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Shaken and stirred ...
2010-06-21 16:09
The Battle for Bond
Robert Sellers (foreword by Len Deighton)
The fascinating story of the battle between Ian Fleming and film producer Kevin McClory forms the basis of Robert Sellers’s new book ‘The Battle for Bond’ (Tomahawk Press). In the late 1950s Fleming, who had already achieved great success as a novelist, turned his thoughts to transferring his master-spy hero Bond to the silver screen, but having no experience of writing for the movies, approached a number of contacts, including his childhood friend Ivar Bryce, who agreed to finance a film, and Ernest Cuneo, who developed a trial screenplay idea for what was to become the greatest Bond movie of all – Thunderball. Over the next two years, the script was radically revised by a number of other writers, including Jack Whittingham and McClory.
But things started to turn sour when McClory’s own plans for the project came into conflict with those of Bryce; and despite the fact that the film had not yet been made, Fleming wrote the novel Thunderball, itself a treatment of a script by Jack Whittingham, ownership of which had been assigned to McClory. In a celebrated trial in November 1963, Fleming was accused of plagiarism in a high-court battle which McClory eventually won, being granted the future rights to the use of the character of Bond – but only in scripts derived from the Thunderball project.
For Riviera readers, the most interesting part of the story comes twenty years later when McClory tried to revive ‘his’ Bond in a film which would rival the official series of movies (by that time itself a hugely successful franchise). Never Say Never Again, much of which was filmed in Nice and along the Côte d’Azur, was a production nightmare, filled with acrimony, countless on-set re-writes and squabbles between actors and producers. It was saved by one fact alone – that it starred Sean Connery, the James Bond of Thunderball, who would now go head-to-head at the box-office with Roger Moore.
Written with all the tension and pace of a well-made thriller, this real-life story of attack and counter-attack – much of it based on the papers of Peter Carter-Ruck, McClory’s defence lawyer – is fascinating for Bond fans as well as anyone entering the lion’s den of movie-making.