The View from the Bridge

by Nicholas Meyer

  Although Time After Time bears a superficial resemblance to The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (Karl had said my book inspired him to write his), I think there are significant differences between the two. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is about two specific people, Holmes and Freud, and how their intellectual gifts cross-fertilize. By contrast, Time After Time is a movie that juxtaposes types. Wells represents civilized, progressive, constructive humanity; the Ripper is his dark, destructive counterpart. If The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is about individuals, Time After Time is concerned with the flip sides of humanity.

  That’s my two cents, anyway. Artists are not the best—and certainly not the definitive—critics of their own work. Once that work is launched into the wide world, we lose all proprietary authority, and our opinions are of no more value than anyone else’s. Possibly less. An author can’t possibly follow his book into the hands of every reader, looking over his shoulder and telling him what to think about what he’s read. Or what it means. Neither can a film director explain his intentions from the back of every theater where his film unspools. People will think what they’re going to think, conclude what they will. The artist/author’s opinion is simply and merely one additional viewpoint. The word “definitive” has no place in artistic or literary discussions. There is no such thing as a “definitive” biography, any more than there can be a “definitive” piano concerto or a “definitive” apple by Cézanne.

  Warner Brothers and Orion competed for the screenplay and wound up cofinancing it. To become the director, I had essentially replicated the “leapfrog” system that had successfully led to my becoming a screenwriter: I had consented to sell the film rights to The Seven-Per-Cent Solution only if I wrote the script; this time I would sell my script only if I could direct the film.

  They do say that fun is the past tense of shit, but, looking back, making Time After Time was perhaps the most fun I’ve ever had in the daytime. I barely knew what I was doing, had never directed a film of any kind before (unless you count my youthful contribution to Around the World in Eighty Days) and, though terrified, I enjoyed every heady minute of it. I worked with temperamental but excellent actors and I surrounded myself with an excellent and supportive crew, to all of whom I made the same speech: “I know nothing. You must teach me. You must not mind teaching me. And having taught me, you must not mind if I then want to do it my way, anyway. Don’t go away angry. Don’t go away at all.” Those who could smilingly endure this catechism and say yes were the ones I wanted. I proposed Malcolm McDowell as H. G. Wells. Warner objected—“He always plays the villain!” “Yes, but this time he’ll be the hero—that’s acting,” I explained, remembering Herb Ross’s advice about sticking to my guns. A young, slow-talking brunette from Arkansas gave a terrific reading as the heroine. She was completely different from the blonde, fast-talking, city-chippie, Jean Arthur type I had contemplated when I wrote the script, but she’d made me see the part in a different light. I fought for and landed Mary Steenburgen. When Malcolm asked me who his leading lady was to be, I grinned and predicted, “You’ll love her.”

  Warner Brothers suggested using Mick Jagger as the Ripper but I had trouble visualizing him—not as the Ripper (certainly!) but in his alter ego as a Harley Street surgeon. When I demurred they said, “You mean you won’t even meet with him? I then realized—better late than never—that in order to appear reasonable I needed to go through the motions. Besides, there was always the possibility that they were right and I was missing a bet. A meeting with the living legend was duly convened at his hotel suite. Jagger’s latest tour was coming to an end and he was understandably fatigued. We had beers and made self-conscious, desultory small talk for twenty minutes or so (about what? I can’t recall), and then I departed, my mind unchanged. David Warner made a splendid Ripper—and a convincing Victorian doctor.

  There’s lots to say about making a movie; directing is fun. Orson Welles called it the biggest set of electric trains any kid was ever given to play with. There are also an astonishing number of moving parts and the director must keep track of all of them. It is therefore also extremely hard work, both intellectually and physically. You must be in top shape or you’ll collapse. The job goes on seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day; there’s no let-up. If you are not shooting, you are preparing to shoot, thinking about the film, watching dailies, dealing with actors, losing locations, answering to your backers, and always, always trying in the tumult to hear the small voice that whispered to you while you were writing the thing. Is this what I imagined? Is it better? Is it worse? Should I settle or go for another take? I remember reading someplace that Steven Spielberg said the hardest and most important thing to do while directing is to listen to that small voice in your head that reminds you of what kind of film you set out to make in the first place. It is almost impossible, sometimes, to hear that all-important voice amid the din of movie battle. The best directors have great inner hearing.

  If you are both writer and director, you face a double-barreled pressure. When you’re working on the script, you can’t be directing; when you’re directing you can’t be working on the script. So: make sure that script is ready before you go. Directing a movie is like having a picnic on Mars—once you set out, there’s no going back for the salt. The script will change as you work but try to have it in the kind of shape where it will be able to withstand change and still be true to itself. And you. Like the Constitution, which has had many amendments, but still manages to express the essential notions of the Founding Fathers.

  Malcolm and Mary were great together—you really believed they were falling in love. I told myself I was a really good director. . . .

  There are some strengths I bring to directing that are extremely useful and other qualities that are liabilities. In the main, I am healthy and haven’t ever become incapacitated on a shoot; I know something about scripts and have become good at writing them; I understand the mechanics of storytelling and the integral part that character plays in narrative. We learn about a character from the choices he makes. (Character is destiny, says Aristotle.) My background in theater helps me to deal with actors and performances. You’d be surprised how many directors know nothing about stories or actors—or maybe you wouldn’t. In addition, my writing ability is also of use in the editing room, where I know about cutting and pasting and being ruthless with what doesn’t work. Also, I like people, which is useful if you’re a director. I can usually charm or coax them to give me what I want.

  So much for the good news.

  The bad news is that I came to moviemaking late, especially working with the camera. While Steven Spielberg was playing with lenses, I was playing with typewriters, and the difference is all too obvious. The camera and its possibilities were alien to me—a fine situation for a film director. And remember, I’m a slow learner. The British have evolved a great system: you direct endless commercials and hone your technical skills along the way; in the U.S. commercial directors don’t direct movies and vice versa. (The closest thing to that kind of training nowadays in America is music videos for MTV. But music videos arrived after I did.)

  In addition, while I like people, I have difficulty confronting them. If I can’t coax or manipulate them to get what I want, I sure as hell can’t threaten them. Directing is government by consent of the governed. It’s an agreement presumably made by actors and crew alike to trust the director and do what he says. But if an actor acts up and I can’t figure out how to defuse him, I don’t do head-to-head.

  There are some directors who believe themselves—rightly or wrongly—to be omniscient. No one can tell them anything—about story, acting, filming, or editing. Crew members who make suggestions get fired.

  That isn’t the kind of director I ever believed I am or aspire to be. Filmmaking to me is a collaborative process, and that’s much of what interested me about it. When I write, I write alone and I have complete control. I am limited by only my ability. When I direct, I work with gifted people and I try to tak
e advantage of what they know and think, always reserving the right to say no. I am a pillager of other people’s ideas, and on Time After Time I found that I (and the film) benefited from this policy.

  Let one example suffice. We had just shot a scene with Malcolm and the unit had broken for lunch. A lighting man came down from high up in the gaiters (the scaffolding suspended on cables above sets on a soundstage, which supports crew and lights) and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “You’re the writer of this thing, as well as the director, aren’t you?”

  I owned that I was.

  “Well, if you’re asking me,” the man went on, “he’s saying the wrong thing there,” meaning Malcolm as H. G. Wells in the scene we had just completed.

  “Really?” I didn’t know whether to pursue this or not. I was hungry. “What should he have said?”

  “Well, if you’re asking me . . .” and the man went on to supply a line far better than the one we had just shot. It was a reprise from an earlier moment in the script and so terrific, echoed in this scene, that I kicked myself before realizing that, as the director, I was entitled to come back after lunch and shoot the lighting man’s line instead of my crappy piece of dialogue.

  I cherished this moment (a) because it helped the film and (b) because the atmosphere on my set encouraged this sort of participation, of which there were to be many other instances. We sometimes limit people by using them to fulfill only their “official” job capacities. The cinematographer takes the pictures, the script girl sees to continuity and so forth, the gaffers arrange the lights.

  This seems very shortsighted to me. These people have been around and seen a lot. Their ideas aren’t always right, but I can always reject them. I carry in my head a vision of what the film is supposed to be (the little voice) but I can evaluate suggestions that may help me achieve that vision. Once my crew realized that I was interested in what they thought and had to say about the work, we became a much more cohesive and “European”-type unit. In America if the director turns to the prop man and asks what he thinks of a scene or a line, the man is terrified to respond; it’s not his department. His department is props, a fiefdom he guards jealously, and when he looks at the dailies, he is interested in only whether his props did the job they are supposed to do. In Europe there’s much less territoriality about job responsibilities and much more overlapping involvement with the total project. There’s less fear, less concentration on covering your ass. To me this is a much more interesting and appealing way to work. Hollywood technicians and artisans are the equal if not the superior of any in the world; the problem lies with a system seemingly cribbed from the assembly line.

  Warner Brothers wanted changes in the finished film. Some of their ideas were good; others I didn’t like. They wanted more close-ups; I didn’t see the need. They wanted Mary Steenburgen to appear more roughed up at the end and asked me to reshoot; again, I thought they were wrong. If audiences were studying whether she was “roughed up” instead of simply being flabbergasted to find her alive at this point in the tale, we were in big trouble.

  A week or so later, my editor, Donn Cambern (who cut Easy Rider), found himself on an airplane with someone in the biz who asked him what he was working on. When he said, Time After Time, his seat partner sighed sympathetically, “Oh, that’s the one they hate.”

  Cheerful tidings. Warner Brothers hated the film. Naturally. Among other things I had used the services of Hungarian film composer Miklós Rózsa (Ben-Hur , The Asphalt Jungle, El Cid, etc.), who was considered passé. Warner wanted a pop score, which would have been ludicrous. Our hero was a Victorian man, through whose sensibility we were seeing our world; I wanted the music to reflect his values and life experience, not ours; let rock music be another phenomenon he encounters in the late twentieth century, heard on radios or televisions.

  Ted Ashley, then the head of the studio, saw the film in a screening room, talked on the phone most of the time as it ran, and then fled, saying, “Great job, talk to you later.” Herb and I didn’t hear from him for months. The word was out that we had made a stinker.

  That I had made a stinker.

  By the time we were due for our first preview, I was a total wreck. I had insisted and resisted, I had fought, I had refused so many of their suggestions, their well-meaning, but (to me) wrong-headed ideas, and now I was paying the price, my directorial career over before it had properly begun.

  We previewed in Woodland Hills, just outside LA, because no executive could be bothered to travel anywhere to see this film. Some of them didn’t even bother showing up in Woodland Hills. Those who did glared at me or pointedly ignored me. Even my two stars, demoralized by helpful remarks from their agents, wouldn’t speak to me. I sat down behind them as the house-lights dimmed and felt as though I was going to my execution.

  One of the fights I had had with Warner involved the use of their old logo (the Warner Bros. shield) and the fanfare written by Max Steiner to go with it. Warner was then using a logo that looked as though it should be stamped on office furniture; I had an old-fashioned film and I wanted an old-fashioned beginning. In the end (that is to say, the beginning), I had my way but they were enraged about it.

  Now the Warner shield burst forth upon the screen, accompanied by the Steiner fanfare, and the audience erupted with applause and cheers.

  And that was just the beginning. As the film unspooled, the audience responded enthusiastically in all the right places and applauded for some time when it was over. The picture was unquestionably a crowd pleaser. I can still remember Malcolm and Mary in the seats in front of me, staring at one another in disbelief as the film splashed across the screen behind their astonished silhouettes, to the accompaniment of laughter and cheers. I still remember a Warner exec looking at me in the lobby as I walked out and tearing up his notes like so much confetti, tossing them in the air.

  People loved the film. At the end they didn’t want to leave but milled about the theater, a sure sign of approval. The “cards,” those terrifying mini-reviews by audiences that can result in a film’s being recut, reshot, or even shelved, were more wildly favorable than they had been about anything Warner had released in the previous three years.

  I stood in the theater lobby, unable to grasp what had happened. And stranger things were to follow. A second preview in Toronto the next day was even bigger than the first in terms of audience size and enthusiasm. Woodland Hills, after all, was a suburb of Hollywood, and the audience must have been half industry. In Toronto, it was just folks, and they were much less inhibited about manifesting their approval. The following Monday Frank Wells, chairman of the company, introduced himself to me by saying, “Failure is an orphan but success has many fathers. Congratulations.”

  We even got a handsome letter of apology from Ted Ashley, who quoted Fiorello La Guardia—“When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut. You’ve made a great film,” he went on. “Now the only question is whether the people will come—whether you get the tom-tom factor,” by which he meant word of mouth.

  Later still, Bob Shapiro, head of production at the studio, genially confided over Diet Cokes in his office, “We admired you when you were flexible and we admired you when you held firm.”

  Admired me? While I was trying not to heave with terror for having defied them? I had absorbed all these body blows personally, agonized over my career prospects with every stand I took and all the while, from their point of view, it was—what? Just business?

  Ultimately, our film may have been victimized by its early success. Buoyed by those preview results, the studio opened it very wide, perhaps too wide. The movie needed time to build, time for those tom-toms to spread the word. We were in so many theaters on day one that there was no time for word of mouth to take hold. We also didn’t have a big star, on the strength of whose name alone people would hear about or be interested in the film. We had Malcolm and we had Mary, with whom Malcolm had fallen in love. After the film they were married and had children. Perfect castin
g. In the end the picture did do well, if not quite as well as those previews had led everyone to hope.

  Time After Time is not a great film, but, like The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, it is enormous fun and, I think, does not insult the viewer’s intelligence. Between the two movies there is something that seems to characterize the best of my work (in my subjective estimate, anyway): the fusing of a strong, often fan tastical story with realistic characters, which makes the concept more plausible than might otherwise be the case. Looking at the movie today, I am struck by its homely appearance and its startlingly bitter social commentary. But both these aspects are easily—and mercifully—overwhelmed by the charm of Malcolm and Mary as Wells and Amy. Perhaps the fact of their falling in love as the cameras rolled didn’t hurt. Movies are soufflés. Some rise, some don’t. Time After Time, with all its first-time directing faults, is nevertheless a soufflé that rose and has remained aloft since its release. Steven Spielberg, producer of Back to the Future, told me that his team had studied Time After Time, running it again and again.