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It’s amazing how often a director will make a spy movie to scratch their Bond itch and it can turn out better than a lot of actual Bond movies.
Sadly the Americans would probably lap that up
Are you on drugs?
On Drax, perhaps?
Interesting idea, structuring the plot around Bond needing to pull off a bunch of assassinations of fictional world leaders could be cool.
One can hope that Amazon does personally tell EON it’s time for them both to go. I’d like to see Anthony Horowitz take a try at a script.
I see a lot of fans talking about bringing Irma Bunt back. I also agree with bringing her back. She’s the one villain ally in general who could be a great main villain in their own right. Two names that I can think of to play her would be Diane Lane and Winona Ryder. Not the biggest names, but they could be effective. Along with Blofeld, she is one of the top 5 villains I would bring back. The other 3 are Goldfinger, Mr. Big and Alec Trevelyan.
I hope Amazon tell EON to do one now and take over too. I would love to see Horowitz novels adapted, but I'd also like to see the rest of the untapped Fleming material adapted PROPERLY too first. When I say properly adapted, I don't mean that woeful attempt at YOLT in NTTD.
It's the sort of thing I wish TMWTGG had been about.
Ha! Yes, I wish that would still be true too :D
I think Bunt should be played by a Tilda Swinton -style actress - someone who could ooze icy threat but also cultured charisma. Granted, that's not exactly how Fleming described her (literary Bunt was obviously modeled after Ilse Koch), but in my opinion that could work. A bit like Dench's M, but thoroughly evil.
Later, Von Rahm invites Bond to go hang gliding with him and when they are airborne, the outraged Von Rahm tries to kill Bond. There is a mid-air “dogfight” in which Von Rahm knocks Bond off his glider, sending him plummeting into Krimml Falls.
After the main titles, we find Bond in the British Embassy in Vienna. The Ambassador scolds Bond for knocking “the living daylights” out of Von Rahm and tells Bond that not only has he been recalled but that he will also be court-martialed. In the next scene, Bond “returns to his ancestral home in the highland.” There we meet Bond’s “spinster aunt” Charmaine and his “ailing” grandfather with whom he “shoots clay pigeons on the moor.” Yes, there's definitely some shades of Skyfall in this.
I won't give you the full transcript, but suffice to say Bond gets involved with a MI6 agent called Bart Trevor and is employed as a pilot to fly a DC3 to Singapore. He lands in the airfield of Universal Exports, which is the cover name of MI6. There he meets Felix Leiter of the CIA and Q, MI6’s weapons expert. The rest of the story is your usual action oriented caper, which finally ends on Bond being appointed to the Double-O section back in London and M turning to Bond and saying that “your next assignment will be to investigate a man in Jamaica, Dr. No.” So ends the treatment.
What I want to show is that the previous "early Bond Years" treatments didn't involve Bond as a Royal Navy commando or any of his connections to the navy in the slightest, which I was kinda surprised by. It was only ever mentioned in passing. Their treatment mostly revolved around Bond being more of recognised pilot than an able-bodied seafarer.
Anyway, for good reason Cubby Broccoli decided against this concept, stating fans wanted to see the agent at the “height of his powers,” not a novice. Times might have changed but I still believe Cubby was right in his assessment. Of course, there'll always be some fans that would like to see this happen, but will their enthusiasm alone be enough to make this concept a guaranteed worldwide hit? No, I don't believe it would.
Which brings me back to Bond 26. I still believe the producers will not want to be hamstrung by casting an older actor in the role, and will go for someone much younger this time round. They could do another Lazenby, whereby they cast a mature-looking 29-year-old actor but have him already at the “height of his powers" with no need for a backstory. Personally, this is the way I'd go.
;)
BTW, thank you for your post @bondsum. Would love to hear more about that treatment. And I fully agree with you on the way to move forward... as if you didn't already know ;)
Just for you, I'll add a little more about the Bond XV treatment. This is what was said about the outline: Richard Maibaum and Michael Wilson came up with a clever conceit for Bond’s first mission—MI6 needs his skills as a pilot and not necessarily as a secret agent. While Bond has flown many aircraft in the previous movies, his piloting abilities have been ancillary to his main assignment. But, in Bond XV, Bond’s aviator skills are the reason that he’s been assigned to this mission. With regards to the Bond Women, there is essentially only one Bond Woman (Betje Bedwell) in the outline. The brief exceptions are his brief dalliance with Elsa in the pre-credit sequence and presumably his flirtations with the woman at his party. The treatment suggests that Bond actually falls in love with Betje or is at the least extremely taken with her. There are several scenes where their courtship is shown, including their time together in Singapore, where Bond buys her jewelry, an uncharacteristically romantic gesture for the cinematic spy. In one version of the treatment, Bond suggests that they live together. It's noted that the Bond of the novels also formed relationships with women, including Tiffany Case, that would extend beyond the missions. Much of Trevor’s advice will form the basis of Bond’s operational behavior in later missions. Most notably, Bond will rarely again fall for a woman while carrying out his mission. Bart Trevor also teaches Bond that the best way to get out of danger is through talking. It’s a technique that Bond relies on frequently. Basically, the story pretty much has Bart Trevor as his tutor and Bond as his prodigy.
I must add that Mark Edlitz's book is well worth the purchase and essential reading for those that want to know more about story development and the unused Bond scripts.
I know, Heike Makatsch is very talented.
I'd be fine with a German woman. But no blonde! Bond has dark hair!!
I must be honest and say I never massively liked the sound of that treatment, although I think I skipped it in Lost Adventures and mostly know it from The Making Of The Living Daylights book: that version does sound slightly different.
What I liked was that so many people lost their minds about the idea of someone else being 007 in NTTD (although for some reason those objections didn't reappear once they actually saw it - it's almost as if people get used to things and it turns out they're not as bad as they first thought :) ) whereas that Bond 15 treatment had Burton Trevor as the original 007 who Bond took the number from. I wonder if that would have been similarly inconceivable.
I think the whole Nomi as 007 was misdirection to blindside us into not seeing Bond has a daughter in NTTD. The early promotional material certainly implied that Nomi would be seen as a threat to Bond, but that never materialized in the actual movie. For all her "throwing a bloody tampon in the bin" comments, her role was rather inessential.
that would be kind of cool
Because it was a first draft, it's difficult to judge this script and how it would have translate to the screen, but, as it was transcribed by Charles Helfenstein, it wasn't the ideal Bond's origin story, despite obvious qualities (the relationship between Bond and Burton Trevor in the first place); I think it fell flat due to its uninterested villain and, at the end, Horowitz's Forever and a Day was a better origin story.
Again, I'm not against an origin story at all, but I think Eon won't be interested in this concept so soon after the release of IO Interactive's game.
I agree she was inessential (and you could remove her from the plot entirely) but I don't know about the distraction thing. Indeed they never promoted her as 007 in the marketing.
Yeah there wasn't much of a killer story (indeed it seemed quite Indiana Jones with a lot of hidden treasure) or great ideas I was massively interested in. The alternate Dalton 3 with the robots in Hong Kong actually sounded a bit better than this one, and featured a killer stunt (although I'm not sure they could ever actually have done it because the stuntman would have died if he'd got it wrong at all!).
Thanks to real life, the Bond plots just keep coming.
Interesting. Thank you for posting.
I think Eon often trots out scenes from previous scripts from the vault, as it were. When Safin took out Spectre in Cuba, I was reminded of one of the TSWLM treatments where the young upstarts assassinated the old guard of SPECTRE.
I wish they had incorporated Nomi more in the climactic battle. In fact, I wish they had shown Bond and Nomi infiltrating the base via the Garden of Death, that is, more like the novel.
Arrgh ! Can't I just get some frickin' sharks with laser beams on their frickin' heads ?!!?