Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-01-19 (Sunday)

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Broccoli discussing basically how out of date the Fleming story was and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The novel's plot was out of date shortly after it had been written, once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.

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).