For those who weren’t there, who didn’t live through the transition, it may be impossible to understand what it was like. Even for those who were, enough time has passed that perhaps the memory has dimmed under the successive tides of Sherlockian enthusiasm. But the fact is that 1974 is a watershed year in the history of Sherlock Holmes. The Great Detective went mainstream with the debut of Nicholas Meyer’s novel, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. We now live in a Sherlockian universe permanently transformed by this single volume, a pastiche that inaugurated the modern Sherlockian age.
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., written by Nicholas Meyer, was first a novel, published in 1974, and then a motion picture, released in 1976. Meyer’s novel presents a heretofore-unpublished manuscript offering an alternative account of events found in “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House.” It recounts Watson’s heroic efforts to rescue his friend from a harrowing descent into drug addiction and madness. After learning from Holmes about his enemy, Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, Watson discovers that the evil genius is nothing more than the Holmes brothers’ timid, childhood mathematics teacher, against whom Sherlock has recently begun waging a campaign of persecution. After a consultation with Mycroft, Watson and the elder Holmes devise a plan to get Sherlock to Vienna, where Watson enlists the aid of Sigmund Freud, whose pioneering work with cocaine addiction, and more recent work on the unconscious mind, not only saves Holmes from his addicted state, but also reveals the dark secret shared by Sherlock and his brother. It being a Sherlock Holmes novel, there’s an external mystery as well, one that draws Holmes, Watson, and Freud into a chase whose goal is to prevent World War I.
Presented as the true account by Dr. Watson of what really transpired between Holmes and Professor Moriarty, this work of pastiche spent forty weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list (thirty-four of them in the top five). Take that in for a moment. Not forty weeks on the mystery list, or some other sub-category. That’s right, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche spent the better part of the year as a runaway best seller on the list that really matters. Publishers Weekly ranked The Seven-Per-Cent Solution as the ninth bestselling novel of 1974, where it competed with other blockbusters like Centennial by James A. Michener; Watership Down by Richard Adams; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré; and Peter Benchley’s Jaws.
Just to make the point as clearly as I can, the only Sherlock Holmes stories to rival The Seven-Per-Cent Solution for popular success (and cultural impact) are the original publications of the canonical stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. That after forty years the knowledge of this may have faded is understandable, particularly to newly minted Sherlockians of the last decade or so. (For instance, Zach Dundas, in his otherwise outstanding survey of the whole history of Sherlock Holmes, completely misses the significance of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.) The full history of Sherlock Holmes must include the history of the culture that grows out of the original sixty stories, a history which has generally been understood as a succession of “eras” defined by highs and lows in the cultural popularity of Sherlock Holmes. The hallmark of these highpoints are spikes in the writing and publishing of Sherlockian titles by major publishing houses (small Sherlockian publishers have always been there during both boom and bust times), major film and television productions, regular Sherlockian articles in the press, as well as references to Holmes in news and magazine articles, and most important, new Sherlockians and a corresponding flowering of new Sherlock Holmes societies. Like a series of incoming waves, each crest represents an historic high point. These high watermarks are generally thought of as coming about once a decade. Conventional wisdom cites them as:
-The 1940s: Following the closing of the Canon and death of Arthur
Conan Doyle, the 1940s constitute the first era: a time when the
Baker Street Irregulars formalized its organization and the first
generation of scion societies appeared across the country. It’s
often called the first Sherlockian Golden Age.
-The 1960s: This decade saw Douglas Wilmer and Peter Cushing on
television in England, a major motion picture in the theaters (A
Study in Terror), and, most significantly, William S. Baring-Gould’s
Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which is seen as the most prominent
manifestation of this peak period.
-The mid-1970s: The boom-time triggered by the publication of The
Seven-Per-Cent Solution is generally thought to have lasted to the end
of the 1970s.
-1984–1994: The era of Granada Television’s Sherlock Holmes series,
starring Jeremy Brett. The series’ debut in 1984 sparked a decade
of Sherlockian enthusiasm that lasted until the series’ close in the
early 1990s.
-2009 to present: Starting with Robert Downey, Jr.’s, first Sherlock
Holmes film in 2009, and taking off with the popularity of the
BBC’s series Sherlock and CBS’s Elementary, the latest Sherlockian
Golden Age is widely believed to be underway.
But this is wrong. The era ushered in by The Seven-Per-Cent Solution never actually ended. Since 1974 we’ve been living in the modern Sherlockian Age.
*
For readers who, even at this point in reading this account of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, either don’t remember or just don’t get how huge this book actually was, consider this. The novel debuted in July 1974. It entered the top ten of The New York Times Best Sellers list in September 1974. It debuted in theaters as a major motion picture in on 24 October 1976. That’s barely enough time, from the moment the book was published to its appearing in theaters, to actually make the film. The popular explosion that was The Seven-Per-Cent Solution brought the book to the screen in record time.
Despite having had a frustrating experience with International Famous Agency over the book’s publication, Meyer was still represented by them. His International Famous agent at the time was Kevin Sellers. Meyer refers to him as a “junior agent.” Sellers was the son of Arlene Sellers, who was partnered with Alex Winitsky. Sellers and Winitsky were producers, best known for financing films like Swing Shift, Don’t Look Now, and Papillon. Sellers and Winitsky then took the project to Universal Studios’ Ned Tannen, who was at that time head of Universal. Tannen had read the book. “I remember he told me what a kick he had gotten out of it,” recalled Meyer.
The terms of the sale had one major proviso: Nicholas Meyer would write the screenplay. “That was the only condition under which I was willing to part with it,” said Meyer, “and no one seemed to have any objection.” Meyer had a couple of reasons for this demand. The first had to do with how he felt about the majority of Holmes films. “In Hollywood then, the people who make Sherlock Holmes movies never read the original Sherlock Holmes stories. I think the only person who ever read them was Billy Wilder,” he explained. The second reason had to do with the actual mystery in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.
“The writing of the screenplay was an interesting experience,” he remembers. “I felt the book was a great story about Sherlock Holmes. But I also felt that it wasn’t the world’s greatest mystery. I think putting Holmes together with Freud was terrific, and having them solve a case together was terrific; but I didn’t think the case was necessarily terrific. So, I regarded the opportunity to write the screenplay as a chance to improve the mystery. I’m not sure I did that, but I certainly tried.”
Meyer had additional thoughts on making changes in the plot from page to screen. “The other thing I thought of, in connection with that mystery, was that when you go to see a film version of a mystery novel you have read, you aren’t going to be surprised. If you have read Presumed Innocent, you know the wife did it when you see the movie. So I thought, ‘Okay, given that I really don’t think the mystery is all that great in the book, here’s an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. We can have a better mystery, and people who have read the book won’t know what’s coming.’ So that’s what I did.”
Looking back on the screenplay from the vantage point of forty years, Meyer’s opinion of the film’s script is a bit surprising. “I’m embarrassed how wordy it is. Way too talky. I think I became a much better screenwriter after I started directing. I became much more aware of the relationship and the ratio of words to pictures when I did Time After Time. So I find, in retrospect, that The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is a fearfully talky movie. The only saving grace is that, by and large, it’s good talk. I just wish there was less of it.”
Meyer has a special talent as an adaptor of other people’s work, but quickly learned that it isn’t as easy when the material you are adapting is your own. “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was relatively early in my career,” he observes, “and it was me working with my own material. I’ve listened to many authors talking about adapting their own material, and they have a great deal of difficulty in being ruthless. It happens with directors too. You can have a shot you really love, and it was very hard to get . . . it’s a beautiful shot. But if you discover it doesn’t belong in the movie, you have to accept that it has to go.”
Meyer’s early inclination to wordiness wasn’t because he began his career as a novelist, but instead is due to his time in college at the University of Iowa. “I was a theater major, and so I started out with a sort of stage orientation. That means dialogue. As a beginning screenwriter, I started out writing tons of dialogue because I thought it was like a play. But in screenwriting imagery dominates dialogue, and if it’s too talky it doesn’t feel cinematic. You have to be ruthless. I have learned since that time to write very, very spare stuff . . . descriptions, dialogue, everything. It is just the bare minimum of what you need. Certainly with my own stuff, I never had the feeling that it was so wonderful that it was incapable of improvement.”
Despite feeling that The Seven-Per-Cent Solution screenplay is far too verbose, the young screenwriter, having completed the first draft of the film, was even then trying to cut it down to size. In pursuit of that sense of ruthlessness in editing, Meyer wanted to cut what is, for fans, one of the most beloved scenes in the film. Having inserted it at the last minute into the novel following a dream, Meyer wanted to cut the tennis scene! Fortunately, it stayed in. “When you re-watch a film you have made, you are sort of re-watching home movies of your life,” says Meyer. “All you can see are the things that you did wrong. All I could see for a long time when I saw The Seven-Per-Cent Solution movie was how verbose it was. I remember arguing with the director, Herb Ross, about this very thing, saying, ‘You have to cut this! You have to cut this!’ And he was protesting, and he had the last word.”
You can see evidence in Meyer’s archives of his attempt to prune the screenplay. There are three drafts:
11 March 1975: The first draft. For fans of the film who find the “talkiness” of the film to be a virtue, you can see what Meyer is getting at. Long passages of dialogue are imported directly into the script.
25 June 1975: This is the “final” draft that went into production. You can clearly see a general tightening of not only dialogue but the action as well.
25 June 1975: This is an actual script used during the production of the film. It is rife with pages of different colors representing changes that were continuing to be made even after shooting started. Different colors mean different days and different changes, and there are many different colors. A comparison of the changed pages to the corresponding pages in the unchanged final version shows that, right on through the production of the film, Meyer was cutting and tightening the script.
“We did cut a lot of stuff,” he confirms, “not only stuff in the script, but also stuff during editing. Originally, like the novel, we started in the nursing home in Hampshire, and we ended the movie there too.” Indeed, these scenes are in the script’s first draft. “But the film had too many endings. There’s the locomotive chase ending. The duel ending. Then the hypnosis ending. Then the Danube ending. And then the Watson-in-the-nursing-home ending . . . too many endings! So we lopped off Watson in the nursing home at the end, and therefore there was no point in having it in the beginning.”
Robert Duvall, however, disagreed. The beginning and ending sequences with his aged, wheelchair-bound Dr. Watson were some of his favorite scenes: “I felt sort of betrayed. I felt it was a better movie with those first ten minutes. But unless you own your own company, you have no power.”
“I still think if I were to write it today it would be a much better script. I could achieve the same effect with a lot less talking.” To this day, Meyer thinks about cutting The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and not just for an overall verbosity. From a storytelling point of view, he has one particular scene in mind.
“At the end of the movie,” Meyer reminds us, “Freud asks to hypnotize Holmes one last time, saying, ‘There is another portion of your mind to which I would also like to say farewell.’ That is when we finally learn the whole secret of Holmes’s traumatic childhood, and who Professor Moriarty really was. And then Freud has a speech, which was in the novel, and is also in the movie. He says, ‘It becomes clear. Now we understand his distrust of women, well recorded by you, doctor; his choice of profession, detective—detector of wickedness, punisher of injustice—he makes a laundry list of revelations. And then Watson says, ‘You are the greatest detective of them all.’ I said to Herb Ross, the director, ‘We should cut the speech.’ He said, ‘What?!?’ I said, ‘Well, we’re just repeating what the audience has already just seen. And look at what Alan Arkin is doing with his hands . . . he’s interlacing his fingers . . . “It becomes clear.”’ All you need is ‘It becomes clear,’ the hands go together, Watson saying ‘You are the greatest detective of them all.’” Meyer’s plea fell on deaf ears. Ross refused to make the cut. “To this day I fantasize about having a shears and just slicing out that speech!”
As Meyer mentioned, the director of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was Herb Ross. “Herb began life as a dancer and choreographer,” recalls Meyer. “He then drifted into movies as a choreographer in musicals, like Funny Girl.” By his late twenties Ross had enjoyed success as the director of the musical House of Flowers on Broadway, as well as working as a choreographer for Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones.
As a motion picture director, Ross carved out a niche as an efficient director, with his best-known films being Play It Again, Sam; Funny Lady; The Turning Point; Footloose; and Steel Magnolias. “Herb was married to the most famous dramatic ballerina that America had ever produced, Nora Kay,” Meyer remembers. “She retired on their honeymoon, and threw her toe shoes out the window of their Volkswagen as they cruised through the Black Forest. From then on she largely oversaw the management of his career.”
Meyer had a good working relationship with Ross. “One of the things that was really nice about working on the film was that Herb was so deferential and so inclusive of me as creator of the book and the screenplay. It was remarkable.”
Indeed, Ross treated Meyer as more of a collaborator and sought input from the screenwriter on numerous items in addition to simply the script, including music, casting and editing. One example came in the original screenplay. Meyer recalls, “On the first page it says ‘Music by Bernard Herrmann.’ Seeing that, Herb went out and hired Bernard Herrmann! But then, sadly, Herrmann died before he could do the movie. But that’s the kind of fidelity Herb had to the source material. If I put it in the script that’s the way it was going to be. I lost a lot of battles with Herb to cut material from the film, but I won a few battles too,” he adds.
Casting
With script in hand, things began to get very real. It was time to cast the film. Meyer’s dream choice to play Sherlock Holmes was Peter O’Toole. “He was the one person in the world I wanted to see play Sherlock Holmes.” O’Toole, an outstanding Shakespearean actor with appearances at the Bristol Old Vic and the English Stage Company before moving to the big screen, was a real, honest-to-goodness movie star. Lawrence of Arabia; Becket; The Lion in Winter; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; The Stunt Man; My Favorite Year. Yes, a real movie star.
Herb Ross said no. Ross had directed O’Toole in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and the two “did not get along.” That was the end of that. And so, while the role of Sherlock Holmes remained undecided, Ross and Meyer set out to cast the other parts.
Sigmund Freud
The casting of Sigmund Freud was perhaps the most straightforward of the three main characters of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. As Meyer remembers, “I suggested Alan Arkin as Freud, Herb thought that was a good idea, so we got Alan Arkin.” Arkin had a long list of television and motion picture credits by the time he was cast as Sigmund Freud, including a comic turn in The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming and as the terrifying villain in Wait Until Dark.
Dr. John H. Watson
“This was not a Sherlock Holmes story. This was a story about Sherlock Holmes. With that in mind, I was trying to get people to look at these characters in ways different from the way we’d gotten used to seeing them—and misunderstanding them—because of Hollywood.” So said Nicholas Meyer when the discussion of casting Watson began. Watson was, for Meyer, crucial to put right. “I felt that Nigel Bruce, as charming as he might have been, was not the Watson I read in Doyle’s stories.” Getting that Watson—the Watson you could believe actually wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories—was the goal. “I thought,” said Meyer, “that Holmes is very vain. He doesn’t want the admiration of a buffoon, but instead wants the admiration of a regular person. And you want to believe Watson could have written the stories. I never believed that Nigel Bruce—Colonel Blimp— was that person.”
Meyer’s full account of the casting of Robert Duvall as Watson deserves to be told in its entirety:
Movie stars do not audition. They “meet.” They’ll come and sit down and talk to you. Herb Ross had offices at MGM, and on that particular day, he was having a fight with his wife, Nora Kay. It was a telephone battle, and they were hanging up on each other all morning. I don’t know what their fight was about . . . they were never consequential . . . but he didn’t make a move without her. It was with this going on in the background that Robert Duvall came into the office to chat with Herb and me about playing Dr. Watson. It was the same day that he was “meeting” to star as Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory, and so he came in inexplicably in the character of Woody Guthrie! He had the full Okie accent, he was wearing a brown buckskin fringed jacket, and the entire time that Herb and I were sitting there bewildered, staring at each other over his shoulder, he was speaking with this outlandish twang. Finally after fifteen or twenty minutes, he just got up and said, “Well, I’ll be gittin’ along now, and, oh . . . by the way, I brung you this tape of me talkin’ like Dr. Watson.” And then he puts this cassette tape down on the desk and walks out, leaving us sitting there thinking, “What the hell was that?”
Then, we listened to the cassette, and out comes this Oxbridge speech of this entirely different person! You could not believe it was the same person! I said, “That’s it! He can do it.” And Herb said, “Well, wait a minute. Let me play this for Nora.” So, he gets on the phone (I’m on the extension) and he says, “Nora, can you tell this person isn’t English?” Then he plays the tape. She says, “Herbert, who is that? Is that Mel Brooks? If you want to throw this film in the toilet go ahead and pick that person.” He was devastated, and I’m thinking “Oh no, I’m going to lose my movie star!” I think if a great actor wants to play something, try and make it work! Then Nora goes on, “Don’t take my word for it. Talk to Sam.” Sam was Samantha Eggar, her English actor friend, who later ends up playing Mrs. Watson in the film. So we call Samantha, and ask her if she can tell this person isn’t English. She says, “Well, it’s frightfully good, but he’s trying too hard, isn’t he?” Now Herb is really unsure. On the fence. I ask him if we can call one other English person, and this time I want to ask the question. So now we call an executive at 20th Century Fox who had an English secretary. This time I rephrased the question, saying, “We’re having an argument here. Is this accent South African or Australian that we’re listening to?” And then I played the tape. Her response was, “Well, that’s neither. That’s Oxbridge. That’s BBC English.” And that’s how Robert Duvall got the role of Dr. Watson.
Duvall himself says of his work to master the accent: “When I got over there I constantly worked on the English thing. I observed people. I listened to people in restaurants, on the streets. Everywhere I went I took a tape recorder so I could check myself.”
The casting of an American received criticism from Holmesians in Britain. In retrospect, these comments undoubtedly had little to do with the quality of the performance. “A lot of English people said they didn’t like the Dr. Watson in the film, saying they can tell he’s not British. I didn’t lose any sleep over it. I thought Duvall was great,” said Meyer.
The young Nick Meyer learned a valuable lesson in screen acting from the veteran film star. Having cast such a big name in such an important role, Meyer didn’t understand Duvall’s performance. “When we would watch the dailies, I couldn’t see Duvall doing anything,” he remembers. “I was getting kind of anxious, and I said, “Can’t we get him to emote? He’s just delivering lines without doing anything.” So Herb talked to Duvall, who became prickly and said, “Well, what do you want me to do? Make faces?” So we sort of backed off, and then, when we stuck all the pieces of film together, Duvall walks away with the movie! That’s real movie acting and he knew exactly what he was doing.”
Professor Moriarty
If reeling in an actor with the stature of Robert Duvall was exciting, the casting of Laurence Olivier as Professor Moriarty had Meyer walking on air. “When Herb Ross turned to me one day and asked, ‘What do you think about Laurence Olivier for Professor Moriarty?’ I was about ready to jump out of my skin! I was so excited. But on the outside I’m playing it cool and saying, ‘Hmmmmm . . . yeah, sure, that might be good.’”
“Excited” was an understatement. Olivier was a childhood hero of Nicholas Meyer’s. “From the time I saw him in The Beggar’s Opera and then Henry V, he was my idol,” said Meyer. “The idea that I would ever have him in a film of mine . . . I was just knocked out. The man who introduced me to Shakespeare, who revolutionized everything for me. ”
Cast him they did. In six months’ time, Olivier was scheduled to work for three days on the set at Pinewood Studios, where interiors were being shot. “Oh, my God,” worried Meyer. “He’ll never live to be in the film.” Olivier had just recently had a serious illness prior to his role in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. “Or I’ll never live to see
it if he does,” Meyer alternately feared. “I have all these crazy scenarios about what is going to go wrong, until the day at Pinewood Studios when, there I am, face to face with my idol, with the man who changed my life. Talk about shaking hands with your dreams! I just couldn’t believe it. When he left after three days I took the canvas-backed chair of his that had his name on it and kept it.”
It was a magical three days for Meyer, who fondly remembers his hero on the set of his movie. “It was very close to the end of Olivier’s career, and he’d been ill so you had to be very careful with him. When he was supposed to be in Holmes’s cocaine-induced hallucinations looking like a reptile, he said ‘I shall do my Richard III face!’ And by God, he did! Scary!” Meyer remembers talking about Sherlock Holmes with Olivier, who asked “Did he really take cocaine?” When Meyer told him he had, Olivier’s response was, “Well, I don’t think my father would let me read that one.” (Olivier’s father was an Anglican clergyman).
Sherlock Holmes
There was still the question of who would play Sherlock Holmes. Nick Meyer’s thoughts on screen Sherlocks are interesting. “I think Rathbone was an excellent Holmes. Peter Cushing was good, if a little too small. I had a great weakness
for Ronald Howard.”30 Over the course of several weeks, Ross and Meyer had considered a number of actors. “Then one day Herb asked me what I thought of Nicol Williamson,” remembers Meyer. “At that time Williamson was taking Broadway by storm playing Hamlet.” Indeed, critics were hailing the Scottish-born actor as the Hamlet of his generation. “That’s how he got the role.”
Having a reputation as a Shakespearean stage actor actually was a factor not only for Ross and Meyer, but for Williamson as well. “I guess one of the reasons I’m playing Sherlock Holmes is a reaction against taking on so many classical roles in the past,” he said in an interview with film critic Rex Reed. “I was offered the role in Billy Wilder’s version a few years ago, but the script was corny. This one has great excitement and color, and I’m playing him as a hopeless romantic. I’m playing him with a light touch, but the movie is not a caper or a spoof. I’m sort of a quizzical Leslie Howard.” He adds, “It’s something I’ve always wanted to play.”31
Despite a professed desire to play Holmes, Williamson does admit a lack of familiarity with the source material. “I have never seen a Sherlock Holmes movie or read the books. Everyone else in the world seems to have seen and read them except me. If you ask the man in the street who Sherlock Holmes was, he’ll say, ‘Oh, well, wasn’t he the famous detective?’ Or he’ll say Holmes ran around with Dr. Watson and lived in Baker Street.”32
To this day, feelings are mixed about Williamson’s portrayal of Sherlock Holmes. The mercurial, ginger-haired actor gives an outstanding portrayal of a man racked by drug addiction, and yet. “I think he’s a terrific Holmes,” says Meyer. “There’s only one problem. I think at the end of the day he’s not a movie star. I think that’s why he usually doesn’t make the cut when people talk about their all-time best Sherlock Holmes list. But he’s terrific.”
Reflecting further on Williamson’s Sherlock Holmes, Meyer says, “Years ago, the Lone Ranger went on tour. It was a Wild West show, and
they did rope tricks, and things like that. But at the end of each show, the Lone Ranger unmasked. And it was a disaster. There were kids yelling down from the balcony, ‘That ain’t him!’ And of course it wasn’t, because we all know who the Lone Ranger is. We all know who Hamlet is. And we all know who Sherlock Holmes is. It’s us. And that’s why there cannot be a perfect Hamlet. There cannot be a Lone Ranger underneath that mask, and there cannot be a perfect Holmes. No matter the portrayal, Holmes’s personality is the dominating feature. I’m not sure Nicol’s personality was dominating. His art was dominating, but not his self.”
Director Herb Ross’s thoughts on Williamson’s portrayal were succinct: “There isn’t one single thing in it that will remind anyone of Basil Rathbone.”
Early publicity
Once all the pieces were in place but before production actually began, the Press Department of Universal was already cranking up the public relations machine to promote the film. One unique action, which showed the studio’s desire to tie the film version of The SevenPer-Cent Solution to the phenomenally popular book, was to send copies of the novel to potential reviewers and critics. The book included a card inside the front cover, which read: “Why are we sending you a copy of ‘The Seven-Per-Cent Solution’? It’s elementary!” It then went on to point out: “Herbert Ross will begin shooting the film version of Nicholas Meyer’s #1 best seller book.” It outlined the cast, mentioned the producers, and concluded: “If you wish any special photographic or editorial material on ‘The Seven-Per-Cent Solution’” contact the Press Department of Universal Studios in Hollywood. The power of the novel’s popularity, which had propelled an amazingly fast journey from page to screen, was an asset that Universal definitely intended to exploit.
Shooting The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
With the script completed, director in place, and casting wrapped up, there was nothing left but to make a movie. Shooting began in October 1975. The majority of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was shot in four major locations. Interior scenes, including 221B Baker Street, Professor Moriarty’s flat, and Sigmund Freud’s home were shot in England’s Pinewood Studios. Situated about twenty miles west of London, Pinewood is a production facility for everything from a 30-second television commercial up to the latest summer blockbuster. Familiar film franchises that call Pinewood home include James Bond, Superman, Alien, Tim Burton’s Batman series, and Harry Potter.
The second major location was also an interior one. Established in 1886, the Queen’s Club, a private sporting club in West Kensington, London, was chosen for the infamous court tennis match. In real life, the club hosts a prestigious annual lawn tennis tournament. The two other standout locations for shooting were Wales, where the thrilling railroad chase that comes toward the end of the film was shot, and Vienna.
Of the four main locations, Meyer was present at all but the tennis match at the Queen’s Club. Being present on set for the filming of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was for Nick Meyer like attending film school. “There were a number of aspects to the making of the film that were entirely dreamlike,” said Meyer. “This included simply seeing the handiwork from my little Laurel Canyon house make this journey all the way to England and Vienna.” It was a total immersion into filmmaking: set design, lighting, cinematography, direction (especially watching Herb Ross, who Meyer credits with teaching him to be “observant,” work with actors), seeing how actors learn and rehearse lines, evaluation of “dailies,” and film editing.
Meyer recalls, “There were filmmakers involved in this who were real idols of mine. Ken Adam, the production designer, who became a good friend, and who is now Sir Ken Adam. His influence was enormous. His credits and résumé are just extraordinary.” Indeed, Adam’s credits include work on Around the World in 80 Days (a favorite childhood film of Meyer’s); Barry Lyndon; Sleuth; Dr. Strangelove; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but he is best known as the production designer of the incredible sets seen in the James Bond films of the 1960s and 1970s.
“Another person who made the experience dreamlike was Oswald Morris, my favorite British cinematographer,” recalls Meyer. Morris, who photographed The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, had a long, storied list of cinematic credits. His work can be seen in Moby Dick, A Farewell to Arms, The Guns of Navarone, The Spy Who Came
in from the Cold, Oliver!, Scrooge, Fiddler on the Roof, Dracula, the original Moulin Rouge, and The Man Who Would Be King. “This was pretty heady company,” adds Meyer.
“I also became good friends with Joel Grey while working on the film,” said Meyer. “He plays Lowenstein, who, the footnote in the book and film credits informs us, may be fictitious!” Readers undoubtedly will recall Joel Grey from his Oscar-winning role in Cabaret.
When asked what his most memorable moments are of the production of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Nick Meyer cites two: shooting the train sequences, and shooting in Vienna. However, his feelings about both experiences are quite different.
Shooting the train chase
“The biggest charge of actually filming the movie had to be those trains!” remembers Meyer. “We were with a railroading club who had the trains.” The trains were provided by the Severn Valley Railway, a group of about seventy largely unpaid railroad enthusiasts who volunteer to do everything: promoting the organization, maintaining stations, rebuilding bridges, and most fun of all, maintaining and running the vintage rolling stock. The Severn Valley Railway runs a full-sized, standard-gauge railway line of regular, vintage steam-hauled passenger trains along an approximately sixteen-mile line. Their fleet includes eight steam locomotives and twenty-five diesel locomotives. “Chasing back and forth on these locomotives was just so much fun,” remembers Meyer. “These trains couldn’t go very fast, but we could under-crank the camera just a little bit to speed them up slightly.”
The Severn Valley Railway has made appearances in numerous period film and television productions, and has served Sherlock Holmes in other productions as well. In 1977, their trains can be seen in the joint British/Canadian television production of Silver Blaze, starring Christopher Plummer.33 One of Severn Valley Railway’s trains can also be seen in Robert Downey, Jr.’s, 2011 film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, most memorably when Mary Watson is pushed off the train into the water as it passes over a bridge. Readers may have also seen the trains appearing in the 1987 production of Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington, starring Joan Hickson as Miss Marple, and the 2005 feature film, The Chronicles of Narnia.
“Just being on these trains was, for me, a big deal,” recalls Meyer. “One of my earliest, most profound influences was Jules Verne. Not only did I read all of Verne, I was weaned on Disney’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Then, after that, I went and saw Around the World in 80 Days on my eleventh birthday. The influence of this movie, which actually persuaded me that making movies was what I wanted to do with my life, cannot be overstated. There was a scene in Around the World in 80 Days when the paddle wheeler, Henrietta, crossing the Atlantic back to England in time for Phileas Fogg to win his wager, runs out of coal. At this point the imperturbable Fogg uses the last of his funds to purchase the ship, and then dismantles her for fuel. They burn everything. Well, I need not tell you where that wound up!”
Racing back and forth across Wales was a high point for Meyer, “until something brings you down to earth, like getting a coal cinder in your eye when you are wearing contact lenses.”
Shooting in Vienna
Perhaps the location that leaves the most lasting impression upon viewers of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is the city of Vienna, the destination of Watson’s plot to introduce Sherlock Holmes to Sigmund Freud. As happy a memory as the train filming was for Nicholas Meyer, Vienna was a completely different experience. “I was there for shooting in Vienna . . . what a strange place I found that to be. I found it distressing. It was not a friendly place. Even Robert Duvall, who is not a Jew, found the company there extremely dour. It wasn’t the image that tourists might see.”
Vienna, the capital and largest city of Austria, is the cultural and political center of the country. When most people think of Vienna, music and culture come to mind, conjuring up a sort of fairy tale image. The cultural tradition includes theater, opera, classical music, and fine arts. Often called the “City of Music,” Vienna is associated with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Robert Stolz, and Arnold Schoenberg. Meyer’s experience was different.
Of Vienna and his time there he says, “They sell the image of Johann Strauss, and Mozart is claimed as an Austrian. But technically Mozart was from the Grand Duchy of Salzburg, which was not part of Austria as a country during his lifetime. I think what troubles me is that after the war Austria portrayed itself as Hitler’s first victim. However, when you look at the newsreel footage you see that they weren’t his first victim. They were his first ally.” It is true that, in 1938, the Austrianborn Adolf Hitler received a triumphant reception upon his entry into Austria following its annexation into Nazi Germany. “It just felt weird to me being there, and I’m sure it’s just one impression, and it was 1975. Maybe by now it would be a much different experience. But I do remember hearing ‘The Horst Wessel Song’ at midnight, sung by a bunch of young guys in trench coats marching down the middle of the Graben. It was chilling.”
In addition to art and music, Vienna is also known for its association with Sigmund Freud. And that, after all, was why the film crew was there. In addition to the scenes of arriving at and departing from train stations, catching cabs, and chasing Joel Grey through the streets, there were, of course, scenes in and around the home of Sigmund Freud.
Freud’s address in Vienna was Berggasse 19. It is now the Sigmund Freud Museum. Freud lived and worked there from 1891 to 1938.35 Following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, rising antiSemitism, and, ultimately, the ransacking of his flat by the Nazis, Freud departed Vienna for London on 5 May 1938. But he was indeed there in 1895 when the events of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution are set. As Meyer recalls, “The exterior of Berggasse in the film is not Berggasse Street, which at that time had a lot of car dealerships in it. Instead it was shot on a nearby street that still had cobblestones and was otherwise a match.” However, while most of the scenes within Freud’s home were shot on a soundstage at Pinewood, some interiors were filmed in Freud’s actual building. “Upon arrival, when Toby the bloodhound is leading Holmes and Watson up the stairs to the flat,” Meyer recalls, “those are the actual stairs.”
Evidently for Alan Arkin, playing Freud in Freud’s home was memorable for another reason. As Nicol Williamson recounted at the time: “Alan Arkin, who has been in Freudian analysis for nine years, got claustrophobic and couldn’t breathe when we were filming locations at Freud’s actual house in Vienna.”
Filming was completed in twelve weeks on a budget of $4.2 million. With footage in the can, post-production began. William Reynolds, whose endless credits include The Sound of Music and The Godfather, edited the film. The score was composed by John Addison, who had won an Oscar for Tom Jones (also best picture for 1963). And of course, there was one additional piece of music that was created especially for The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. “The Madame’s Song”—sung with gusto by Belgian actress and New York club doyenne, Régine—was written by composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.37 (Regine’s performance was subsequently dubbed by British singer Georgia Brown, who also played Frau Freud in the film). The song was later retitled “I Never Do Anything Twice” and rerecorded for the album Side by Side by Sondheim.
Finally, the film was ready to release. Distributed by Universal Studios, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution debuted on 24 October 1976.
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Excerpted from “Together Again for the First Time: Forty Years of the Seven-Per-Cent Solution” by Steven T. Doyle, printed in The Baker Street Journal: 2015 Christmas Annual, printed by the Baker Street Irregulars. Copyright 2015 by the Baker Street Irregulars.
