Nicholas Meyer was hired to direct in late August 1981. Meyer had written the smart, revisionist Sherlock Holmes novel The Seven Percent Solution (1974) and the screenplay for the 1976 movie version, and he’d adapted and directed the time-traveling Jack the Ripper movie Time After Time (1979). He admitted from the start that he knew nothing about Star Trek except that it was set in the future, what the USS Enterprise looked like, and that there was a character with pointy ears. (The movie would begin with an in-joke to that effect: it started with a caption announcing it’s the twenty-third
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