Bob Shayne

I originally wrote the four hour miniseries Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady (1991) (with considerable help from British author H.R.F. Keating) as "Sherlock Holmes and the Merry Widow," and in it Irene Adler was starring in a Vienna Opera Company production of "The Merry Widow" when she and Sherlock Holmes meet up once more. I used various subplots from "The Merry Widow" as subplots for the actors/singers performing in the production, so that the effect was that these people were having affairs, etc., in real-life that reflected those in the opera they were performing. Also the subplot between Holmes and Sigmund Freud concluded with a scene on a fast moving train in which Freud gives Holmes a Rorschach test in which all the words Freud shouts out remind Holmes only of famous clues in his famous cases. The main subplot had Holmes and Irene meeting each other again and exploring their dysfunctional relationship with the help of Freud, and finally getting it on! The main mystery -- a spy story -- was based very loosely on Conan Doyle's "Bruce Parkington Plans." Soon the production company discovered that "The Merry Widow" was still under copyright. So they changed the operetta the cast would be performing to "Der Fledermous." So now we had the cast of "Der Fledermous" living out subplots from "The Merry Widow." Then the company moved the production site from Budapest to Luxenbourg where they have no old-fashioned looking trolleys, so the most important sequence from the "Bruce Parkington Plans" had to be dropped. Then Engelbert Humperdinck walked out midway through shooting, so his subplot stops halfway through. Then the brilliant director refused to edit and include in the final film the scene where Freud administers the test to Holmes, so that the Freud subplot leads nowhere and that key scene is missing in the Holmes-Irene love story. The mini at four hours was an abomination. But if that isn't bad enough, the company hired someone without the slightest interest in coherence to cut the mini down to a two-hour video. The end result is completely incoherent, the worst piece of filmmaking I've ever seen. Even Ed Wood couldn't have equaled it.

However, the same year another miniseries was made in Zimbabwe called Sherlock Holmes: Incident at Victoria Falls (1992) that worked, even though the script (also by me) wasn't nearly as good as this one started out to be. A vastly better director and a vastly better set of locations made all the difference in the world. I'd recommend you get that one instead.