How could this be?
Well the genesis goes back to when the first movie was in development - the first Bond film was intended to be an original story called Thunderball which had been written by Ian Fleming, Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham. McClory always claimed to have invented SPECTRE. However when the script fell by the wayside Fleming later salvaged it for his 1961 novel, Thunderball.
McClory and Whittingham sued Fleming saying that the book used many of their ideas from the aborted screenplay. The case was settled but McClory ended up retaining certain rights to the characters and plot. Later when McClory made moves to put the a movie version into production a deal was reached with Broccoli and Saltzman and the movie became the fourth James Bond movie.
However McClory had often tried to get a series of Bond movies into production based on ideas from the Thunderball script but legal battled with EON Productions kept this from happening. That was until the early 80's when EON found themselves unable to stop McClory from putting the film into production. And when news broke that Sean Connery had signed to play Bond in this unofficial Bond movie Eon were horrified.
Thus in 1983 there were two Bonds in the cinema - Octopussy had a summer opening and Never Say Never Again opened in the autumn. Which is the better Bond movie though? Well Octopussy won out financially but Never Say Never Again wasn't too far behind. And Octopussy too benefited from having all the series trademarks - the opening gun-barrel scene for one thing. And of course the regular supporting cast - Desmond Llewellyn, Louis Maxwell and Robert Brown who had succeeded Bernard Lee as M. While Never Say Never Again's biggest pull was that it had Sean Connery, the man who many considered the real James Bond.
The Bond films however had moved on since Connery's days and his performance in Never Say Never Again, whilst enjoyable, doesn't come close to the earlier movies. And like Thunderball, the film it remade, it suffered from being over long with a severe drag in its middle section. The script curiously mimiced Roger Moore's lightweight style which has never made sense to me - surely having Connery in the role was such a coup that the hard edge of the early Bond's should have been the template.
These days EON own all rights to the Thunderball scripts and no further movie adaptations can be produced. McClory died in 2006.
2 comments:
There was also the U.N.C.L.E. telefilm, The Fifteen Years Later Affair, at that same time with a scene where George Lazenby, driving an Aston Martin with the vanity plate JB on the front, witnessing Napoleon Solo in a car chase and lending a minor hand.
All three serious Bond actors playing the same character, sort of, at the same time.
What doomed NSNA was the fact that it was a lame remake of a Bond film Sir Sean had already done. Octopussy and Thunderball were both classier films.
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