Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the shir That You
Can't Be Serious podcast. Im D James D and I
am here with my buddy Jason Colvin. Actually we're doing
this via zoom. I am in the Bahamas where it's
a breezy eighty degrees and Jason is sweating his balls
off in India.
Speaker 2: Yes, that is correct, sir, shaken not stirred.
Speaker 1: All right. We are here to talk about the competition
of the James Bond of the sixties against the James
Bond of the seventies in movies that occurred in the
eighties Sean Connery Roger Moore head to head in nineteen
eighty three.
Speaker 2: This summer, there was some amazing things happening in the movies.
We had Return of the Jedi, National Lampoon's Vacation. We
had your favorite movie, Jaws three D.
Speaker 1: We had Trading Places. I saw Boobies for the first time.
It was a wonderful, wonderful year. But yes, I'm happy
to be back in nineteen eighty three. Again.
Speaker 2: This was an incredible thing to hear that two Bond
movies were going to be in theaters, not at the
same time, but relatively close, Like what four months apart.
I can remember being a kid going what are you
talking about? I can see Bond in June and Bond
in October? Right, it's fantastic. Absolutely, sign me up.
Speaker 1: I can have. I actually have a memory of walking
by the old movie theater in Central Mall, Fort Smith, Arkansas,
seeing the poster for Never Say Never Again and saying
to my dad why is this movie called Never Say
Never Again? And my dad telling me, well, I'm pretty
sure that Sean Connery said he would never play James
Bond again, and now he is, and so that's probably
why the movies named this. I was like, there's another
guy who plays James Bond.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, right, So do you remember your first Bond experience?
Speaker 1: No, I mean it was I mean, that's that memory
right there is the first like vivid, I can say, yes,
that happened. But James Bond was just kind of a
part of childhood. I mean, my dad loved the movies
and they would come on TV all of the time,
and so I just saw them, you know, they were
just all out there and I just saw him. Bond
was just out there and he was cool. And I
would see the movies as they came on, yeah about you?
Speaker 2: Well yeah, so I remember very vividly in nineteen eighty one,
my friend he's like, now you gotta go see four
Year Eyes Only. And I'm like, what what is four
Year Eyes Only? He's like, it's the new James Bond movie.
And I'm like, who is James Bond. I don't know
who James Bond is? Right?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Wow?
Speaker 3: OK?
Speaker 2: And he's like, you what you know You've got You're
gonna love James Bond. We got to go see it.
And so we went and saw four Year Eyes Only.
And I was an instant James Bond fan. So four
Year Eyes Only for me is not only the best
Roger Moore movie, but it's kind of my home movie,
you know what I mean. And so that's the one
I go back to, is for your Eyes Only. So
when Octopus he comes out two years later. In that
two year period, ABC used to have the Sunday Night movie.
They would show like The Spy Who Loved Me and
Moonraker and Diamonds Are Forever, and I would just slowly
acquire these movies, and so by the time Octopusy shows up,
I am ready for a new James Bond movie.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. You know, as time goes on, you get
the introduction of Timothy Dalton, you get the introduction of
Pierce bros And I can still remember having conversations with
my friends when we knew that Roger Moore wasn't going
to be the James Bond anymore, of you know, hey,
it needs to be that guy from Remington Steel. He
is the perfect guy for James Bond. Yeah, And then
it wasn't him, and everybody was outraged, and I think
I was like, I'm not going to go watch those movies.
I'm upset because they didn't make Remington Steel James Bond.
That's just wrong. And then by the time that he
actually that Pierce Brosen and becomes James Bond, I was
just like, he is the best James Bond who had
the worst scripts to work with. There were some bad
computer graphics going on in those movies. The scripts weren't
super good. But he was a really great James Bond
without much to work with.
Speaker 2: That is true. However, he started off with a really
good one. One GoldenEye, in my opinion, is a good
Bond movie, and so he had all that good credit
in the bank and the next bunch of them were terrible.
Speaker 1: They were really bad. And gold and I I mean
that was the introduction of James Bond into the video
game world too, which I mean GoldenEye was fantastic. I
didn't I watched the movie, but I loved the video game.
That's awesome.
Speaker 2: That is very true. Maybe my favorite home video game
of all time. My friend's like, hey, I gotta show
you this cool video game. I'm like, listen, dude, I
got a job and I got a wife. I don't
have time for video games anymore. I played for like
thirty seconds. I'm like, I'm buying this tomorrow.
Speaker 1: How old are you, dude?
Speaker 2: I'm I am. I am old, but I am not
as old as Sean Connery or Roger More in of
these two movies or the record. Let's go ahead and
get that out there, because that's an important factor when
we discussed these two movies. Yeah, Sean Connery was fifty
two when he did Never Say Never Again. He had
taken twelve years off.
Speaker 1: YEP.
Speaker 2: Diamonds Are Forever was in nineteen seventy one. He was forty,
but he looked like he was about fifty two.
Speaker 1: He has an old look. About him.
Speaker 4: He does.
Speaker 2: He does octopusy. Roger Moore was fifty five. He's three
years older than Sean Connery. Most people don't really realize that.
Speaker 1: He has a younger looking face. He just does. I mean,
Roger Moore just has a younger looking appearance about him.
Maybe it's the receding hairline that Sean Connery has. Maybe
it's the wrinkles. I can't really Maybe Roger Moore has
a good plastic surgeon. I'm not real sure, but but
Roger Moore always seemed to be younger, even though he
was actually about three years older than you.
Speaker 2: Okay, so today we're ultimately going to compare Never Say
Never Again from nineteen eighty three to Octopussy nineteen eighty three,
Connery versus More Battle of the Bonds, and it's gonna
be great. But really, the interesting stories here are kind
of the behind the scenes stuff. So if you say
to yourself both of those movies sucked, hang on, because
there is some interesting stuff going on behind the scenes
of these movies.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, there are much better James Bond movies out there
than Never Say Never Again and Octopussy, But we chose
these two because it was the summer of Bond versus Bond.
That's right, and the story there is an impressive one.
Let's you want to jump into the history a little bit.
Speaker 2: Let's I'm ready to get into it. Let's go.
Speaker 1: Okay. So our story begins back in nineteen oh eight
with the birth of Ian Fleming. A year later we
have the birth of Albert R. Broccoli, nicknamed Cubby Broccoli
by his family. A few years after that, in nineteen
fifty team we have the birth of Harry Saltzman, and
then nine years later we have the birth of Kevin
mcclury mcclury Kevin mccluy. Obviously the most important figure in
this is Ian Fleming. He was born to a wealthy family,
grew up in wealth, and then of course, a few
years after his birth, World War One begins and tragically
his father dies in World War One. This comes into
play with the character of James Bond. Later in the
early movies, you don't really get his history. He's a
very two dimensional character, but later on, especially with the
Daniel Craig version, you get some of that backstory, which
includes him being an orphan.
Speaker 2: Yep, yep.
Speaker 1: So he ends up going to Eton for college, where
he meets and intensely dislikes a gentleman named Scarmannga.
Speaker 2: Who is that right?
Speaker 1: Are you kidding me? No, I'm not kidding The scar
Manga is named after a guy that he hated in college.
I don't think he had three nipples, but yes, that's
where that name comes from. And he writes his first
story there.
Speaker 2: Let's let people in on the joke. If you are
a just basic, not very intricate James Bond fan, you
may not recognize that name. That is the villain from
the movie The Man with the Golden Gun, and he
does have three nipples, played by Christopher Lee, which more
impersonates him by putting on a fake third nipple, which
is a very weird point in that movie. Keep going, okay,
you mean mid nubbin teddler being and Scaramanga.
Speaker 1: Okay, right. So, so, while while Fleming is in college,
Broccoli his family has moved to the United States. They
introduced broccoli seeds to the US, according to his obituary
in the New York Times. I don't know how accurate
that is, but you know, let's go with it.
Speaker 2: I mean telling me that broccoli is named after Cubby
Broccley's relatives.
Speaker 1: That's what it sounds like from the from the oh
bit in the New York Times. Yes, they're the ones
that brought the seeds over. They're from Italy, and broccoley
is is based on the Italian words. And so who
am I? I'm just a guy here. I just I
reported as a reader. That's all I can do. Okay,
all right? And then Saltzman is running away from his
home and joining the circus. I'm not kidding, literally joining
the circus. Okay, all right, this is an interesting bunch
of characters. And then I guess, I guess McClure is
learning to scuba dive. I'm not sure what he's doing
at this time. So Ian Fleming, he goes to college
and then does some does some journalism work, and then
World War Two starts to happen and he becomes due
to the at the behest of his He becomes an
assistant to a gentleman named Admiral Godfried, who is in
charge of all of like the secret operations of the
UK during World War Two. And Godfried basically tells Fleming, hey,
you are a super creative guy. Use that creativity to
think up stuff. To help us, and there's I mean,
he actually thought up a plan in order to get
control of the Enigma machine. His idea was to have
a UK pilot fly a German plane and crash it
in the ocean near a German ship so that the
ship will come over and try to save them, and
then the pilot then takes over the boat and they
get access to the Enigma chine. That was his plan.
For several years, he's involved with this type of espionage,
type of creative service, and that's what is the seed
for all of his stories. I mean, he basically said
ninety percent of his stories are based upon facts and
the other ten percent or him just making some stuff up.
Speaker 2: That's really cool, you know, Thunderball and never say Never again.
I mean, that's knocking on the door of being familiar
territory to the plot lines of those two movies. Okay,
that's amazing, keep going.
Speaker 1: Okay. So he at some point tells somebody, you know,
when I'm done with all of this, I am going
to write the greatest spy novel that has ever been written.
And so he ends his time with Admiral Godfried, who
becomes kind of the basis of m later on, and
then he ends up renting this place down in Jamaica
called GoldenEye.
Speaker 2: GoldenEye where Sting wrote Every Breath You Take and all
of synchronicity. Basically, yes, it's incredible.
Speaker 1: So he didn't write He did not write his first
Bond book until he was forty three years old. That's edible, man,
it's insane. It's a year younger than I am right now.
I mean it's like very get busy starting a podcast
or something. So during this time that he's doing all
of this cool stuff, broccoley starts working for Howard Hughes
after he takes over the movie The Outlaw. You know
The Outlaw. If you don't know the movie, you know
the picture of Jane Russell profile with her amazing like
torpedo cleave Yebi's going on there, I am familiar, keep going.
He becomes a part of that movie with Howard Hughes
when Howard Hughes takes over for Howard Hawks when he
got fired. This will come into play later on. And
so Saltzman has been in the circus and he's like
in vaudeville, and so he at some point becomes interested
in James Bond. Likes the character and he buys the
rights to the character of James Bond. Broccley wants to
buy the rights to the character of James Bond, but
then finds out that Saltzman already has them. He through
a mutual friend, meets up with him and they decide
instead of you know, Broccoli says, I want to buy
the rights from you. Saltzman says no, but I will
form a company with you, and that company becomes Ion Productions,
which is the company that is responsible for almost all
of the James Bond movies. So Ian Fleming in this time,
this was nineteen sixty one that they bought the rights
to James Bond. He unfortunately, about three years earlier, thought hey,
it'd be a great idea to make James Bond into
a movie, huh. And he thought that because he had
recently met a guy named Kevin mcclury, and Kevin mcclury
was this guy who was an avid scuba diver, an adventurer.
So McClory had also been had become involved in movies.
He had been an assistant to John Houston and had
worked on the African Queen Ulan Rouge and ended up
being an assistant director on Moby Dick, which starred James Mason,
who we will learn later was one of the original
people considered to be James Bond in the first James
Bond movies. Oh all right, cool, right, So this guy
he was, he got he hooked up with Elizabeth Taylor.
I mean, this is not this is no you know
con man. This is a guy who's in the industry
and romancing the starlets.
Speaker 2: Okay, now, wait a minute. Kevin McClory dated Elizabeth Taylor
in her prime. Is that correct?
Speaker 1: Yes, that is correct. He dated her and actually got
engaged to marry her.
Speaker 2: Anybody who can date Elizabeth Taylor in her prime has
kind of got it going on. All right, keep going.
Speaker 1: So Unfortunately, Kevin McClory had come in nineteen fifty eight
and talked to Ian Fleming and said, hey, I think
that this James Bond character would be a great character
to have in the movies. And Ian Fleming was like, cool,
let's do that. Yeah, and so and so they together
started working on a movie script. Movie script had multiple names,
including James Bond of the Secret Service.
Speaker 2: And Longitude seventy eight West.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, that's a terrible, terrible turble. It's a terrible title.
Speaker 2: That's like, that's like saying I'm gonna do a movie
about Disney World. I'm gonna call it main Street USA.
You know, I mean, that's a terrible title.
Speaker 1: All those things aside, Fleming, mcclury, and a guy named
Jack Winningham all worked together. They put this script together.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty nine, Fleming met with mcclury and Wadingham
to have a script conference and that's when they actually
Fleming is the one who changed the title from Longitude
seventy eight West to Thunderball. January of nineteen sixty, McClory
visits Fleming at GoldenEye to tell him he's working on
the final script for this thing, and you know, Flemy's
just like, okay, yeah, I keep going. So once they
sit down and talk about the final script, he goes
away to kind of finalize things. Fleming sits down at
his desk at GoldenEye and writes Thunderball based on that script.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just to I mean, just to let you
know how Fleming worked. It was unlike most authors work.
He was producing a book every single year, I mean,
from Casino Royal on. He issued a book every year,
and he would go he would go have a swim
in the morning out at GoldenEye. He'd have a swim
in the ocean. He would come back and have a
breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast. He would sit down
at his old typewriter and he would crank out the pages.
I mean, just type NonStop. Didn't review it, didn't look
at it. I mean, there was there's no meticulousness about this.
He was just right, right, right, right right. And so
I'm sure that at the point that they are, at
this stage where he's got this outline in his head,
there's no question that he should have known better than
to write a book based upon what they have already
talked about and not give any credit to anybody.
Speaker 2: It's really not smart on Ian Fleming's part. And I
hate to say that because he's the author of a
lot of these stories that I love so much, but man,
he just wasn't very bright on how he decided to
go about well.
Speaker 1: I mean, he his lifestyle I think was very similar
to James Bond, and I think he had this kind
of bulletproof attitude about him that he could probably do
whatever he wanted to do and get away with it,
just because of the life that he had led, and
unfortunately he was wrong in this particular circumstance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, Kevin McClory gets a hold of an early
copy of this not called Thunderball, and when he reads it,
he's like, what the crap? This guy has stolen my ideas.
And when they had got together, of course, there's lots
of drinking, lots of talking, lots of discussion, and it
becomes hard to sort out who thought about what, and
so so mccluy sued to keep the book off the
shelves just to.
Speaker 1: Let you know, I mean, we don't want to paint mcclury.
I've given him kind of the evil introduction a couple times,
but he's not necessarily the bad guy in this particular scenario.
Like Ian Fleming got together with Jack winning him and said, hey,
how about we just kind of kicked this guy out.
I mean, he had his motivation was to get this
guy out of the picture, and Whittingham didn't fall into
that plan. And ultimately, when Thunderball came out, mcclury said, hey,
have you seen this, and Jack quitting him like yeah,
And so they both sued him. It was at the
High Court in London. As you said, that happened on twentieth,
nineteen sixty three, and the case was settled in nine days.
I don't know what it was like back in nineteen
sixty three, but a case getting settled nine days after
it got filed is amazing.
Speaker 2: That's pretty open and shut, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, and I mean, just to let you know
who was probably the culpable party here, Fleming paid mcclury
damages of thirty five thousand pounds. He also paid his
court costs, which was fifty two thousand pounds, and mcclury
got the future versions of the novel credited as based
on a screen treatment by Kevin mcclury, Jack Whittingham, and
Ian Fleming in that order. Like, I mean, that's freaking huge.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But what we also need to know, and this is important,
some people make decisions under certain types of stress. In
the middle of that nine days, Ian Fleming had a
freaking heart attack.
Speaker 2: Among the things, like you said that McClory won, he
also had the right to make Thunderball as a movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he won the screenplay treatments, and that was something.
Here's here's an interesting thing. Now. So this is nineteen
sixty three, so they work together in nineteen fifty eight.
The first Bond movie comes out in nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 2: Yes, Doctor No.
Speaker 1: Doctor No comes out in NICECC sixty two. This is
nineteen sixty three year later, so we I mean, they
all know Doctor No is a big hit. Kubby Brockley
is involved with the movie at this point. Harry Saltzman
is involved with the movie at this point, and so
they say to him, yes, you can have the screenplay
rights to this particular storyline, and then you are allowed
to reproduce it ten years from now. So here's here
are the two possibilities that I see as a legal
analysis on this one. For them to give up not
only hey, we're going to give you the screenplay now,
but we're gonna let you reproduce it every ten years.
There's only two possibilities. Either they thought this thing, the
story is going to be over in ten years and
nobody's going to care, right, or they thought we're going
to be so financially successful in ten years after making
all of the Bond stories and movies that we've got,
that we're going to be rich enough to stop him
from doing this, you know, or some sort of remake
of the Thunderball, and ultimately that's kind of what ends
up happening.
Speaker 2: It's very very interesting. It's very interesting. It seems to
me that they are trying to give McClory everything they
can to kind of make him go away, pacify him
with film rights, remake rights. And I was telling you
that McClory, it's all this credit for Thunderball, but there's
some question about whether or not he gets credit for Spector.
Which Spector. You know, Spector's huge, I mean, Bond's bad
main bad guy. Is spect the.
Speaker 1: Key bad guy. I mean that the the through the
series you get you get a movie in the twenty
first century named spect I mean it's and you look
at all of the all of the spoofs, any of
those things, it's always got Specter involved, right, I mean absolutely.
If you look at Austin Powers and Number two and
Doctor Evil, that is all Spector, right, right. And then
you know the chairs that are all lined up. I mean,
so you watch Thunderball and you see you see Number
two walk in with his eye patch, and they all
go to the chairs and the guy who's hidden behind
the screens petting his little cat is a white cat.
Speaker 2: I'm just all from Thunderball.
Speaker 1: It's all from Thunderball. So the fact that Kevin mccluy
has got the rights to this particular storyline is huge
because this particular storyline is a main factor in so
many of the Bond films.
Speaker 2: And yeah, specifically, Spector was the bad guy in Doctor No,
the bad guy in From Russia with Love. It's mentioned
in Goldfinger. So they don't want him to have any
claim on revenues from those previous movies that are huge successes.
But just to clarify, Specter is a group of bad
guys that they needed to create that wasn't the Russians,
And it wasn't the mafia, wasn't the Germans this, and
it wasn't the Germans, right, this nefarious group of bad guys.
The inspector stands for Special Executive for Terrorism, revenge, Extortion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the introduction of Specter in Thunderball is fantastic
because it's just this meeting of evil characters who are like,
it's like a business meeting of criminals. It's and it's not.
It's it's fantastic. And then one of the guy. You know,
there's two guys who were responsible for some sort of
I think it's like a drug deal or something like that. Yeah,
And the headman of Spector says, yes, but basically you've
been cooking the books. And one of the guys is
like what no, and the other guy's like, yeah, everything's cool,
We're cool. And that cool guy's just zapped dumped and
he's gone.
Speaker 2: Yes, and he goes under and he's like, I'm very
badly burned, but oh no, I'm sorry. That's awesome power.
So I get him confused a little bit.
Speaker 1: Bells of omens.
Speaker 2: But the bad guy you before we get off of this.
So Specter is a very important piece in this. Obviously thunderball.
They got their butts kicked in court. McCrory took him
to task on that one. But Blofeld is in play
as well. Blofeld is like if somebody sued George Lucas
and they won the rights to Darth Vader, right, Blofeld
is the number one bad guy, the head of Specter.
He's the bald guy that strokes the cat in all
the movies, right, right, And that they wanted to make
sure that Kevin McCloy didn't get ahold of that guy.
Speaker 1: And just as a side note, in the Austin Powers movie,
the character of Number two is played by the actor
Robert Wagner, who when they were trying to decide who
the new James Bond would be after Timothy Dalton, they
were looking at him and he was like, no, I'm
too American. You should just go ahead and give that
to Pierce Brosen.
Speaker 2: And speaking of Americans, I'm gonna throw a little plug
in here for Octopus real quick.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So obviously when Never Say Never Again is remade, which
Never Say Never Again, for those who don't know, is
a remake of Thunderball based on Kevin McClory's ability to
remake that movie every ten years. So I did that,
would Never Say Never Again?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Connery comes takes the role at age fifty two. Roger
Moore is three years older than him, so when he
is in Octopus, he's fifty five right. So after for
your eyes only, Roger Moore said, I want to retire.
I'm too old to do James Bond anymore. And so
you can actually YouTube James Roland does his screen test
as an American James Bond, and I was telling you
he doesn't even play with an English accent. He is
doing it as mister coole American. Think George Clooney, you know,
just cool and classy American.
Speaker 1: So Sean Connery is not the first actor to ever
portray James Bond, and Doctor No is not. It was
not the first novel. So why wasn't the first novel
the first James Bond movie? Well, actually it was right.
The first time that James Bond is ever portrayed on
the screen is on a TV show called Climax, in
an episode called Casino Royale. The actor that portrays him
is Barry Nelson, who hasn't been in pretty much anything
else that you probably would have heard of except The Shining.
He is the guy who sends Jack Nicholson off to
the hotel with.
Speaker 2: Oh are you serious?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, So he plays this, He plays this James
Bond character, but he plays him as an American, and
so that let's see in Fleming know, hey, Bond might
be good for the screen. Which then in nineteen fifty five,
a year later, he sells the rights to Casino roy
Al to a guy named Greg Radoff. Okay, and he's
a producer. Now he's thinking, Okay, they're gonna make Casino
roy Al. I know a movie. The only problem is
Greg Radoff and his writer, whose name is Lorenzo Simple,
who to let you know his experience. He wrote Three
Days of the Condor and he wrote the early version
like the sixties versions of Batman with Adam West. But
Greg Radoff and Lorenzo Simple look at James Bond and
they go, this character is stupid. There's no way that
anybody would believe that a man could say the stuff
to women that he's saying right now. So what we
need to do is we need to change the character
into a woman, and we're going to call her Jane Bond. Yeah.
So fortunately before all of that happened, Greg Radoff dies
and greg Radoff's attorney slash agent, Charles Feldman, buys the
rights to Casina Royale from his widow and he gets
together with Howard Hawks. I told you he'd come back
in Howard Hawks and he says, Okay, we need to
make this movie. We need to make this book into
a movie. Casina Royle need to make this book into
a movie. And they were going to hire Lee Pucket
as a writer, and they were going to hire Carrie
Grant as James Bond. Now I know you've heard of
Carrie Grant, but do you know who Lee Puckett is?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: Tell me well, remember in our Raiders of the Lost
Arc versus Back to the Future episode where I talk
to you about George Lucas telling Lawrence Casten, Hey, I
had this lady writing the Empire strikes back for me,
but then she died. Yes, Lee Puckett, Wow, yeah, Wow.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 1: So Charles Feldman has the rights to Sina Royale, which
is why it never got made by Eon Productions as
a Bond movie. They started with Doctor No, and then
they went through all of their pieces and then you know,
we're talking about the time and history where two James
Bond movies were going head to head. But it's not
the first time that this ever happened. The first time
it ever happened was in nineteen sixty seven when.
Speaker 2: And Casino Royale went against You only lived twice.
Speaker 1: So Casino Royal is a James Bond movie, but it's
a spoof, right, It's a satire and it stars David Niven,
who was you would know. I mean our age group
would know him as the villain, if you'll call him that,
in The Pink Panther. But David Niven was one of
the guys who was originally considered to be James Bond.
David Niven, Carrie Grant, James Mason, who I mentioned before,
were the guys that they wanted to be James Bond
before they ultimately settled on Sean Connery. But then nineteen
sixty seven happens. David Niven's like, yeah, let's go ahead
and do this thing. And so they make this movie
Casino Royale that's got him and Peter Sellers and several
other famous actors, and it's all this who's the real
James Bond kind of storyline, and it's all supposed to
be comedy, which was appropriate, But that's the first time
that two Bonds went head to head in the same year.
Speaker 2: So back to Thunderball, when and Kubby Broccley and Harry
Saltzman are making this movie and they see that Kevin
McClory is going to be a royal pain in the butt,
A fly in the white meant a monkey in the wrench.
I can't wait to do Diehard. But yeah, they make
him producer of the movie Thunderball, hoping again to pacify
this guy so he will go away. Even though he's
got in his back pocket he can remake Thunderball every
ten years. So they put him in charge of filming
underwater scenes.
Speaker 1: Right. He was the scuba diver. And that's why this
movie is so that underwater scenes are such a big
factor in this movie is because Kevin McClory was a
big scuba diver and he's like, hey, I really want,
you know, underwater scenes to be a big part of this.
And so back in the sixties, those underwater scenes were amazing.
I mean, nobody had done that stuff except in like
the TV series Flipper.
Speaker 2: But that's why Thunderball, when you look at it today,
it is like watching a movie in slow motion because
everything's underwater. Yeah, the fight scenes are very slow motion,
you know, so.
Speaker 1: Right right, So it's interesting, you know, that's that is
a factor of looking you know, we're eighties kids, and
so we're looking at what was going on in the
eighties back and we're and we're thinking, okay, Thunderball, little
slow with the I mean, why are we spending so
much time? And then the union water scenes but that's
because of our perspective. Right. It's interesting. I mean we've
gone through we've gone through several different steps where Ian
Fleming is just trying to get this thing to become
a movie. From my perspective, I'm just thinking, how do
you not How does a studio not immediately go, Yeah,
this is a fantastic character and this needs to be
a movie. It didn't happen until until JFK Yeah listed
From Russia with Love as one of his top ten books.
That was the push that Broccoli and Saltzman were looking
for to get their movie made, and that's what led
to the studio going to green lighting Doctor Now. Yep.
Speaker 2: It also caused the novels to explode of Ian Flemings.
Speaker 1: Right, So, starting with Doctor No we had studios that
wanted a big name. They wanted Carrie Grant, they wanted
James Mason. But the problem is Carrie Grant says, I
don't want to do more than one movie, and James
Mason says, I don't want to do more than two movies.
And then they get to David Niven and he's like, no,
I'm now I'm not really interested in doing more than
three movies. But ultimately they decide we want to get
an unknown actor to play the part of James Bond,
and so they're going through several actors and one of
the guys that comes through is this unknown guy who's
only been in this kind of weird little movie called
Darby O'Gill and the Little People and was in the
chorus for like South Pacific or something. Yeah, but Saltzman
says that when he walked in, it was his walk
that got him the part. He's this big man but
walks with such poise like a cat, and he said
that only this is Saltzman. Harry Saltzman said that only
Sean Connery and Albert Finnie are the only two large
guys who walk in this way and would have been
appropriate for this part. Which is ironic because in the
early eighties, just before Never Say Never came out, Sean
Connery was actually looking at becoming Daddy Warbucks in the
movie Annie. And I mean he really wanted it. He
loved the play. He wanted to be in the movie,
but he was unsure about his singing ability. He even
took voice lessons, but they basically said, you got to
tell us now, are you in or are you out?
And he's like, I'm not sure. And at that point
they said, never mind, We're gonna go to with Albert Finnie,
who couldn't really sing anyway.
Speaker 2: He was terrible.
Speaker 1: Yes, so it didn't matter. It was still a wonderful
movie with a terrible singing Daddy Warbucks. Sean could have
been that guy. How weird with life have been at
that point?
Speaker 2: Wow?
Speaker 1: But they they back in the early sixties. They land
on Sean Connery who who was a casket maker? Ye,
who was a lorry driver. He had done all kinds
of things. And oddly Kubby Brockley had also been a
casket maker. I don't know, maybe that's the connection they
found anyway. Ian Fleming hated the idea of Sean Connery
being James Bond. He would refer to him only as
that lorry driver. But then when Doctor No came out
and it was a massive success, Ian Fleming was like, Okay,
I like Sean Connery. It's all right.
Speaker 2: You know, we weren't alive obviously in the nineteen sixties,
but the nineteen sixties are kind of known as having
spy mania, right, So the Bond movies take off Thunderball
is the first movie ever that they showed round the
clock twenty four hours a day because they had so
many people waiting in line to watch this movie.
Speaker 1: Okay, Jason, let's jump back in. Let's talk about some
kind of staples for the James Bond movie formula. Okay, yeah,
So the first movie that came out in the James
Bond series that we consider a cannon film is Doctor No. Right,
we talked about some of the things that came before,
but Doctor No is the first of the Eon Productions,
the first Sean Connery Bond movie, and it has as
the beginning scene the silhouette, the gun barrel, the turn
and shoot that is iconic for all Bond movies. And
when this first came out, the barrel and the silhouette,
everybody started applauding at that scene before anybody knew what
was going on with James Bond. But you know what,
it wasn't Sean Connery.
Speaker 2: I know, that's amazing, huh it.
Speaker 1: Was Yeah, it was a stuntman named Bob Simmons. It
was not Sean Connery in that first gun barrel scene.
Speaker 2: Okay, here's a little side note to Bob Simmons. All right,
the guy who did the gun barrel scene. I think
for the first three movies, he is the guy at
the beginning of Thunderball that's dressed in drag that James
Bond pulls the that's a man baby and punches him
right in the face. That's the guy who does the
gun barrel scene.
Speaker 1: That was a woman they had a woman, is a woman,
A woman, a woman right until Bond punches her square
in the jaw. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2: So yes, the gun barrel scene is absolutely a critical
part of the Bond cannon, which you don't get at
the beginning of Never Say Never Again. And really Doctor No,
the first movie out of the gate, you didn't have
that pre sequence scene and they're still kind of feeling
their way a little bit before they kind of nailed
down the formula right.
Speaker 1: And just as an interesting connection, Doctor No was released
the same day as the Beatles first single, and then
there's this kind of a weird Yeah, there's this kind
of weird competition. And then even in James Bond, at
some point he's he makes the comment about I can't
remember the quote, but it ends with it's like listening
to the Beatles without ear muffs on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's in Goldfinger. Yeah, yes, James Bond.
Speaker 1: Is too cool for the Beatles, right, So it wasn't
until Goldfinger that we got that full formula of the
beginning scene with like Bond always seduces a lady, he
kills a bad guy, he gives his witty one liner,
and then the music and the silhouettes begin, and as
it turns out, the Goldfinger soundtrack actually outsaw the Beatles
that year's Finger came out gold Finger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's a lot of things to the formula
which I'd love to discuss maybe at the end when
we kind of do final judgment. But yeah, you have
the pre gun barrel sequence, right, the gun barrel, You
have the theme song, opening credits.
Speaker 1: Still, what of naked Ladies?
Speaker 2: Octopus? He kind of pushes the envelope on this. You know,
you have gadgets and babes, bad guys and henchmen.
Speaker 1: Don't don't forget the cool cars.
Speaker 2: We've already argued about this on a previous podcast about
what the coolest James My car.
Speaker 1: Was, and I maintain I maintained my position it's the
Aston Martin.
Speaker 2: But and then at the end we're going to compare Bonds.
Speaker 1: With that formula. You had a lot of people who thought, wow,
this is just something that we can make fun of.
So there was tons of talk shows like David Frost
would make fun of Bond routine Lee back in the
UK and his co host later got her own show,
Millicent Martin, and she would do these Bond spoofs as well.
And one of the actors that she got to play
Bond in her spoof was someone you might have heard of.
His name is Roger Moore.
Speaker 2: Oh really, I'd love to see that man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great. It is a great one. It's they're
trying the comedy out and he's still Bond. I mean
it's ten years before he becomes Bond, but he's still
Bond in this goofy wow like late night TV bit So.
Thunderball is the ninth book and Ian Fleming series. It
is the eighth full length Bond novel and it was
first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on March
twenty seventh, nineteen sixty one. It was the novelization of
that script that we talked about. After the lawsuit, McClory
gained the literary and film rights for the screenplay, while
Fleming was given the rights to the novel, although it
had to be recognized as being quote based on a
screen treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack whitting him and Ian
Fleming in that order.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting you and I talked off air. Kubby
Brockley and Harry Saltzman had to move up the production
of Thunderball or else Kevin mcluy was going to do
it without them. So the interesting thing to me as
a Bond fan is Thunderballs the fourth movie made. But
that wasn't the original slate. We were supposed to get
on Her Majesty's Secret Service as number four, which means
that Sean Connery would have played instead of George Lasmbie
the Bond from that movie.
Speaker 1: Kind of interesting, right, Yeah, this lawsuit is not an
insignificant thing. I mean, Ian Fleming had a heart attack
during this short lawsuit. He had a heart attack in
the middle of it. And then yeah, just a little
while after, just August of nineteen sixty four, nine months
after the trial is over, he has another heart attack
and dies at the age of fifty six. So they
make that movie, and then in nineteen seventy six, Ten
years later, mcclury announces he wants to produce an original
James Bond film. The title that he wants to use
is Warhead Warhead eight or James Bond of the Secret Service.
But the project gets hampered by the Fleming Trustees and
the Eon Producers filing lawsuits, right, and he gets slowed up.
I mean, this is nineteen seventy six, and we know
Never Say Never Again doesn't come out for another seven years.
He was not able to get the title of James
Bond of the Secret Service. They did stop him from
doing that because it was too close to the title
of Her Majesty's Secret Service.
Speaker 2: Now here's the interesting thing to me. Obviously, with Never
Say Never Again, you get Sean Connery back in the role.
But before he sort of had him there, he needed
a Bond, so he was going after Richard Burton, and
he went after George Lassabie. That would have been interesting
to see George Lassabie back in that role after nineteen
sixty nine is Her Majesty's Secret Service with Orson Wells
as Blowfield.
Speaker 1: Right, Eon Productions was looking at other actors to play
in Octopussy and then when Sean Connery finally says, okay,
do it again. Ion Production says there's no way we
can come out with James Brolin. And so at that
point Roger Moore, he had fulfilled his contract and was
on a movie by movie Basis, and he was ready
to be done, but they convinced him to come back
and do Octopussy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't take on Sean Connery in some rogue
James Bond movie, some new guy, right, right, you know,
as early as like you said, nineteen seventy five, nineteen
seventy six, he's getting this together. In nineteen seventy eight
he works on James Bond of the Secret Service, hoping
to get orson Wells as blow felled. Richard Attenborough as
the director, and they were hoping to go up against Moonraker.
Speaker 1: Right, and Richard Attenborough, of course we know later on
later on goes on to become the grandfather in Jurassic Park,
the park owner's right, who they had originally considered for
that role. Mister Sean Connery. Yeah, and then James Brolin,
of course, is the key actor in the movie West World,
which was written and directed by Michael Crichton.
Speaker 2: Also plays p w in Peeman's Big Adventure.
Speaker 1: Well that we can't leave that out, and obviously James
Bond like performance.
Speaker 2: But here's where it gets really interesting to me. So
when Kevin McClory starts organizing this idea of going up
against Moonraker and I'm gonna kick their button. They're going
to be sorry they did this to me. He calls
Sean Connery and so he calls him up and says, listen,
you're the best Bond ever. You know what he does.
We need your insight. Why don't you come over and
help us and be a consultant on our script, which
we know is a big smoke screen, just to kind
of lure him back in. Right, play the role.
Speaker 1: Again, right, And so the way that they ultimately land
on the title that they land on is once he
accepts the role, his wife says to him, I thought
you said you were never going to do another James
Bond movie again, and he's like, well, I feel like
I need to do it again, and she says, well,
never say never again, and she actually receives credit in
the closing credits for the title of the of the movie.
Speaker 2: Okay, before we get to never say it ever again.
An octopusy and thank you for hanging around. It's taking
us a long time to get here. But there's a
couple of interesting tidbits in the other Bond movies before
we get to this point. Okay, so the Spy who
Loved Me, you're going up against this guy named Stromberg
that was originally supposed to be Blowfeld, but because of
all these legal issues, they didn't want something to happen
to spy he Loved Me, so they just changed the
specter and Blowfeld they took that out. So that's why
Stromberg acts exactly like Blowfield. And at the beginning of
four Yar Eyes Only, there is a scene where Bond
is visiting his dead wife's grave, who was killed on
Our Majesty's secret service. He gets in a helicopter and
his helicopter is taken over by a guy in a
wheelchair with a bald head and you know, stroking the cat.
You don't never see his face, and he never names himself,
and it's clearly supposed to be Blowfilm. He's taking control
the helicopter and he's gonna kill Bond. So Bond escapes,
takes back control of the helicopter, picks this guy up
and he takes him and he dumps him down this
humongous chimney, and it's basically like we're killing Blowfield. Double birds.
Speaker 3: To you, Kevin McClory, we haven't really talked about what
happened when Sean Connery stopped doing the Bond movies and
Roger Moore took over.
Speaker 1: There was a big backlash at the idea of having
more takeover, and I realized we have that George Lasmbie
thing in the middle there. Right when this happened in
eighty three, there was kind of this big like all
of those people who had been Roger Moore haters were like, ah,
finally the real James Bond is back, right, Yeah, But
as we find out that movie did not do as
well as Octavius did.
Speaker 4: That's right, all right, everybody, Now that you know the
history of these two movies, join us next week when
we will get into the comparison of Never Say Never
Again in Octopus.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us. We will see
you next week.