Last year saw the release of “007’s Road To A Million”, the reality TV contest series hosted by Brian Cox in which different people need to recreate Bond-inspired stunts in their bid to win a million dollars.
Despite Eon’s claims to the contrary, it is commonly accepted the show only exists as a compromise between them and MGM’s new owner Amazon, for whom the Bond series will be the crown jewel of their new acquisition and a vital pawn on their side of the streaming wars. Basically, Amazon want regular James Bond streaming “content” and Eon just want to make major theatrical experiences every few years. A reality TV show seems an obvious middle-ground, giving Amazon what they want cheaply (the real reason reality TV dominates the television landscape today) and with very little effort from Eon’s part: no scripts to develop, no set-pieces to plan, no hundreds of millions of dollars to raise.
The candidates for a Bond TV series are many. An obvious one would be something based around the original Ian Fleming books as they are both period pieces and much more serialised than most of the films were, offering something potentially familiar but different for fans of the films. Another candidate, the spin-off series, has already been tested, as the 90s saw a James Bond Jr TV series which also span off into comic books, novels and video games.
But for this pitch we have to take on both Amazon and Eon’s requirements. Not only does this need to use the Bond name and iconography, but also this needs to be at little time or expense for Eon. And the answer seems obvious: why not use work Eon has already done?
With decades of treatments and screenplays that Eon has developed but, for one reason or another, not brought to the screen and many animation studios in Asia which make their living making films and TV series produced in the west (Rick and Morty, Blade Runner: Black Lotus, The Lord of The Rings: War of the Rohirrim), Amazon seems to be sitting on the mother of PR scoops: a series of new adventures starring previous Bond. For the cost of a couple of weeks in a soundbooth (outside of the cartoon production costs I mean), George Lazenby’s Bond could deal with Tracey’s death and get his revenge on Blofeld, Timothy Dalton could round-out his Bond film Trilogy, Pierce Brosnan could get a final film he can be proud of and Daniel Craig can get a mission to fill in the blank between his rookie period (Casino Royale/Quantum of Solace) and his “old dog” days (Skyfall/Spectre/No Time To Die). Not to mention, fans would get to experience a few what-ifs, such as John Landis’s Moore film, Quentin Tarantino’s Brosnan film or Danny Boyle’s Craig film.
Some compromises might need to be made of course. Sadly, we are two actors down (RIP Sean Connery and Roger Moore), and as I categorially refute the idea that an AI generated version of them would be anything better than passing off a mute plasticine Wallace as Peter Sallis, we may unfortunately just have to do without them. Likewise, as far as I know no sequel to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was ever written with George Lazenby in mind, as he had given up on the idea of reprising his role by the time that film premiered. As far as I know, the only unused script between the versions of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969 and Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 that we got was one that mutated into involving the vengeance of Goldfinger’s twin brother which, if it exists as a full script, still wouldn’t help us with our Lazenby sequel. While there was a treatment for a Lazenby Diamonds Are Forever which kicked off with the death of Irma Bund, the fact it would still need Eon to develop it into a full screenplay might put it in the “too much work” camp.
However there is a later script, one written for Roger Moore, who we couldn’t otherwise homage, which might do the trick. It opens with Bond trying to get revenge on Blofeld, attacking his hideout and in which Blofeld definitely dies. A script which was seen at the time to be wrong for Moore as it wrote him “in the Connery” mould. I am speaking, of course, of the first, unused version of The Spy Who Loved Me.
In this script by Richard Maibaum, an alliance of international terrorists—including the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Black September Organization, and the Japanese Red Army—attack SPECTRE’s headquarters in Norway and depose Ernst Stavro Blofeld, before trying to destroy the world with nuclear SLBM attacks on the world’s petroleum reservoirs to make way for a New World Order. Now, we might need some tweaking, but this sounds like a decent follow-up to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, at least with For Your Eyes Only and The World Is Not Enough being unavailable, and an intriguing concept for fans of both Lazenby and Moore.
This would bring us to Timothy Dalton. Dalton had several 3rd film scripts written for him before a lawsuit got in the way and delayed it until it eventually had to morph into Brosnan’s first film, Goldeneye. The one which eventually mutated into Goldeneye might be the one to go with here, as it is definitely a full script, has the personal angle that suited Dalton best (a Anthony Hopkins-style mentor rather than Sean Bean-style equal) and means we don’t need to go near the script with the cyborgs.
Brosnan has several potential scripts. Firstly, we should mention Everything Or Nothing, the video game many people already consider Brosnan’s true Bond Swansong as it features his likeness and voice, and came out after Die Another Day. It was also written by Brosnan’s usual Bond film writer, Bruce Feirnstein, who had written his first three Brosnan Bonds Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough, and would go on to write Connery’s video game From Russia With Love (also Connery’s last performance as Bond. Maybe Feirstein is the real supervillain here). However, as Everything Or Nothing already exist in the public eye, we will dismiss it, only noting that our Other Potential Brosnan Final Adventure can be considered either his 5th or sixth film.
One of our candidates, discarded in favour of Tomorrow Never Dies, was adapted by its writer into the novel Forever and a Death (a title that is very close to a later James Bond novel, Forever And A Day). His own personal choice for a fifth and last film was Casino Royale, for which he approached Quentin Tarantino, who wanted to make it in black and white and set in the 1950s, an idea which seems preposterous right after Die Another Day, but entirely reasonable for a one-off animated “What-If?” film for streaming. But what does that matter, since Tarantino never wrote that script, meaning the idea is now entirely out of the remit of this exercise.
Or… is it?
Yes, the Tarantino script doesn’t exist, but is there a period set screenplay for Casino Royale, written by a celebrated writer, that went unused?
As a matter of fact, there is. A script by none other than Ben Hecht, writer of several Hitchcock films including Spellbound and Notorious, as well as Scarface and the screen version of the novel A Farewell To Arms, which Timothy Dalton’s Bond referenced in License To Kill. He was also an uncredited hand on Stagecoach, The Thing From Another World, Mutiny On The Bounty, Foreign Correspondent, Gone With The Wind, A Star Is Born, Monkey Business, and several more Hitchcock films such as Rope and Lifeboat. It was written in the 1960s, potentially for Sean Connery, in an attempt to set up a rival series to the Eon one, which later morphed into a disastrous spoof film.
I think that would do, don’t you? And we get our Connery What-If, like we got our Moore one earlier with Lazenby.
But that still leaves one Bond, doesn’t it.
Some might say we don’t need one from our most recent Bond, Daniel Craig. Some are even pleased to see the back of him. But, as a Bond, and a critically acclaimed and commercially successful one at that, if we can have him we should.
And contrary to what might be believed by the long gaps and awkward jumps of the Craig era, we do in fact have some scripts for him. Firstly, we should mention Bloodstone, the video game released and set between Quantum of Solace and Skyfall, with Daniel Craig’s likeness and voice, the closest thing we have to both a Craig Bond in his prime and a transition between Quantum and Spectre, both the films and the organisations, and written by the afore-mentioned seasoned Bond film writer, Bruce Feirnstein, who would also write the Craig video-game version of Goldeneye 007. However, we will need to dismiss Bloodstone for the same reason we dismissed Everything or Nothing, leaving us two other potential mid period Craig adventures, Peter Morgan’s Once Upon A Spy/Nothing Is Forever and Danny Boyle’s Unnamed film.
The former has been described as being in the style of John Le Carre, and was an early attempt at a 3rd Bond film for Craig. Several ideas from it would eventually make their way into Skyfall, included a mistake from M’s past coming back to haunt her and M dying at the end, though here the mistake was an affair with a KGB agent in Berlin during the cold war leading to a son, a Russian oligarch, surfacing in the present to blackmail the spymaster. Bond was then called in to tackle the villain, but is forced to kill M at the movie’s denouement.
Admittedly at least some of the script would need to be jettisoned due to its influence and contradictions with Skyfall. We might therefore have more luck with another unused Craig Bond script, which also dealt with a Russian Oligarch. Though little is known about it, its director Danny Boyle said. “Weirdly—it would have been very topical now—it was all set in Russia, which is of course where Bond came from, out of the Cold War. It was set in present-day Russia and went back to his origins, and they just lost, what’s the word… they just lost confidence in it.”
I think that would work.
We might even have enough for a Season Two of our What-If Bond-Style, as there are other unused Bond scripts. These include a Dalton/Brosnan Thunderball remake called Warhead 4000, a mostly original script co-written by Sean Connery himself (written with spy-thriller writer Len Deighton, the script focused on SPECTRE shooting down aircraft over the Bermuda Triangle, before taking over Liberty Island and Ellis Island as staging areas for an invasion of New York City through the sewers under Wall Street), and a Casino Royale play written by Bond continuation author Raymond Benson, to say nothing of more scripts Eon themselves may have written and shelved, or the scripts Ian Fleming is said to have written himself (not counting Thunderball).
But what do you think of these ideas? Would you like to see these turned into a 4 part animated series made for streaming?
Oliver Giggins
REFERENCES.
Jeremy Dunn, 2020. Dunn On Bond.
Mark Edlitz, 2020. The Lost Adventures Of James Bond.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/20/lost-james-bond-film-once-upon-a-spy-007-killing-m
The Verbal Diarist 