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And every script/draft P&W have written had been rewritten by others brought in by EON. Even their sole credit for DAD wasn’t solely theirs. EON keeps hiring them because they’re very knowledgable about Fleming, they always liked the ideas they outline, and then always hire others to polish/rewrite up the scripts.
The director of DAD, for example, dragged out that ice palace scene with the dumb car chase that made me want to stop watching it and the writers have apologized for that movie, period....
Or QoS, where the director trimmed out too much of the film so it can be "like a bullet" while the writers were on strike....regardless of the original ending with Mr. White.
why compare them. theyre both very different characters. i love them both.
Camille or the actress who played her has the ability to do what the Paloma character did physically but was also more established. Seeing her in NTTD would have gone hand in hand with Felix Leiter's return as characters who were overdue for a return or update.
I was really hoping Camille would have a small appearance in the background at the Cuba party. Her and Bond with just a passing acknowledgement would have been tasteful.
Unlike a Grace Jones cameo which would have had her play a different character since May Day is deceased.....A Camille Montes return of any sort would be credible if played by Olga K again.
If the same M/Q/Moneypenny actors get hired again for Bond 26, then a Camille Montes return, even as a background character, would help. They brought back the casino card player alongside Sean Connery in Dr. No to a couple of actors' first Bond movies. Audiences can use better support to help welcome the next Bond...for example, Jason Connery etc....it kinda rewards the longtime fans for sticking around despite all the reboots which have happened with the series over the decades. None of them burned me more than to see how LTK and GE are too different and distant from one another. Bond really suffered in LTK and then GE comes in getting marketed better and having a new Bond and scrapping any mentions from the horrors of dark LTK story etc...
The dramatic scenes in QoS had some notes of LTK in that the vengeance factor and the consequences of having to dig two graves was explored. Bond learned from Camille by observing and helping her before he could approach Yusef and save his own job.
Ah, but May Day was only killed in the DN-DAD continuity. ;)
I get what you mean by wanting to see some degree of continuity between films (and I do too to a degree), but the only semblance of continuity that ever really existed pre-Craig was along the lines of the occasional reference to Tracy, which we even get during the Brosnan era in TWINE. GE was never going to reference the events of LTK anymore than any previous Bond film had referenced the events of its immediate predecessor (Tracy references and a very brief mention of Dr. No in FRWL aside).
On LTK and GE, I suspect the reason there was no Felix during the Brosnan era was specifically due to concerns about continuity and not really knowing how to address the fact that Felix was now maimed. Do you show a Felix with prosthetics or would that be asking too much of '90s audiences to recall what had happened in a film released six years prior and with a different actor as Bond? Conversely, do you show Felix without prosthetics and mess further with continuity? I suspect that's why they came up with the Jack Wade character instead—to bypass the Felix continuity issue entirely—and decided to make more of a character out of Tanner during the Brosnan era for the Fleming connection instead. By resetting everything, CR of course avoided the issue as well.
It would be interesting if the next Bond picked up where Dalton/Brosnan left off and simply introduced a modern-day Felix with high-tech prosthetics as he's shown in the Felix Leiter graphic novel. That would pay homage to the old continuity and allow us to see a different kind of Felix on film.
TD and PB were worlds apart. So a TD continuation would be more befitting, especially since the actor left on better or "gooder" terms than the latter. A Felix Leiter with prosthetics would be understood better to a degree for newer audiences as they too would know that this character had more than one traumatic events underwater in any continuity.
Of course, Jack Wade was a Felix Leiter version. Casting the guy from TLD was a Charles Grey-move but just not enough to really help the Dalton fans ease in. I think the lack of grittiness and bloodless shots filmed by the director were noticeable as well.
DAD does not deserve continuity in any creative or financial sense. Had the producers decided not to get Bond grounded, they would have given plenty of more ammo to spoofs like Austin Powers. That's what video games are for although any of the former actors can retain a sense of continuity in future video games with well developed stories these days. That's where 007 Legends failed most. It didn't incorporate a single Bond actor of current or former times in addition to simply reenacting old scenes from prior movies.
If Camille turned up,they probably would have killed her off along with seemingly everyone else who was in CR and QOS!
They didn't kill off Paloma. She could have been just a wave-off or a tool for advancing Bond's mission finding someone. Felix being killed off with Bond...DC and Jeffrey Wright have on screen chemistry so that's their own versions of their characters. Plus, Beam has been long fired so no more fun Felix and Beam banter. Simply having Wright play Felix for another new Bond actor would be out of place....Camille on the other hand was more of a solitude type and she had that pull to make audiences wonder if she is alright simply wishing a better life of recovery from her journey. Bond complicated her mission as much as he helped her later on. She can carry her own weight and the actress didn't need to lean on anyone to get by.
Well, Eon themselves are in a right pickle now that they're running out of Austin Powers films to adapt. Perhaps they can hire Mike Myers as a consultant on the next Bond's run.
Haha!
Barbara Broccoli: Okay, Mike, we did the brothers thing. What next, time travel... or fembots? (Smiling) Fembots, right?
Mike Myers: Yeah, baby, yeah!
Hey, they were going to put Dalton up against robots in the early 90s. You never know...
DC went up against nanobots instead. And they won. Not a bad movie like the time they sent Bond to space or when a diamond satellite as up there causing ice surfing off of cliffs.
I laughed out loud at a couple of parts...but putting that up against TSWLM and seeing how the budget of MR caused the future films of John Glenn each having their subsequent budgets slashed one after another...you wonder if we could have gotten more influence from OHMSS such as the timeless esthetic of that film. If you see some parts of Blofeld's monologues in his office with Bond.....
FYEO starting off as a sequel to OHMSS was not a coincidence but the film just did not have the feel of the former movie and give that closure aspect of the sequel fans never got.
I'm sure Bond would have done okay against robots he could see. Fighting against robots you can't see is just an unfair challenge for anyone.
I actually think it’s a better version of TSWLM because it’s embracing its farcical nature and discarding any pretensions of gravitas. Barbara Bach couldn’t act and they tried to give her dramatic scenes like when she confronts Bond about her dead boyfriend. Lois Chiles isn’t gonna win an Oscar, but they don’t try give her anything beyond banter and looking hot, and that played out much better in her favor.
Why does that even matter? MR should be judged for the film it is, not for the future setbacks EON frankly gave themselves for how they managed production, along the line with declining box office receipts. Maybe if they made better films in the 80s by not hiring a hack like John Glen we wouldn’t have seen the steady decline of the 80s.
John Glenn sure had his signature tropes....and his films really carried little to no esthetic despite the chateau in AVTAK.
He was at the time viewed as a OHMSS legacy guy and even introduced his first scene in tribute to it...could have been better.
Well I unerstand it's always difficult to see which influence comes from whom, but they weren't involved in the QoS scrit as I understand it and even with the writers' strike the script/ story holds up better than most. The films I know they had quite some influence on (notably DAD, SF and SP) have horrid scripts, sometimes saved by the filmmaking itself (SF). There's too many plot holes, the dialogues stink and it just doesn't hold together at all. Some films, like CR, have a strong narrative base and end up very good indeed, but the question is: is that to their credit, or to the credit of the underlaying narrative. I think we know the answer to that when it comes down to CR.
Lois Chiles hot? That woman may look good, but she might as well have been a mannequin. I agree Barbara doesn't have much gravitas but at least she seems like a living, breathing human beeing (@Luds disagrees here, he'd say a living, breathing alien, but still alive).
There's various versions of what was in the P & W QOS script, not sure how accurate all the claims are. Some similarities to what we eventually got: Mr. White was brought for interrogation in the boot of a car and escaped, but P & W had Bond deliberately engineering the escape so that he could track White going back to Quantum. They had Mr. White going to the Palio in Sienna, but in the P & W script he was then killed by his own side (sounds familiar). They had flashbacks showing how Vesper became tangled up with Quantum (possibly the interrogation tape) and had Bond seeing her in nightmares and thinking he saw her in the street. Eva Green said that Barbara Broccoli told her everything that they had planned for her in QOS, but the plans changed when Forster was hired as he particularly hated the idea of flashbacks.
In other parts of the P & W script, Bond killed a Quantum assassin in a rope fight (as with Mitchell) and then pretended to take on the assassin's mission to kill a woman (as with Slate and Camille), but he used it to infiltrate Quantum itself. This led to Bond finding Yusef and he then spent a 'prolonged' time torturing him in revenge for Vesper. There was also a shootout at an opera - but it was at the climax of the film and it ended with Bond as a silhouette against the eye on the stage set. 'The man who was only a silhouette', etc.
I hate to be fair to them, but with all this, I can see why P & W's names are still on the credits, even though they seem to have been off the project at an early date.
That would have been a better sequel to CR....DC said that he had to modify the writing to help make Forster's QoS more of a sequel to CR as well though Forster insisted on never using flashbacks or much of Eva Green....wow, what a waste!
I'm pissed at Forster.
Forster was right to ditch the flashbacks. They're not necessary. Killing off Mr. White would also have been a bad idea. There was an obsession with haphazardly bumping off important characters during the Craig era. It's very strange, especially given that it's a strict continuity that would benefit from keeping characters alive for successive films. Honestly what we got sounds better to me, though I do like the idea of Bond's silhouette against the eye.
That would have made an excellent gun barrel sequence!
yep, I agree. The P&W story seems too thin for me. Too many unconvincing proposals. The sihouette thing is cool though.
I understand it's important to have writers that understand/know Fleming, but that should not outweigh their writing qualities. And writing a proper spy story is not easy at all.
That’s why EON always brings other writers. P&W are the Fleming nerds, and then the pro writers are brought in to make something out of it.
This is probably why SP was off. Logan was the one to kick it off and then P&W were brought into rewrite it. And then that turned out disastrous which is why production was postponed for two months so other writers can clean up as much as they can.
Remember, ever since DAD was made, people had to be reminded that 007 is a spy and that character-driven stories are what viewers find interesting.
Fleming being adapted to film more closely has often proven for a better movie outcome. OHMSS and CR were closely tied to their title books...other films only took inspiration or intershared scenes away from one another (like how FYEO took the LALD boat-dragging scene).
The DC era had a lot of job security for the films because they had Ian Fleming's novel for CR, they had a lead actor who cared about many aspects of the production and wasn't simply there to collect a paycheck only. He focused on putting his best foot forward. And he never got too comfortable in simply showing up to filming.
Save for Lazenby, you could say the other actors were interested in the films and the production, albeit to lesser degrees than Craig, but still influential. Connery worked with Terence Young to set the Bond style and criticized the GF script, calling the moment Oddjob crushed the golf ball as stupid. But Cubby and Harry didn't really want to give him any more, just preferring him to show up, say his lines and go through the motions.
Moore always said all he tried to inject into Bond is humor and Richard Maibaum said they worked the scripts to his strengths. But he also complained about Bond kicking Loque's car over the cliff in FYEO as something he just doesn't do. Obviously, they worked to make Dalton's films work to his desire to play it closer to what Fleming had in mind, always talking about the books. And Brosnan often said he wasn't satisfied with the quality of scripts he got and longed to do more of the style Craig's films did.