Free The View from the Bridge by Nicholas Meyer Page B

standing there, saying his lines.
    â€œCan’t you ootz ootz him?” I implored Ross. “He’s not doing a thing.” Herb acknowledged the problem and tried to approach Duvall, who scoffed testily, “What do you want me to do?” and made a serious of exaggerated grimaces. We were going to have to live with what we’d got.
    In the end, Duvall almost steals the movie. What we took to be his static performance, once stitched together, revealed itself to be the most sophisticated film acting. Duvall understood, better than most, how his performance would come together in the cutting room, how gestures so tiny they could not be perceived with the naked eye or indeed in the dailies, once combined, would deliver the cumulative punch. The closer the camera came, the less he knew he needed to do.
    Looking at dailies turns out to be an art in itself.
    At this time, I was being importuned by my publisher, E. P. Dutton, for a second Holmes novel, a request that threw me into some confusion. I well understood their reasoning while at the same time I worried that I would, by repeating myself, do the one thing that as a writer—and filmmaker—I had always vowed to avoid. Two conversations served to change my mind. The first occurred in San Francisco at the home of Francis Ford Coppola, where I found myself having dinner one night with the director and his large family. I had the opportunity to ask Coppola why he had chosen to make the second Godfather movie, which he had filmed the year before.
    â€œThree reasons,” Coppola told me, serving up pasta he had cooked for about twenty people on a Saturday night. “In no special order, I was offered a great deal of money; secondly, I was curious to see if I could mine the same vein for more material, and lastly, there were elements of the first movie—chiefly a pervasive amorality—which troubled me and I saw in the chance to make another film over which I would arguably have more control, an opportunity to address what I considered this serious defect.”
    Two days later, in Los Angeles, Godfather II won a boatload of Oscars, including Best Picture of the Year and Best Director.
    The second conversation took place with another director, Ulu Grosbard, in Los Angeles. We were on a soundstage, standing in a buffet line at a wrap party for some film I’ve forgotten, when I posed the question of a sequel to my book to Grosbard.
    â€œDo it,” he told me. “It gives you ‘fuck you’ money.”
    â€œMeaning?”
    â€œIt buys you the right to fail. Our business is very problematic,” he elaborated. “You can have hits, you can have flops, you can be hot, you can be cold. It’s good to make money when you can; it’s something for a rainy day and it buys you the opportunity to take chances on material whose commercial prospects might otherwise scare you off.”
    Coppola’s and Grosbard’s arguments carried the day and I went back to the Holmes well.
    In 1976, I published my second Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The West End Horror , in which Holmes solves a grisly case in London’s theater district, crossing paths with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, George Bernard Shaw, and Bram Stoker. Though it lacked the surprise engendered by its predecessor, and though it was not a story about Sherlock Holmes (rather, a Sherlock Holmes story), it gave me considerable pleasure, especially as I found the actual mystery superior to the one in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution , and creating good mysteries is not normally one of my strengths. I also thought my characterizations of Wilde et al. were pretty good and I was proud of the fact that all the real people Holmes encounters were doing what they were actually doing in the first week of March 1895. Like Seven , The West End Horror became a bestseller, remaining on the Times list for three months. I had definitely arrived.
    To top off my heady