Oscar nominee Nicholas Meyer joined guest host Ian Punnett to discuss his successful screenwriting and directing career as well as his new work writing Sherlock Holmes novels. He began by telling Ian that he doesn't care which medium he tells a story but that he knows he's done a good job if "once I have told it to you, you know why I wanted to tell it to you." Meyer recalled his involvement with the second Star Trek film ("Wrath of Khan") and how he was assigned to cobble together a screenplay based on five previous drafts. There was a short deadline because George Lucas' ILM effects company couldn't complete the effects by the release date unless they had a script in that time. He finished the draft in 12 days.
Meyer recalled that he and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry didn't particularly get along well. Still, the legendary producer saw the 1991 "Star Trek, the Undiscovered Country" (which Meyer wrote and directed) three days before he died, "and quite liked it." For his newest novel, Meyer tells the story of Sherlock Holmes searching for the source of the notorious "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," an acknowledged forgery which Meyer pointed out was concocted around 1903 by the Czar's secret police in order to persecute Russian Jews. Meyer said he was enduringly proud of the fact that his nuclear war film, "The Day After" actually "changed Ronald Reagan's mind about a winnable nuclear war" and led to attempts to sign arms limitation treaties with the USSR.
----------------------
Open Lines began with Michael in Virginia, who called Coast to Coast "the most interactive broadcast in America" and expressed his opinion that it could have stopped the spread of Nazism if it existed before the Second World War. Phillip called from Washington state with his opinion that anti-war activists are not pacifists, but promoting "a different form of isolationism." Steve in New York City said that he has "chip in my body that tracks my every movement." He also thinks that "the government is downloading everybody's thoughts all over the Earth" with similar technology. Jim in Michigan told of his "miracle dog," found by happenstance abandoned by the side of a road and who lived for 16 years.
Steve from Pennsylvania said that a different kind of nuclear reactor called the "thorium salt reactor" should be reviewed and researched since "the fuel and the coolant are one and the same…and it's much more efficient." Nick called in from India, where he was staying near the Ganges River as a sort of spiritual pilgrimage. He said that "the energy here is very strong." Becky said that in her state of Alaska, the Russian ethnic community is well-integrated and also that people there are a bit more on-edge about any world conflicts because they are directly in line for a "first strike" attack. Donald from California recalled a strange sight he saw with a friend of a man dragging a cross that he thought weighed "400 or 500 pounds easy" along a highway in the middle of the desert in the middle of the summer.
C2C News Editor Tim Binnall shared intriguing stories featured on the Coast website during 2019 toward the top of the show.