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According to the Bulingame Music of James Bond book, FS was offered the song with different lyrics, an earlier version. He raved about the demo, but there was a an argument of disagreement between FS and Cubby, and FS never recorded the track. Paul Williams re-wrote the lyrics and it was offered to Bush.
I'd love to hear the demo that Sinatra heard.
I’d have thought Kate Bush would have wanted to write her own song.
I confess to knowing nothing about Kate Bush. Heard of her, but she didn't get much if any exposure in the U.S., at least not to where I'd have heard of her in the smaller town I live in. If she wasn't on the top 40 then she'd have been an unknown to us.
I really wish Frank had crooned a song as I think it would have been a classic. But then again I like Munro's version of FRWL. :)
There was a recent "James Bond and Friends" podcast that dealt with filming the series in order after CR was released. In other words the follow up to CR in 2006 was not QOS but LALD remade for today's sensibilities. Lets play with that for our next "what if".
CR comes out in 2006 and is a huge hit! Bond is back on the cultural radar and relevant again. Craig shows how a Bond can be a hero again for the audience of today. The producers are emboldened and decide it's time to revisit the novels and announce LALD is the next adventure starring Daniel Craig. What say you Mi6?
What if for the Craig era the filmmakers decided to go back and update the novels and film them in order of the books. Would this had worked better then the original stories that we got. In other words would CR, LALD, MR, DAF remade closer to the stories of Fleming been better then CR, QOS, SF, SP. What if EON remade the books like CR but updated them for a modern audience?
I already posted this on the podcast thread, but it applies to the new subject so I'll paste it below in quotes:
"I loved the latest topic of cracking a modern LIVE AND LET DIE adaptation as the follow up to Craig's CASINO ROYALE. Had EON chose to go that route, I think a good casting for Buonapart Ignace Gallia (aka BIG) would have been Michael Clarke Duncan, as he was not only a good actor but would have had the right kind of presence and charisma for a main villain. I definitely would have gone the Mankiewicz route of casting an African-American actress, and I think Zoe Saldana would have been splendid."
I stand by this comment, especially the casting of Zoe Saldana as Solitaire. I also liked the suggestion in the podcast that the villains could be linked to the Ugandan terrorists featured in CR.
And given how loose CR was as an adaptation, stands to reason LALD would be about the same so you wouldn't necessarily have to tread the same waters like Felix being fed to a shark which LTK did and the yacht sequence in FYEO.
To take this further, the thing to consider is that MGM will still have its financial issues which would put an adaptation of MR on indefinite hold, which is what happened with Bond 23 being pushed back from a 2011 release to 2012. So with that happening, it makes me wonder how EON would approach an MR adaptation, or even consider just going a different direction and we still get SKYFALL. Even so, MR would still have London featured prominently, still showing a display of British pride with the Olympics coinciding and so on.
With the pace these films are released, we wouldn't get to experience Craig's take on the Blofeld trilogy either, which would've been the necessary arc it needed to complete his journey. We may not like some of the things done with his five films, but at least the way they are continued and being tied up makes sense.
It's interesting, having watched all the films and then reading the novels, my opinion was that every novel blew it's corresponding film out of the water. But now I'm going back and watching all the films again and finding new appreciation for all of them.
Afterwards I'll likely read all the novels again (just got Folio Society's Casino Royale and would like to expand that collection), and then the films, repeat until I die.
EDIT: Special shoutout to Geoffrey Holder, Baron Samedi in this film is absolutely inspired, IMO.
It only gets really tricky once you hit FRWL as the fifth film, because it was already very faithfully adapted. And again this is all just fun hypothetical stuff, not something we’re seriously advocating for.
I wish they would faithfully adapt these novels in future films, though. It's such a shame because Moonraker is a personal favourite of mine and I feel would lend itself well to a modern movie. I am doubtful that we will ever see this material faithfully used in future films, though.
Ironically (although I don't prescribe to this theory at all) with the rumours that Safin is Dr. No this would essentially be true to an extent.
The question for me how would you do them with the same titles but yet not have them viewed as remakes?
I’d use alternate titles based of chapters. Like The Undertaker’s Wind.
You could argue that certain Bond films are soft remakes of others, but an honest to goodness one wouldn't sit well with me, even if stuck closer to the source material.
Good call.
This is where I come down, too.
LALD has been adapted more wholly than most of the novels, across several films. There are bits and pieces left, but not enough in my mind to justify rehashing the "been there, done that" aspects of the story (Felix's maiming, etc.).
DAF also falls into this category of "mostly adapted."
So:
"Faithfully adapted": DN, FRWL, GF, TB, OHMSS, FYEO, R, TPOAL, TLD, CR
"Mostly adapted": DAF, LALD, 0iNY
"Half-adapted": MR, YOLT, TMWTGG, THR
"Never adapted": FAVTAK, QoS, OP
There has been some "crypto-adaptation" of the "half-adapted" categories (namely, GE, DAD, and SF), but they could still go back to the original Fleming stories.
If Eon wants to come out blazing with Fleming and the next actor in B26, I still think they should look to exactly what they did with CR and do MR.
There is a lot they could still mine from the novel's though, a lot of Moonraker and the whole A View To A Kill undercover segment would translate well to film I think
That would obviously be heavily altered in a film adaptation, much like CR was heavily altered for 2006.
And also cheaper, as far as locations go, for the new Bond's first outing. Despite MR being mined for parts in MR, GE, and DAD, it's very surprising that they haven't filmed it faithfully yet, especially as the follow-up to QoS. I wonder if Babs is holding it back for some reason.
As an aside, did you know MR was not part of the original novel package optioned by Broccoli and Saltzman? They supposedly didn't get the rights until the late '60s.
Anyway, to answer the original question, I don't think LALD would have worked as a follow-up to CR, but MR would have.
That's why I find it fascinating as a topic, because they could not only add new stuff to the adaptation but discard the stuff that was already adapted like Leiter being maimed and the climax with the yacht over coral reef. Bond wasn't chasing bombers in Miami airport in the CR novel, who knows what would have been added on top of LALD. It wouldn't be a straight up adaptation.
Yes, except that the major plot turns of LALD ("He disagreed with something that ate him," the keelhauling, etc.) had already been used to great effect in the film series.
As opposed to MR, which has the flamethrower sequence, entire characters, and an ending left to use.
The more I think about it, LALD the novel is very dependent upon the black villain network, which would make a modern adaptation tough to pull off without feeling horribly dated.
That’s why it’s suggested they could change the black American gangster angle with the Ugandan terrorists featured in CR. It not only updates the villains for modern times but also ties in with what was already set up in CR.