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From: Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-01-19 (Sunday)
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2025 18:24:37 -0800
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On 1/21/2025 10:07 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
> Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:
>> On 1/20/2025 5:39 PM, anim8rfsk wrote:
>>> Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:
>>>> Ian J. Ball <ijball@mac.invalid> wrote:
>>>>> On 1/20/25 1:18 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
> 
>>>>>> 'Moonraker'. And yes, the physics ARE complete male bovine digestive
>>>>>> end product but its still a fun flick. :)
> 
>>>>> I have it on good authority that "Moonraker" is the best Bond film,
>>>>> EVAH!!  ;p
> 
>>>> I despise this movie on principle that they made such a horrid
>>>> adaptation of Fleming's best novel. All they had to do was set the movie
>>>> story in the 1950s, same as the novel, and it would have been a great
>>>> movie. We don't need Bond In Space in, essentially, a remake of major
>>>> elements of You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me.
> 
>>>> Why not set the movie in the 1950s? There's absolutely no continuity.
>   
>>> So what about the book requires it to be set in the 50s?
> 
>> Apparently the original written story was about a billionaire building a
>> nuclear missile to nuke London.
> 
>> By this point in the movie series Fleming was long dead and they weren't
>> really "adapting" the books, they were using them as inspiration for
>> their own scripts/stories.
> 
> During Fleming's lifetime too! Fleming's plot from the Goldfinger novel
> wasn't used. The novel's scheme by Goldfinger was poorly thought out.
> 
>> One of the extras included footage of Chubby
>> Broccoli discussing basically how out of date the Fleming story was and
>> how they needed to "update" it to the current times.
> 
> The novel's plot was out of date shortly after it had been written, once
> it became known that the American government gave nuclear weapons to the
> UK and France. No, France didn't invent the Bomb as De Gaulle claimed,
> not that anyone believed him. It doesn't matter. It should have been a
> straight adaptation set shortly after WWII, continuity be damned, and
> there never was much continuity from one movie to the next, or done as a
> tv miniseries.
> 
> While reading about this to refresh my memory, I didn't recall that
> Moonraker began life as a screenplay that Fleming had been writing over
> several years, the origins of which predate the publication of Casino
> Royale in 1953. When the producer he was working with couldn't raise
> cash to produce the movie, Fleming added scenes to the screenplay and
> turned it into the third novel Moonraker published in 1955.
> 
> What's important here is that Fleming did not sell rights to the plot to
> Saltzman and Broccoli as I suspect these may have been owned by the
> first producer, avoid another McCLory fiasco in which Fleming lost all
> rights to Thunderball despite having written it (originally as a
> screenplay for McClory).
> 
> I need to do a lot more reading here as I've never read this before,
> that Saltzman and Broccoli didn't own adaptation rights.
> 
>> Eon did realize that despite the huge success of 'Moonraker' they needed
>> to bring Bond back down to earth, metaphorically.  That's one of the
>> reasons for blowing up his Lotus early in 'For Your Eyes Only', to move
>> away from relying on gadgets and more on Bond's abilities and skills.
>> (I'm working my way thru the FYEO extras before watching it and they
>> talk about this a lot.)
> 
> Um. If that's all Broccoli said, he's not telling the whole story.
> Moonraker, while it had the best box office in the Bond series to that
> time, was made at double the budget of The Spy Who Loved Me and
> therefore didn't have as good return on investment.
> 
> Saltzman needed cash and had tried to dissolve his partnership with
> Broccoli in the early '70s but Broccoli never bought him out. So Saltzman
> tried to sell his half of the company to various studios, eventually
> selling to United Artists, which was motivated to buy it so they could
> continue to distribute Bond movies.
> 
> Remember, Moonraker was released by United Artists, then part of the
> Transamerica conglomerate. In the next year, 1980, the Heaven's Gate
> fiasco destroyed United Artists. MGM was no longer independent and was
> owned by Kirk Kerkorian, who would then buy the largely worthless UA,
> except for the extent to which they owned James Bond and The Pink
> Panther. Kerkorian merged UA into MGM.
> 
> Kerkorian was in debt up to his eyeballs. For Your Eyes Only (the
> closing titles for The Spy Who Loved Me announced this and not Moonraker
> as the next production) was supposed to be another big budget picture,
> and they were going to bring back director Lewis Gilbert to make his
> fourth Bond movie.
> 
Ya, 'Moonraker' was next at least in part because of 'Star Wars'.

> But Kerkorian couldn't raise the cash. Gilbert was out. John Glen got
> promoted from editor to director and would direct 5 Bond movies. For
> Your Eyes Only had a relatively small budget.
> 
> Getting rid of the gadgets saved cash, and the audience got a largely
> back-to-basics Bond movie.
> 
> Note the completely outdated Cold War plot and how Broccoli didn't demand
> that it be modernized. (He's a producer so he's always lying.) I've always
> joked that it's the very same MacGuffin as used in From Russia With Love.
> 
> Except for the parrot, it's a great movie. Glen forced Moore to find
> his inner Sean Connery in several scenes and, briefly, knock off the
> nudge nudge wink wink eyebrow raise acting.
> 
> When Moore made the effort to act, he could act. Too bad he didn't make
> the effort more often.
> 
> In my opinion, For Your Eyes Only saved the franchise. Unfortunately,
> Bond's fate was tied to MGM's, and the very large gaps between movies in
> future were due to yet another MGM bankruptcy or near bankruptcy in
> which they couldn't raise cash. It's why the third script for Timothy
> Dalton was never produced, nor was the fifth script for Pierce Brosnan
> if there actually was a script).

A lot of that was already covered in various disc extras in the box set 
and I suspect much of the rest will be in the extras with movies I 
haven't gotten to yet.  There was one hour-long documentary about 
Saltzman's overreach and resulting financial collapse and another docu 
about the Thunderball/Spectre rights issues and court cases.

-- 
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky 
dirty old man.