The Bond We Never Had

As Daniel Craig makes history in "Casino Royale", the third adaptation of Ian Fleming's 1953 novel, as the first blond James Bond, starring in the highest grossing 007 film of all time and becoming the first Bond actor to win a Best Actor award at the Evening Standard British Film Awards for his role as the former British Naval Commander, does the amazement end there? Oh no buttercup, I have even more startling Bond news, or trivia if you will. It is well known that Barry Nelson was the first film Bond in a 1954 CBS television production of "Casino Royale" and the legendary Peter Lorre was cast as Le Chiffre. After this, according to Wikipedia, 'CBS invited Fleming to write 32 episodes over a two-year period for a television show based on the James Bond character. Fleming agreed and began to write outlines for this series. When nothing ever came of this, however, Fleming grouped and adapted three of the outlines into short stories and released the 1960 anthology For Your Eyes Only along with an additional two new short stories.' This was not the end of the cinematic Bond until Sean Connery's portrayal in 1962's "Doctor No". There were two more attempts to bring Bond to the screen. There is of course the story of "Thunderball" which began as a film project colaboration between Ian Fleming, Jack Whitingham and Kevin McClory, which also went nowhere and became a novel by Fleming. McClory won the screen rights and later produced the film with Albert R. Broccoli & Harry Saltzman in 1965. In 1983 he remade it as "Never Say Never Again" and continued his quest of starting a rival Bond series with rumors of either Timothy Dalton or Pierce Brosnan in the role, up until his death in November of 2006.....but that's not why you called. DID YOU KNOW? That the novel "Moonraker", which was Roger Moore's 1973 entry in the series, was actually first in production in 1956? Dirk Bogarde was cast as James Bond, Orson Welles, who played Le Chiffre in the 1967 spoof "Casino Royale", would be Hugo Drax and also Director, and Peter Lorre, was cast in his second Bond production as Drax's sidekick Willy Krebs. Unfortunately the film was never finished but much of it was shot. Stills, lobby cards and the whole story can be found HERE. About 40 minutes of actual footage exists and plans are afoot to perhaps use it in a documentary about the film or perhaps use digital technology to construct the unshot footage. To quote the article "I mean it really is beyond bizarre," says Jhodi Mace Chambers, award-winning video artist, granddaughter of Dayton Mace, and the person primarily responsible for exhuming The Forgotten Bond Film. "I mean I had heard things, over the years, but ... it was only after Grandma died and they were clearing out the garage, and lo and behold, all these old film cans ... Imagine my excitement when I found out what they were. I'd always assumed she'd had them destroyed." For the past three years Jhodi has been waging a war on two fronts: to restore the footage, much of it badly deteriorated, for public showing; and to persuade the Bond franchise holders to allow it at least a limited arthouse release, probably integrated into a documentary about its making, and possibly even incorporating the iconic Bond Theme into a suitably retro-007 music score. "In all, we have maybe forty minutes of usable scenes," Jhodi explains. "Mr Welles" - charmingly, she refers to the director thus throughout - "had several script pages, around half the total, still to shoot. These we're hoping to re-create, or at least approximate, with the help of some digital wizardry. Right now, we're negotiating for permission to take suitable footage of Mr Bogarde, Mr Welles and other principal players from various films they made in the mid-'50s in order to synthesize, as it were, some semblance of the unshot Moonraker scenes. Maybe we'll even shoot some new stuff - who knows? Maybe the best we can do would be a series of stills, filling in the gaps, and possibly with sound, employing voice artists. It's going to take time and money, but in my belief it's a worthwhile venture. This is a Bond film like no other. Cinema history." Yes friends, like my recent "McHale's Navy" pontification, it is truly amazing the amount of useless information I can compile....enjoy!