Never Say Never Again

The movie Never Say Never Again is a James Bond movie. But it’s not considered an “official” James Bond movie. Why exactly is that? I know there was some legal controversy involved, but I don’t know the details. Anyone enlighten me?

It all stemmed from the co-authoring of the novel Thunderball.

From the IMDB:

The problem stemmed originally when Ian Fleming (the James Bond novel writer) started to take an active role in writing screenplays. He and McClory and Jack Whittington kicked around ideas for a Jamaica-based nuclear bomb blackmail scheme and as many as ten different script treatments were written (the original title was Latitude 78 West). When the scriptwriting process stalled and Fleming headed off to Jamaica for his annual vacation, he went ahead and wrote the novel Thunderball, using concepts (including SPECTRE and Ernst Blofeld) that strictly speaking didn’t belong to him but were created during his spitball sessions with McClory and Whittingdon. After the ensuing legal battles, copies of the novel and movie Thunderball all had to be marked as “based on a screen treatment by Ian Fleming, Kevin McClory and Jack Whittington”.

Fleming himself died in 1964, while the legal battles were still ongoing, and had used SPECTRE and Blofeld in two subsequent novels; On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice. When the dust settled, McClory had the rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld (and still does) and this was how he was able to make the film Never Say Never Again based on those premises. It is not really a remake of the movie Thunderball, but both films were from the same source material and are basically identical in premise.

McClory could legally keep making Bond films, but only from the material created by him, Fleming and Whittingdon. That limits him to SPECTRE and Blofeld, essentially. I’m not holding my breath.

Some other interesting trivia from imdb:

For Your Eyes Only (1981)
The pre-title sequence is a dig at Kevin McClory, who owns the rights to Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE. The unnamed man in a wheelchair is obviously meant to be Blofeld, and disposing of him so early was producer Albert R. Broccoli’s way of saying that the success of 007 did not depend on him.

All of the above is true, but Never Say Never Again isn’t a official" Bod movie because it wasn’t made by Eon productions or Cubby Broccoli, and therefore doesn’t have many of the fatures the “official” Bond films have – the gun-barrel opening, the Maurice Binder title sequence, Desmond Llewellyn as “Q” (or even the title “Q”), etc.

But it did have Sean Connery. The best James Bond since Woody Allen played the role.

I’m unfamiliar with how the movie franchise started. If SPECTRE and Blofeld originated with the writing of Thunderball, were there then a number of screenplays being knocked around before Dr. No got produced? SPECTRE is mentioned in Dr. No, and its leader is featured in From Russia With Love (though I don’t think the name “Blofeld” is mentioned in that or Thunderball, but debuts when Donald Pleasance introduces himself in You Only Live Twice).

Sony Pictures was poised to do a James Bond movie called Warhead 2000 (one of the working titles for Thunderball was Warhead) which was supposed to have Leem Neeson (or however you spell his name) as Bond and Connery as the villian. MGM/EON films managed to have the film killed through legal action. Not sure if Kevin McClory was involved in the production or not.

This is way too complicated to go into details, but the gist of it is this:

Kevin McClory was for a very brief time supposed to be a young up-and-comer in the film business. He wanted to make some James Bond films, but he didn’t want to adapt the novels. So he sat down with Ian Fleming and Jack Whittington and came up with stories/treatments for film productions. However, some project McClory was working on tanked, and he was no longer perceived as being a “hot” producer, so he never managed to get a Bond film going.

Around this time, Fleming sold the film rights for his novels to Albert Broccolli and Harry Saltzman. When the time the first 007 movie, DR. NO, was made, Broccolli and Saltzman believed they owned the rights to everything in the Bond universe, including material from THUNDERBALL, such as Spectre and Bloefeld. So in the film verison of DR NO they added a brief dialogue reference to Spectre, perhaps with the idea that the organization would make a good continuing threat on which to hang a franchise.

Subsequently, the film version of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE also had Spectre added to the plot. Screenwriter Richard Maibaum suggested in interviews that this was the producer’s way of pushing the film franchise in a direction that would enable it to be distributed in Russia someday; i.e, unlike the novels, in the films the villains were a supersecret organization of international terrorists, not Russian communists.

Anyway, McClory managed to get a producer’s credit on THUNDERBALL. After that, Blofeld continued to appear in the Bond series, but references to Spectre were deleted. Years later, McClory managed to use his rights to the THUNDERBALL material as a way to get NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN made.

McClory would also like to make a whole series of films based on the other treatments he developed with Whittington and Fleming. It seems clear that he owns the rights to the material in terms of the plots, but he doesn’t own the James Bond character, which is what has allowed MGM/UA to stop him so far.

Of course, a couple years back, McClory (with the help of Sony pictures) claimed he owned the film version of the Bond character, which he maintained was a separate creation from the literary version. This didn’t fly in court, so for the time being it looks like a dead issue.

Apparently, McClory has never considered the possibility of using his plots but creating a new character that he would own outright – no doubt because he knows the real selling point would be the Bond name.

steve biodrowski
www.thescriptanalyst.com

Is just how horrible the movie is. While it unusual to have a bad Bond or a bad Sean Connery movie, this certainly is a stinker. However, after Highlander 2, The Avengers, and Entrapment among other late career bombs he has been in, Sean Connery has wasted much of the goodwill he had built up as Bond. Oh well, From Russia with Love is sure to be on ABC again soon. . .

-me

Just as a side note - Coming Attractions posted a rumor today that the new Austin Powers movie (originally titled Goldmember until MGM complained and threatened to sue) will now be called Never Say Member Again :smiley: