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Scripting 007: Behind the writing of the James Bond movies
moneyofpropre2
France
You know the name, you know the number, but do you know… How it was planned to pit Bond against Goldfinger’s twin brother on several occasions? What exactly was in the script for the canceled spin-off about the character of Jinx, envisioned after Die Another Day? How Thunderball was first envisaged as a film, before becoming a novel, then a film, and yet another film later? What would Timothy Dalton’s third film look like? What is this action scene in the London postal railway network that was imagined for four films but never ended in any of them? How Max Zorin’s character original plan was to divert a comet and make it crash into Silicon Valley? In which adventure was Muammar Gaddafi briefly considered as one of the villains? How 007 was to confront SPECTRE again in The Spy Who Loved Me and Octopussy? What about this motorcycle chase on the Great Wall of China in a film project where the Bond Girl was inspired by Rambo? Which scenes from the scripts were filmed but cut in the edits? Or how The Living Daylights was first envisioned as a reboot presenting the very first mission of an inexperienced young James Bond?
All the answers to these questions and more can be found in this new free e-book by Clément Feutry about the writing of the films, featuring the world’s most beloved secret agent. Discover 60 years’ history of the saga through the analysis of more than a hundred documents (scripts, treatments, interviews, correspondence, storyboards, etc.). See how the screenwriters created the plots for the Bond films. Who were these screenwriters? From what or from whom did certain storylines or characters originate? How different is the story of the film compared to the novel? How did the plots evolve from their initial concepts to the final edit? What ideas were abandoned along the way and sometimes re-used in subsequent films? What were the challenges? It’s up to you to discover it in this book.
There is a scene in the second Austin Powers movie that haunted me, because it was so true to what happens behind the scenes when you are developing a new Bond movie, where Dr. Evil and his minions are hanging around, and they’re trying to figure out what he should do. They start throwing out all these ideas: blackmail ideas, kidnapping ideas, extortion ideas, and each one gets shot down for one reason or another. And at the end of the scene, Dr. Evil says something to the effect of, « Oh, hell, let’s just do what we always do. Steal a nuclear bomb and threaten the world with annihilation ». And I remember seeing that and thinking, « Oh my God, that’s every Bond story conference I’ve ever been in ».
-Jeff Kleeman, executive at MGM during the first three Brosnan’ films.
A titanic work requiring thousands of hours in research, writing, translations and layout; The best part is that it is available for download right now. An ideal companion to keep you busy in the coming years of « to tell you the truth, we haven’t started thinking about it yet [Bond 26] ».
All the info & download links : https://www.commander007.net/2024/new-free-ebook-scripting-007-behind-the-writing-of-the-james-bond-movies/
And a quick download link : https://we.tl/t-kdZtw3OCyh
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Comments
I need to ask: how long did it take you to create this book?
I like papers book, that's how I usualy read my books, I would I liked and be proud to have one. But there will be not paper version, partly because it cost money to do, so you need to sell it to dn't be loosing money and have financial problems. And I can imagine people who will start to think "he is making money on our back, we wan't a part of that money". So to much problems. I people want to print it on their own, my advice is to use the Openoffice version (I didn't try, but I think the pdf will look like bad since copy/paste from it give, for osbcure reason to me, some unreadable thing).
Well it took more time that I should have reasonably dedicated on it... Wasn't planning to do a book a the begining, just reading things and you are here "damn thing shit is too good, I should write an article on it", then you have some you, "damn, that thing is to long, I'll should write a book".
Part of it is re-use of old articles I write in the ten last last year on CJB; that's why some chapter are not in the chronological order and there are lot of pages with superflus details especially in Brosnan era (was nice to have theses details back in the day when It was in an article just on a single script, seemed superflus to have them now later, but since theses details was already there, might as well keep them I thought). Beside it seems a lot of pages, but it covers 25 films and there is a lot of images, but still more than I visioned.
It's a more of a year work, with get up each morning at 4. a.m. each, spend basically all my morning, noon break, (I work in a office, sometime spend my job time in it when the boss is not around, you know), week-end and holidays on it. Was hard, the harder part was to see other people talking about things I have written month before (like the Anthony Burgess script, the détails of DAF, Bond 15 reboot) while I couldn't say/show myself anything on, because I hate announce/talk about thing not finished. And there was theses translation to do you, the ZigZag/Semic comics, make me frustrated to had to put the book on hold because alsmost nobody wanted to help me with them (but in the end I menaged to finished the translations of all theses comics, you can find them on the same website).
Now I'm happy I can talk about it, and more than happy to have time to sleep and get entertain, catch up with videogame, books, movies, and Bond things & others that I put on hold until now.
30 pages in?! Well I must says I'm (positivly) suprised, when I was re-reading the things for the x or y times I tough some part was very hard to read/follow. That the whole thing will end up to be read only by authors who do some reshearch in a film on another. All the chapter are of the same quality, I don't particiculary don't really like the firsts one, but the things get better when you arrive on OHMSS. In any way I hope you enjoy it and learn new thing.