Released six years before Back to the Future, Meyer’s Time After Time takes Victorian gentleman H.G. Wells and makes him into the ultimate fish-out-of-water. Early in the film, a colleague which Wells knows only as John Leslie Stevenson is revealed to be the notorious murderer Jack the Ripper, who steals a time machine, causing Wells to pursue him into the future, which was, in 1974, our present. Like Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (also co-written by Meyer), much of the action takes place in San Francisco, which, in his memoir, The View From the Bridge, Meyer described as part of the basic pitch: “…our production would be cheap. I would need only two Victorian costumes, and most of the special effects would be in the minds of the viewers.”
Although the story for Time After Time was inspired by a then-in-progress novel by Meyer’s friend Steve Hayes, the film itself has all the hallmarks of what makes Meyer’s work great; the film takes itself seriously but is having a great deal of fun at the same time. Those who watch Time After Time back-to-back with The Voyage Home will find a few repeated gags, though. Perhaps the best joke in the film is that H.G. Wells thinks of McDonald’s as a Scottish restaurant. Meyer is also responsible for the casting of Mary Steenburgen in this film as Amy, who becomes the contemporary girlfriend of H.G. Wells, setting her up to become another time traveler’s girlfriend in Back to the Future III in 1990. He also fought against the producers who didn’t believe McDowell could play the hero, because they insisted, at that time, McDowell was always cast as the villain. “Yes, but this time he’ll be the hero,” Meyer insisted. “That’s acting!”
Warner Bros. also wanted Meyer to cast Mick Jagger as Jack the Ripper, which, although Meyer considered it, and even had a few beers with the famous Rolling Stone frontman, stuck with his gut and cast Warner instead, a decision he doesn’t regret. And for those who love the work of Warner, Time After Time is patient zero for when some of the best stuff begins.
“I look at a movie of mine for the first 10 years after I’ve made it, all I can see are the things I did wrong, and it’s a source of dissatisfaction, frustration, and embarrassment,” Meyer says now. “But, when I look at it after 20 years or more, I find I’m able to judge it less super-critically, I’m able to enjoy it more. And I think Time After Time is a perfect example of that. For a long time, it being the first movie I ever directed, all I could see were my mistakes, and when I watch now, all I can see is how good it is. How well it holds up! But that’s one man’s non-objective opinion.”
Meyer has yet to form an opinion of his latest Holmes novel, the Telegram from Hell, but that’s probably because the book has only been out since late August. This novel is one of the rare Holmes adventures that take place in the later years of the detective’s career, after the events of the short story “His Law Bow,” in which Arthur Conan Doyle revealed that in his sixties, Holmes became a spy working for the UK government leading up to and during, WWI. Meyer takes that idea and runs with it, putting Holmes and Watson into the thick of the events around the war, sending the pair on a vintage spy mission. Their handler is the historically accurate William Melville, who many believe was the inspiration for “M” in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. That said, Meyer insists that he’s not turning Holmes into Bond, but instead simply using real history to craft his own tale.
“When I picked M and Sir William Melville, I was going back to the reality that Ian Fleming was using when he created [his] M,” Meyer says. “But I wasn’t going back to Ian Fleming, I was going back to Sir William Melville and to another extent, Mycroft [Holmes], whose name fortunately begins with M.”