Nobody does it better, p.7
Nobody Does it Better, page 7
KEVIN MCCLORY
(producer, Thunderball)
I was pretty tired, because Around the World went on for nearly two years, so I went to the Bahamas. Prior to working on Around the World in 80 Days, I had spent a lot of time underwater. I’m very keen on oceanography; I’m very keen on everything beneath the ocean. So I was in the Bahamas, taking my first holiday in a long time. I remember walking and thinking, “My God, if you took Todd A-O [a recently developed type of wide-screen motion picture camera] cameras underwater, it would be fantastic.” No one had made an underwater picture since 20,000 Leagues, and part of that was shot in the Bahamas. That was by Disney, and they got kind of leery about it: there wasn’t that much equipment at the time. I started taking a really good look at this from the point of view of the entertainment business, so I started mulling whether to make an underwater picture or not.
ROBERT SELLERS
Then he had an idea to do this film called The Boy and the Bridge, which was a very low-key, sentimental film, almost, about a young boy who lives on the Tower Bridge. He’s sort of an orphan living there, and befriends somebody who works there. I’ve never seen it; it’s just a film that’s completely forgotten and vanished. He was looking for finance for that movie and he met a guy called Ivar Bryce, who was a financier, philanthropist, and friend of Fleming—significantly.
KEVIN MCCLORY
I started thinking about driving around the world. Eventually I did that; I did it for the Ford Motor Company. They put the money up, and it took us 104 days. We had 26 men, two camera crews, five cars.… On the way, I read Reader’s Digest. There was a little short story by an American writer named Ian Ware, about a boy who ran away from home and made his home on the San Francisco bridge. I read this, and kind of liked it, so on the way back (because the cars got to Saigon, and then we flew back while the cars were shipped to San Francisco, for the final journey to Detroit) I ran into Mike Todd in Hawaii, in Honolulu. He wanted me to come back and work for him, but I had decided I didn’t want to work for anyone anymore. You know, it was about time I did something on my own, so I told him. I’ll always remember this: he said, “Well, what are you going to do?” and I said, “Make an underwater picture, in very wide screen.” But then I’d just read this story and he said, “Tell me about it,” so I told him about the boy who ran away from home and all that, and I said, “I think I’ll switch it to London; Tower Bridge, and a Cockney kid. It’ll have a lot of appeal and human interest.” He said, “Kevin, make the underwater picture,” and I said, “Why do you say that?” He said, “Well, I know you, and if you make this boy and the bridge film, you’ll go to festivals and win a lot of awards. But remember: You can’t eat awards.” Prophetic words!
ROBERT SELLERS
Bryce wanted to get into the film business and liked the story, so he backed the film. They went ahead and made it and formed a production company called Xanadu. They thoroughly enjoyed their experience, I think. McClory directed, Bryce produced. Neither had ever made a film before. They fell in love with the filmmaking bug. And they decided, “Let’s do another one.”
KEVIN MCCLORY
I went and made The Boy and the Bridge; I produced it, I directed it, I wrote it. I set it up without a distributor, I got somebody to back it, and I made it. And sure enough, he was right. It represented Britain at the Venice Film Festival, and it went to Spain, and the Cook Film Festival.… I’ve got a lot of awards now to remind me of what he said. The box office was absolutely nothing. It got interest from critics, who were divided. It was never seen anywhere outside of England.
It’s in black and white.… I think it would be an interesting show for children. But that set me back to, “I better make some pennies, otherwise…” Well, you know the industry, and unless you’re a financial success no one’s prepared to back you. I went back to the Bahamas, and then I started writing an underwater story set in the Bahamas. It was at this time I was introduced to Ian Fleming through the man who put up the money for The Boy and the Bridge, and this was in 1959.
ROBERT SELLERS
They talked about various ideas. I think they were going to do a film about Alcatraz or something like that. And then one day Bryce just asked him, “Do you know the James Bond books?” McClory knew of them, but hadn’t read one. Bryce suggested he read four or five of them, which he did. He wasn’t entirely blown away by them, didn’t think they were particularly good, especially from the point of view of making them into a film. He thought they were a little bit sadistic, which they are, of course. “Sadism for the family.” But the central character of James Bond he thought was terrific. He thought, “This is a potentially terrific screen hero.”
KEVIN MCCLORY
I read them, and said that I’d like to meet Fleming. Now at that time no one had made a Bond. Fleming had sold two of his books: Moonraker, which he sold for $5,000 and later bought back for $5,000; and Casino Royale, which was bought by Gregory Ratoff, who I used to work for (I did a picture with him). He bought Casino Royale, tried hard to set it up, but no distributor, sadly, was interested, and he died, owning the property. The rights passed to his widow, who later sold them to Charlie Feldman. I was very intrigued by it, so I met with Fleming, and I told him that I’d enjoyed reading the books, but I didn’t think they were particularly visual; that each and every one of them would have to be rewritten for the screen—written in a visual sense.
ROBERT SELLERS
When you think about it, he was absolutely right about the books not being filmable, because when Richard Maibaum came along and started writing the Connery Bonds from Dr. No onwards, he heavily adapted them, and changed an awful lot. From Russia with Love is probably the closest to the novel. A lot of criticism of the Bond films is that they aren’t the Fleming books. I mean, look at You Only Live Twice—completely readapted. Live and Let Die is a completely different film than the book. Diamonds Are Forever is as well. If you were to faithfully adapt those books to the screen, I don’t think they would have worked. It’s the reason McClory said, “Look, let’s start from scratch. Just start with Bond and then create a story around him,” which is what they did.
KEVIN MCCLORY
James Bond leapt out of the page; he was totally visual to me. “You really have something here,” I said, “but what I’d like to do is to take the character and put him in an underwater setting, in the Bahamas. I’m working on a story right now.… Let’s put him in this opulent setting.” In those days, in 1959, the Bahamas was kind of a paradise to people from Europe, and other places where they couldn’t afford to get there. Palm trees, beautiful women, multimillionaires, and yachts, private clubs, white beaches and azure seas … I mean, the atmosphere was right for Bond. And underwater, I was very keen on, and no one had really utilized it, other than Disney.
STEVEN JAY RUBIN
Fleming’s new agent, Laurence Evans of MCA, told him plainly that young, inexperienced directors did not attract big-name stars. He advised him to consider another director for the project, and although Fleming took the point Evans was making, plans went ahead with McClory with an entirely new adventure that would feature plot and production values geared to a film audience.
KEVIN MCCLORY
Fleming asked me to reread Live and Let Die and Diamonds Are Forever, and I said, “But I’d be reading what I read.” I had taken these books and gone away and really read them carefully, so I said, “Why don’t you collaborate with me; why don’t we write together?” And he said, “Okay”—he was interested. He saw The Boy and the Bridge and liked it enormously, he said. Then he said, “I’d like to work with you.” I said, “Alright, we’ll begin whenever you like.” That was the conceiving, right then, really, of Thunderball.
ROBERT SELLERS
In July 1959, the deal was done. Fleming wrote a letter, which I saw, saying he wanted Kevin McClory, Ivar Bryce, and Xanadu Productions [the company they’d started] to do the first James Bond film. They had his permission and that was it.
KEVIN MCCLORY
We worked on a number of treatments and film scripts … a six-page outline would be thrown on the side.… In one we had the Mafia get Bond.
ROBERT SELLERS
When Fleming actually sat down to write a film treatment, he forgot about SPECTRE, or thought it wasn’t a good idea, and replaced SPECTRE with the Mafia. And it was only when he wrote the book that he replaced the Mafia and put SPECTRE back in.
KEVIN MCCLORY
He was using the term SMERSH as the villains then, and I said, “That’s kind of old hat, making Russians always villains, and black people always villains, like that. We should consider another kind of organization,” and that was the birth of SPECTRE in 1959, which you might find surprising, because you find it in Dr. No, and you find it in From Russia with Love, but you won’t find it if you read the novels. SPECTRE—the organization with Ernst Stavro Blofeld—was created for Thunderball. Anyway, we generally developed various stories and ideas, and mulled them about, and changed them, and altered them again, and so a number of scripts were written.
ROBERT SELLERS
They had this meeting in London with this other chap who came from America, called Ernest Cuneo, who, again, was a friend of Fleming and a friend of Bryce. He was an American lawyer, and they had a big meeting, where all these ideas were thrown around. After the meeting, Cuneo wrote a memo, which he sent to Fleming, which is this famous memo that has been reproduced in quite a few Bond books, where he writes down a plot for a Bond film, from everybody’s ideas that were thrown around at this meeting. It’s incredible how relatively similar it is to the finished product of Thunderball itself. It’s the stolen atom bomb, a big underwater fight at the end. It’s all there. It’s fascinating. Although the villains were going to be the Russians, which, when Fleming read the memo, he thought was a little dated. He thought by the time the film was made and came out, possibly two or three years, the Cold War might be over. So the film would look outdated if the Russians were still the enemy. So he thought of some kind of private organization that were the villains, and he created, then and there, SPECTRE. That’s how SPECTRE was created.
RAY MORTON
The core idea for Thunderball was devised by Ernest Cuneo. Ian Fleming developed it over several treatments and script drafts, but Fleming wasn’t a screenwriter and couldn’t figure out how to make the story play for the screen.
KEVIN MCCLORY
Fleming wasn’t really a screenwriter, and he was working for The Sunday Times, and they had things for him to do, and he kind of did less and less, so I employed Jack Whittingham; that’s how he came into it. He and I completed the screenplay for Thunderball in 1959.
RAY MORTON
Whittingham was a very experienced, and very good, screenwriter, and was brought in to turn Fleming’s story into a workable script, which he did. He developed the narrative, came up with a much more workable structure and plot, and contributed to a number of important set pieces.
ROBERT SELLERS
The fascinating thing of having all the court papers when I was researching my book was that I had about two and a half years’ worth of correspondence, of letters. They were writing to each other on a daily basis for two and a half years. So you would have letters from McClory to Bryce, Bryce to Fleming, Fleming to McClory, Fleming to Bryce, and they were all on other sides of the world. And that was absolutely fascinating, because I put them all in order. It took me about four or five days to read this correspondence, but it told the whole story, in their own words. And about halfway through, you can see that the wheels are falling off. You can see that Fleming is starting to put doubts into Bryce’s mind about whether or not McClory is the right person, because McClory was going to direct the movie.
Nonetheless, behind the scenes, plans were starting to converge—unbeknownst to McClory—to find somebody else to direct the film. And that somebody else was no less than the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.
ROBERT SELLERS
When McClory discovered that, I think the writing was on the wall for him. By this time, the film that he’d made to set the whole thing rolling, The Boy and the Bridge, had been released and been a huge flop. So Fleming started to have second thoughts that McClory wasn’t a capable director. Also, it was getting a little too big for McClory to handle, because McClory was saying things like he was thinking of renting an American warship, the USS Indianapolis or something. “They’ll let us have it for a few days.” It was getting really big.
JAMES CHAPMAN
After North by Northwest, Hitchcock was certainly sounded out about the possibility of directing James Bond of the Secret Service (the film that eventually became Thunderball and prompted the court battle between McClory and Fleming). But Hitchcock was always being sounded out about various projects. It was discussed briefly, but was more an idea rather than a concrete initiative. They knew that Hitchcock’s name would bring prestige, but at the same time would mean surrendering control over the film—and in any event, McClory’s budget wasn’t enough to afford Hitchcock.
ROBERT SELLERS
Hitchcock was actually interested for quite a few months. He was hemming and hawing, and there are lots of letters to and fro. There’s one amazing letter where they’re saying, “If Hitch does it, he wants James Stewart to play Bond.” And Fleming saying, “It wouldn’t be so bad if he loses the accent.” Ivar Bryce writes back to Fleming and castigates him, and says, “What are you even thinking that James Stewart is the perfect choice for Bond? He’s so wrong.” The other fear was that if Hitchcock did it, he would take complete control, which he did on his films. He produced and directed them, and he cast them. So it wouldn’t have been a Bond film as such, it would become a Hitchcock film. But the reason they thought Hitchcock would be perfect was because of North by Northwest.
JAMES O. NAREMORE
North by Northwest is a mildly anti–Cold War film whose bad-guy spies aren’t connected to a particular nation—they prefigure the fantastic Dr. Evils of the Bond franchise, but are more understated and realistic. The picture also prefigures Bond, because it’s a glamorous, VistaVision spectacular involving a handsome Madison Avenue ad man and a seductive blonde; it’s a travelogue, and its design is well suited to the emerging world of Playboy-style consumer culture. But I find it more witty, sophisticated, and fun than the Bond pictures. Though I like very much the first two Bonds, Dr. No and From Russia with Love, the first because Bond sometimes seems a cold-blooded killer, and the second because of its train journey, which has many of the fascinations of trains in Hitchcock.
ROBERT SELLERS
This was for me one of the big revelations of my research for the book [The Battle for Bond]: it was Fleming himself who sent a telegram to the director via a mutual friend, the writer Eric Ambler. Hitchcock was genuinely interested, although it was feared by some that his sheer “weight” of celebrity would overwhelm the project. And with Fleming being so willing to accept James Stewart, I think by this stage he was so desperate to get his novels on the screen he would have had J. Edgar Hoover play the role. It really was an insane suggestion, though. Can you see James Stewart driving an Aston Martin or fighting Robert Shaw aboard the Orient Express?
JAMES O. NAREMORE
It’s hard for me to imagine what Hitchcock would have done with Fleming—Hitchcock’s approach to sex was rarely exhibitionistic: no cheesecake. His violence is more disturbing than Fleming’s sadism, and his humor isn’t Bond-like.
JAMES STRATTON
I don’t think Hitchcock and Bond would have been a successful match. Hitchcock was more subtle and more interested in ambiguity. Bond would have been a bit too straightforward and the tight Bond formula would not have allowed for his personal preoccupations.
While for many Bond fans the “what if?” of Alfred Hitchcock is intriguing, there is no certainty that if he had directed the first Bond film, there would have been any others. He certainly was not known for sequels, and 007 could have very well been a one-off film in a long and distinguished filmography.
JAMES CHAPMAN
I’m pretty sure Hitchcock would not have committed to directing a series of films, so if it had happened, and if it had led to more films, they would in all likelihood have been by other directors.
ROBERT SELLERS
In the letters and telegrams that passed back and forth between the main protagonists, it was only ever mentioned that Hitch would come in to make Thunderball, nothing about him carrying on with the series. I very much doubt he would have made more than one Bond film. Now, would the film have been a success with Hitch at the helm? Very much so; he was too good a director to louse things up. In many ways he was the perfect director for 007: he had a terrific and dark sense of humor, knew everything there was to know about film suspense—indeed, he invented it!—and was adept at handling action. Witness the amazing climax on Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest. Hitch certainly knew how to end a picture.
As a side note, some of the early Bond films were described as Hitchcockian by some critics. Also, in From Russia with Love there is an homage to the famous crop duster sequence from North by Northwest when Bond is attacked by a low-flying helicopter. Or was this an in-joke by the filmmakers, a nod to how close Hitchcock came to directing a Bond film?
As it turned out, those covert discussions with Hitchcock were the least of the problems that McClory would find himself dealing with when it came to the world of James Bond and Ian Fleming. For starters, Gregory Ratoff was actively pursuing development on Casino Royale, which was being reported on by the media. Those rights were a revelation to McClory, who, again, had been promised—in writing—the ability to make the first James Bond film.
ROBERT SELLERS
He felt betrayed: that the right to make the first James Bond film, given to him by Fleming in a signed statement, had been stolen from him by others, and this sense of betrayal was a flame that burned brightly within him right up until his death. To be fair, he exploited the situation, too. When Broccoli and Saltzman came on the scene and made a success of the Bond films, McClory immediately stepped up his plans to make Thunderball, which he announced would go into production at the same time as Goldfinger. You could say he was jumping on the bandwagon, hoping either Richard Burton or Laurence Harvey would play Bond. There’s a funny story of Honor Blackman meeting Prince Philip at some society ball, and when she revealed she was making a Bond film, the prince asked, “Which one?” Miss Blackman politely told him it was the one starring Sean Connery. This was the same society ball that resulted in newspaper headlines the next day saying, “Pussy Meets the Prince,” and persuaded the producers that they could get away with using that name in the film without causing a public outcry.
