the 4,622 movies, plays, operas, novellas, ballets, whatever that are, they always meet.
Because it ain't cool if they don't meet.
John Gaspard: It's a better story.
Nicholas Meyer: It's a better story.