James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  A variety of writers and illustrators were responsible for Dark Horse’s fifteen Bond comics, which ranged from a one-off to a four-parter. Quality and creator perspective naturally varied (in Serpent’s Tooth, Bond tussles with a genetically revived dinosaur), but this mattered less than the fact that, during their four-year ownership of the licence, Dark Horse published more Bond comics/graphic novels than had all previous English-language Bond comic publishers combined. Moreover, there was an adult-oriented sensibility to their publications that allowed such things as nudity, thus giving them a flavour of Fleming.

  This flurry of Bond comics activity came to an end with the expiry of Dark Horse’s licence, after which it wasn’t even back to business as usual but something worse. Topps took over the licensing rights in time for the publication of a three-part adaptation of the ‘comeback’ Bond movie GoldenEye. The project was a catastrophe. The first issue duly appeared, cover-dated January 1996, and was of high quality. Yet issues two and three were seen only in a very small, privately printed run sold at comics conventions. The racy style of artist Claude St Aubin seems to have delayed the second issue, and the momentum lost while approval was being sought from Danjaq kiboshed not only the remaining two issues but a putative regular Topps Bond title. Once again, it provoked the thought that James Bond comics were cursed.

  A case in point: in 2008, Puffin published a graphic novel adaptation of Young Bond novel Silver Fin. Although it was award-nominated, a mooted line of further Young Bond graphic novels never materialised.

  All was silence again until 2014, when Dynamite Entertainment were announced as the new 007 comic licensees. The New Jersey publisher’s stated plans revolved as much around the wider Bond universe as 007 himself. They spoke of their line – which started in November 2015 – portraying not just the adventures of the mature Bond, but a younger, pre-Casino Royale 007, as well as exploring the lives of Bond-supporting characters and villains.

  It may, though, be too late for Bond to finally prosper in comics the way he has in almost all other media. The medium is no longer the big component of the childhood experience it was when Bondmania was at its apex in the mid-sixties. Any twenty-first-century parent will tell you that their kids spurn comics for video games.

  The six-and-a-half-year gap between Licence to Kill and the next Bond movie was more than double the length of any previous hiatus.

  As might be expected, the reasons for the interregnum in the most successful film series on the planet were serious. In 1988, while filming Licence to Kill, Timothy Dalton told fan magazine Bondage, ‘My feeling is this will be the last one. I don’t mean my last one. I mean the end of the whole lot.’ He was clearly in the loop about something not yet on the public radar. It reached that public radar on 8 August 1990, when Cubby Broccoli put Danjaq up for sale. Broccoli’s asking price has been reported as anything from $166 million to $200 million, but either way he found no takers, possibly because of the perennial financial problems of the studio with which the Bond property was intertwined.

  While the companies swooping on the increasingly troubled MGM were partly attracted by the value of the Bond franchise, the attraction was not reciprocated. Particularly vexing to Danjaq was the fact that when in 1990 Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti bought MGM through his company Pathé Communications Corporation, he did not actually have the $1.2 billion selling price and got around that problem by pledging to creditors access to MGM assets, prominent among which was the Bond series. Broccoli felt that there would ensue a cheapening of the Bond series by the selling of TV rights at bargain-basement prices. Danjaq sued to prevent the deals going ahead. The stasis meant that MGM couldn’t afford to fund a Bond movie, and, because they held an exclusive licence to do so, it meant nobody could.

  Ultimately, Danjaq was taken off the market. Public comments by Michael G. Wilson suggest that putting it up for sale had only been a tactical manoeuvre designed to establish a value for the Bond franchise, but in 2012 Bond documentary Everything or Nothing Barbara Broccoli claimed that the move was her father’s anguished response to the conviction that his final few years would be spent in law courts.

  Even without the problems with the distributor, things were awry with cinema Bond. The increasingly ailing Broccoli had left the day-to-day operations of Danjaq/Eon in the hands of his stepson and daughter. Their market research was showing that young male cinemagoers were only vaguely aware of James Bond. Possibly related to that fact is that the year 1990 saw John Glen and Richard Maibaum informed they would not be working on a Bond film again. An unnamed Eon employee even gracelessly claimed in Variety that the eighty-year-old Maibaum was a ‘has-been’. (One wonders what said employee felt about the vintage of Cubby Broccoli, born a month prior to Maibaum.)

  Then were other reasons to believe that the world had left James Bond behind.

  In December 1989, American president George H.W. Bush had declared the Cold War to be over. Licence to Kill had been the only Bond film not released while the Cold War was running and it had flopped. The assumed connection between the two facts was dubious for more than the reason that the film Bond had never quite been a Cold Warrior. Nonetheless, the general public perceived 007 as a character predicated on tensions between the West and the USSR, a geopolitical alliance that had been dissolved at the end of 1991.

  It wasn’t only politically that Bond seemed old-fashioned. True Lies (1994) was the latest in a line of movies that were felt to have stolen Bond’s thunder. That the protagonist secret agent was a married man grappling not just with bad guys but the problems caused him by his troubled teenaged daughter made Bond’s perennial tomcat lifestyle look shallow, even undignified. The greater realism granted cinema espionage by Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan films also gave pause.

  Accordingly, even when the legal issues had been resolved, there were postponements to and rewrites of the next Bond picture that indicated the occurrence of much agonising.

  There was also a clear-out among Bond staff, onscreen and backstage, whether it was through death, retirement or the new recalibration changing times had made necessary. As well as Glen and Maibaum, never to be seen again in Bond credits were Maurice Binder, Bob Simmons, Robert Brown, Caroline Bliss, John Grover (long-term editor) and Alec Mills (long term cameraman/director of photography/cinematographer). The biggest change, though, was the man playing 007.

  Whenever he has been asked, Timothy Dalton is always careful to give the impression that the decision for him to vacate the Bond role was his. For instance, in 2014 he told Scott Meslow of theweek.com that Broccoli said to him, ‘There’s no way, after a five-year gap between movies that you can come back and just do one. You’d have to plan on four or five.’ Dalton said he declined: ‘I thought, oh, no, that would be the rest of my life. Too much. Too long.’

  Yet United Artists executives Jeff Kleeman and Alan Ladd Jr, when spoken to by authors Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury, bluntly communicated the message that Dalton departed at the insistence of the studio. ‘The Dalton Bonds had not performed significantly well at the box office,’ said Kleeman. ‘We were trying to introduce Bond to a new audience. It seemed counterintuitive to what we were trying to accomplish to continue on with Timothy at that point.’ Eon were probably powerless in this: some had noted that the studio’s marketing of Licence to Kill could be viewed as half-hearted or, if one was really inclined, sabotage.

  Dalton brought a trademark to his Bond – pulling the top of his tuxedo jacket across to a Velcro attachment to create a ready-for-action turtleneck effect – but wasn’t really in the role long enough for his tenure to constitute an era. However, in his short occupancy, he brought a much-needed vigour and merciful absence of smugness to the James Bond series. Most of each of his films was better than any Bond picture of the previous decade.

  It is in terms of legacy, though, that his brief reign has had the greatest impact. When Dalton made his Bond entrée, an increasingly digital world was just beginning to use the term ‘reboo
t’ to refer to the function of restarting a computer. The term was yet to acquire the wider meaning of a fresh beginning for a long-running but waning media property. However, a reboot is precisely what Dalton gave cinema Bond. His urgent, intense and naturalistic portrayal has set the trend for the two subsequent Bond actors, and of course such a portrayal dictates the timbre and quality of scripts. That the farcicality and the complacency that began to set into the Bond series from around 1965 onwards are now, apparently permanently, things of the past is largely due to Timothy Dalton.

  Even as the days of a Bond-film family atmosphere started to come to an end, Danjaq and Eon became even more of a clan affair as Barbara Broccoli climbed the ranks to join her stepbrother as producer. Michael G. Wilson at this point relinquished any further formal role in screenwriting.

  Martin Campbell became the first new Bond director in a decade-and-a-half. He was probably best known for his television work, including Reilly, Ace of Spies (whose real-life protagonist Sidney Reilly has been suggested by some as a prototype for Bond) and the acclaimed 1985 BBC drama series Edge of Darkness. His 1994 science-fiction motion picture No Escape starring Ray Liotta made little money but won many fans, including John Calley of UA/MGM, who recruited him.

  The new Bond film would be called GoldenEye. Although given a consultancy credit, Campbell reports that a ‘very ill’ Cubby Broccoli played no active role in the film’s production.

  The preparation stage of the movie was almost certainly the most intense since that for Dr. No. On that movie, the franchise was being birthed. Here it was being given a rebirth. Eon and their distributor were cognisant of the fact that, for really the first time since that debut, they could not rely on an audience being automatically there for the latest Bond instalment. ‘There was certainly a lot of publicity about, “Is Bond past its sell-by date?” because the gap had been so long, and was it so relevant in the nineties and should they be making another Bond?’ says Campbell. A drastic change of tone was deemed necessary. Campbell: ‘What we did was two things. One, we had a female M, which was a big change, and, secondly, we have a scene between M and Bond where she calls him a dinosaur, a relic from the Cold War, et cetera, et cetera. So we kind of addressed it so she spells it out in a way that perhaps the audience might be asking themselves … We had to drag it well into the nineties.’

  Another change was the absence of smoking on the part of the hero. Campbell says, ‘Smoking was a big issue at the time with kids who go and see Bond. I had no problem with him not smoking and I probably was part of that decision.’ However, the director dismisses rumours that he demanded the absence of cigs because he was virulently anti-smoking: ‘If you believe the press, then good luck, mate.’ This finally brought Bond’s physical prowess into line with reality: anybody with the fag habit depicted in the Fleming books and many of the Bond films would have been a wheezing wreck after a few seconds of fisticuffs.

  Another manifestation of the uncertain new era in Bond films was the limited resources available to the director. Campbell recalls, ‘Everybody felt a little bit of trepidation at whether it was going to be successful, which translated into being a little careful with the budget.’ Nonetheless, one staple of the deluxe Bond production process remained: multiple units shooting simultaneously across the globe. Campbell: ‘We had a unit in Switzerland shooting some of the action there, we had a model unit, we had a third unit shooting bits and pieces. What I would have to do is endless storyboards.’

  GoldenEye’s script is credited to Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein from a story by Michael France. The reality is less clear-cut than politics and Writers’ Guild attribution rules would suggest. Campbell recalls, ‘I had the Michael France version, then it was Jeffrey Caine, Kevin Wade – who’s the guy that wrote Working Girl – came on for a period of four weeks, and then it was Bruce Feirstein who came on, did a lot of work on it.’ Campbell also says he contributed ‘a lot’ to the scripts, although also says, ‘I can’t write. All I can do is comment, so I have absolutely no problem with the credits at all.’

  Campbell says he would ‘absolutely’ have taken the job if Dalton had still been in the Bond role. However, with Dalton gone, Campbell had the privilege of being involved in the casting of the new 007. ‘The Broccolis are terrific,’ he says. ‘Barbara and Michael are probably the best producers I’ve worked for. It’s all discussions, it’s all very democratic.’

  Liam Neeson has said that he was ‘heavily courted’ at this juncture to play Bond but turned down the role at the insistence of his wife-to-be. From that point there seems to have been little agonising about offering the role to Pierce Brosnan. ‘Pierce was pretty obviously the number-one choice,’ Campbell reveals. ‘We saw other people, but frankly I think in all our minds we knew it was going to be Pierce.’ Of those ‘other people’, he notes, ‘I hate to say it, I can’t even remember who we saw.’

  Brosnan was born in County Meath, Ireland, in 1953 and raised in London from the age of ten. The reason that the casting process was pretty much a one-horse race is that Brosnan had actually been awarded the Bond role once before. Brosnan made a name for himself during the eighties in the lead role of the blatantly Bond-esque NBC television series Remington Steele and was offered the part of Bond when Remington Steele was cancelled in 1987. In a sickening twist of fate, the publicity the Bond offer generated caused Remington Steele to be revived and Brosnan had to turn down the biggest film role in the world to fulfil his obligations on a programme that had just one further, and somewhat half-hearted, season in it. Subsequently, Brosnan appeared in more than one Bondian television commercial. He also had discussions about playing Bond with that perennial spectre (as it were) at the feast Kevin McClory: one of McClory’s fleeting, straw-grasping, lawyer-frustrated plans to exploit his ownership of a corner of the Bond universe was a live-action Bond television series.

  Brosnan was on the cusp of thirty-five when first slated to play Bond. He was forty-two when GoldenEye was premiered in LA on 13 November 1995. Ironically, Brosnan doesn’t suffer for being older, despite his crinkly forehead. Although a little wide of cheek, he has lustrous black hair, piercing blue eyes and a flawless, chiselled profile. He also inhabits with poise the well-cut suits provided by wardrobe, even if he is slightly stiff in his gun-barrel sequence, where – dressed in a tuxedo – he ends with knees unbent.

  Despite all the changes, it was decided that one thing at least must stay. ‘Bond was legendary for delivering an opening sequence that took your breath away,’ Campbell explains. ‘We just felt it was part of the iconography and it was essential that we did that. I suppose the only difference was that our prologue in GoldenEye was the beginning part of a story.’

  In the tradition of Bond films latching onto the latest crazes, the pre-title sequence includes a bungee jump – although that up-to-the-minute note loses its logic when we learn that this is a flashback to nine years previously. Bond uses this method to effect entry to the Arkangel Chemical Weapons Facility, USSR. Inside he is met by 006 – Alec Trevelyan, played compellingly by Sean Bean. The two embark on their plan to blow up the facility, making this one of the few genuine Cold War passages in the Bond films. A captured Trevelyan shouts out that Bond should finish the job. Taking him at his word, 007 flees the imminently exploding building.

  Although this film endeavours to be a bit more realistic than some Bond fare, that there are limits to this objective is illustrated by the fact that Bond loses his ticket out of enemy territory when he falls from an aeroplane about to take off, but then catches up with it by calmly freefalling. In the same unlikely vein is the fact that Bond subsequently engages in a road duel with a fiery young woman who by coincidence is one of the villains behind the case he is assigned to crack. Said woman is Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), who smokes oversize cigars and murders men during sexual congress by squeezing the life out of them with her thighs.

  The theme song is disappointingly limp. Tina Turner sings a mid-tempo, unmemorable composi
tion by U2’s Bono and The Edge that – like the theme of Thunderball – seems to confuse the title with a quality possessed by Bond. The first non-Binder title sequence since 1964 is provided by Daniel Kleinman, who delivers visuals in which the usual slinky female silhouettes symbolically walk over hammers and sickles and topple statues of communist icons.

  Although now out of titles of Fleming books, Eon keep intact a thread to Bond’s creator. GoldenEye – as it is rendered here – is brought into service as the name of a secret space-based weapon that creates a radiation pulse that leaves enemies vulnerable by destroying their communications.

  Rapidly advancing technology is also represented in the proliferation of modems and the fact that Secret Service headquarters is full of gleamingly hi-tech banks of equipment and massive screens, the latter a quantum leap from the almost patently cardboard sets of M’s and Moneypenny’s offices that had been pretty much unchanged since the start of the series.

  Then there is political correctness. There are several feminist put-downs of Bond, even as the film glorifies the macho behaviour such comments supposedly ridicule and undermine. ‘You are just trying to show off the size of your [pause] ego,’ notes a female colleague of Bond’s competitive driving. Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) is not interested in Bond romantically and suggests that his comments to her ‘could qualify as sexual harassment’. Most seismically, Bond’s boss (Judi Dench) is a woman. This development does not feel gimmicky. Although David Spedding was then chief of MI6 – named as Bond’s employers for the first time – it was now perfectly plausible to portray the organisation as headed by a female: Stella Rimington had been director general of MI5 since 1992.

  It was also of course more interesting in a dramatic sense. The writers pulled out all the stops on this score to create this exchange between M and Bond: