He is the son of Bernard Constant Meyer (1910–1988), a Manhattan psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and his first wife, concert pianist Elly (died 1960; née Kassman).

Meyer followed this with four additional Holmes novels: The West End Horror (1976), The Canary Trainer (1993), The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols (2019), and The Return of the Pharaoh (2021).

The film was directed by Herbert Ross and starred Nicol Williamson, Robert Duvall, Alan Arkin and Laurence Olivier.

Afterward, he also directed "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", a 1985 episode of the television series Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre.

Meyer's next directing job was the 1988 Merchant Ivory produced drama The Deceivers, with Pierce Brosnan as British officer William Savage.

Meyer later wrote and directed the 1991 spy comedy Company Business, starring Gene Hackman and Mikhail Baryshnikov as aging American and Russian secret agents.

The two part, four hour, History Channel event miniseries, Houdini, starring Adrien Brody, aired over Labor Day 2014.

In 2016, he co-created the Italian-British series Medici: Masters of Florence with Frank Spotnitz for Italian TV channel Rai 1, and wrote the first two episodes of season one.

Introduced to Bennett by Paramount executive Karen Moore, Meyer was hired as a potential director for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan despite never having seen the first film.

[10]: 96  Due to problems with the early drafts of the script, which most readers disliked, Meyer quickly became involved in re-writing the film's screenplay.

The draft had to be completed so quickly that Meyer agreed to forgo negotiating a contract or credit for his writing to begin work on the script immediately.

[citation needed] The Wrath of Khan became a financial success, grossing $78 million in the domestic market, and is considered by many to be the best Star Trek film to date.

[17][18] In 2020, Meyer wrote a detailed proposal with his producing partner Steven-Charles Jaffe for a new Star Trek project, including a treatment and illustrations.

Meyer said the project was not connected to any of the franchise's previous films and was set in a gap in the Star Trek timeline where an original story could be told with new characters.

Meyer and Jaffe presented this proposal to Star Trek television producer Alex Kurtzman, Abrams, and Watts, but had not heard anything back from Paramount by March 2021.