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Shaken, Not Stirred:

How A British Secret Agent Became An American TV Icon

 

By Chris Oakley

Part 11

 

adapted from material previously posted at Othertimelines.com

 

 

 

 

Summary:

In the previous ten installments of this series we    recalled the history of the James Bond pop culture phenomenon    from the debut of Quinn Martin’s 007 TV series in 1959 to the    release of the second Bond feature film Not In Our Stars some    fifteen years later. In this chapter we’ll look at the making    of the third 007 movie and the return of the Bond saga to TV    in the 1980s.

 

 

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It would take nearly seven years to bring the third 007 feature film to the screen; during that the time, the fictional superspy’s banner was carried in the pop culture world mainly by paperback novelists and the editorial staff at Marvel Comics, who launched a new monthly 007 comic book in the summer of 1975 to an outpouring of excitement by both newcomers to the Bond world and longtime fans nostalgic for the defunct Pocket Books 007 comics. The Marvel Bond comic series’ debut issue sold out its initial run within just over a week after it hit newsstands; Marvel’s printing presses could barely keep up with the number of orders which were coming in for additional copies of the inaugural Bond comic issue. In fact, with the possible exceptions of Spider-Man and the Hulk, there may have been no character who did more to enhance Marvel’s growth as a force in the comics industry during its first 20 years than James Bond.

While Marvel was reviving Bond’s legacy in the comic book world, a platoon of mystery and thriller writers were re-establishing the 007 brand in the literary realm. Some of the authors of the new outpouring of Bond novels were relative newcomers to the pop lit world, but there were also a substantial number of famous writers participating in this phenomenon. The first new 007 novel to see print after the release of Not In Our Stars, titled The Damocles Agenda, sold 200,000 copies over its first three weeks of publication in hardcover and another 150,000 in its debut in paperback format. Those sales would turn out to be the match that lit the fuse for an explosion of interest in the James Bond franchise.

With Ken Annakin having decided he needed a change of pace for his next directing job, 20th Century Fox was in urgent need of someone new to assume the director’s chair for the next 007 feature film. That was one of the reasons for the seven-year gap between the second Bond movie and the third; another reason was that the BBC had unexpectedly scored a ratings hit with a rebooted version of the Saint TV series featuring Roger Moore in the title role, and Fox had to wait until he was finished with his commitment to that series before they could get the ball rolling on their initially untitled follow-up to Not In Our Stars. There were also some legal issues to be resolved; shortly after Stars was released a would-be screenwriter sued both 20th Century Fox and Quinn Martin Productions claiming they had plagiarized his concept for a 007 TV series, and although the claim was patently bogus it took nearly two years for the courts to resolve the matter. (It would later turn out that the only plagiarizing being done in the case was by the plaintiff himself, who would later spend three months in jail on grand larceny charges and have to pay more than $75,000 in fines.)

The third reason for the hiatus involved a certain pair of USC film school alums who would direct projects that made motion picture history and continued the evolution of the blockbuster summer film as we know it today. Between the Steven Spielberg thriller Jaws and the George Lucas sci-fi epic Star Wars, Fox had few if any resources left over before 1978 to even consider mounting production of another 007 movie. In fact, the very week that Star Wars was released in theaters a Fox executive was anonymously quoted in the entertainment industry trade newspaper Variety as saying that it might take “as much as ten years” before another Bond movie could be made and released in first- run theaters.

As one might expect, the prospect of having to wait a full ten years for the next chapter of the 007 saga didn’t sit too well with Bond fans-- and they were quick to let the powers that be at Fox know it. Letters and phone calls bombarded the Fox executive officers on a daily basis protesting the idea of a decade-long hiatus in the making of the next Bond movie; for that matter there was plenty of grumbling among Fox employees about the notion of having to put off the next 007 flick so long. But in the spring of 1980, with Star Wars having filled the studio’s coffers to the bursting point and its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, promising to swell them still further, Fox finally gave the green light for the drafting of a preliminary script treatment for a new 007 feature film.

The new installment of the Bond series, titled Onyx Fire, would return 007 to his jet set roots; taking place mainly in Switzerland and the wealthier sections of the Persian Gulf, with a brief but quite important subplot set in the Caribbean, Onyx Fire would also mark the re-introduction of SPECTRE as a major adversary for 007 as its primary storyline had him being stalked by hit men in the pay of the revived terrorist organization in a quest to avenge the death of Ernst Stavros Blofeld.

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The search for a suitable supporting cast for Onyx Fire began shortly after the second draft of the movie’s script was completed. To play the leader of SPECTRE v 2.0 the new movie’s producers tapped internationally renowned Swedish actor Max von Sydow, who had both the perfect look and the perfect voice to play the heavy in Bond’s latest cinematic adventure. His character, ex-mercenary turned new SPECTRE leader Hans Moreau, was described in the screenwriters’ notes for the script of Onyx as “a cross between Reinhard Heydrich and Jack the Ripper”. Accordingly the Fox wardrobe department designed all of von Sydow’s outfits for the movie to have a militaristic and extremely homicidal look to them-- with the result that when it came time for Onyx’s first directing unit to shoot von Sydow’s entrance scene in the film, one of the cameramen on the set would come close to fainting out of sheer terror.

It had been hoped that Hope Lange would reprise her old role as Ms. Moneypenny-- who in Onyx’s backstory had by now left her old job as a secretary and was working as a behavioral analyst-- but her Stateside TV commitments at the time had rendered her unavailable for the film. So the producers of Onyx held a three-week series of studio auditions to find a pinch hitter to fill Lange’s shoes for the latest 007 screen outing. Finding candidates for the role wasn’t a problem; the real challenge would be sorting through the thousands of hopefuls to find the perfect actress to fit that role. The auditions would run the gamut from some of the biggest names in Hollywood to fresh-faced unknowns for who this was usually their first try at landing a part in a major film.

The part finally went to Susan Hampshire, a rising British film and TV star who would later become an international sensation for her performances in the Forsythe Saga miniseries and the long-running BBC TV comedy Monarch of the Glen. Hampshire won the part of Moneypenny on her second read-through at the London auditions and was on the set of Onyx Fire three weeks later for the start of principal photography on the film. In fact, most of Onyx Fire’s cast with the notable exception of Max von Sydow were British, as well as half the production crew. Of all the 007 movies that have been released since the original TV series went off the air, few had a more distinctly British flavor to them than Onyx.

Principal shooting for Onyx started in Zurich in October of 1980 and moved on to the island of St. Croix two months later; from there, the film’s cast and crew traveled to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, where Onyx’s most important sequences would be shot. Filming in the Gulf was a major challenge for the Onyx production team-- and not simply due to the searing heat of the Arabian desert. The Iran-Iraq War had started by the time the Onyx cast and crew arrived in Qatar, and there were deep fears other Persian Gulf states might get pulled into the conflict too. These fears were sufficiently strong for the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Secretary’s office to issue a joint travel advisory to the movie’s production team urging them to move their shoot to a more secure locale.

As it turned out, Qatar would never be drawn into the Iran-Iraq War. Still, the advisory moved Fox executives to be even more cautious than usual regarding on-set security; accordingly, arrangements were made with the Qatari defense ministry to have a detachment of Qatari army troops guarding the Onyx Fire during filming hours and a private security company was hired to guard the cast and crew when they were off work. The private firm definitely earned its money during its time watching the Onyx Qatar set; although they never encountered terrorists or troublemakers, they had a fair number of run-ins with paparazzi who were trying to infiltrate the set to uncover dirt about the film’s stars or leak information about its storyline.

Principal photography for the movie returned to London in late March of 1981 and wrapped up during the first week of April. After that it was a race against time to finish the post-production chores in time for Onyx’s scheduled mid-July release. This time around 007 would have more than just the usual adversaries to overcome on his latest mission: a sequel to the horror classic Halloween was slated to hit theaters that summer, as was the post-apocalyptic action-fest Escape From New York and the German World War II epic Das Boot. And a certain pair of USC alumni were teaming up to produce a quirky little art-house pic called Raiders Of The Lost Ark. In short, Onyx Fire was going to be facing some serious competition for the hearts, minds, and cash of summer moviegoers both at home and abroad.

Onyx Fire debuted in New York and London on July 16th and went into wider release two days later; it quickly blew Halloween II and Das Boot out of the water at the box office and gave Raiders a serious run for its money during the late summer and early fall of 1981-- indeed, by the time its initial theatrical run ended just after Labor Day, it would become the third-highest grossing feature film of that summer. A holiday re-release of Onyx two weeks before Christmas would boost its box office take even higher. It would also light the way for 007’s return to the TV screen after more than twelve years’ absence...

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In the spring of 1982 executives at NBC-TV were looking for a way to boost their network’s prime-time ratings and recapture its old spot as America’s number one television broadcaster. During a meeting of NBC’s board of directors, one of the board’s junior members suggested the idea of doing a revival of the original 007 TV show. He meant it as a joke, but the senior board members took his comment seriously enough to draft a seventeen-page memo sketching out possible storylines for the pilot of a 007 reboot. By June NBC’s attorneys had started negotiations with 20th Century Fox and Ian Fleming’s estate for the rights to launch a new James Bond series. Once those rights were secured, NBC’s attention then turned to the job finding the right actor to fill Bond’s legendary shoes.

That was where Pierce Brosnan came in. The Irish-born actor had already established his dramatic chops with his work in the movie The Long Goodbye and British TV series like The Professionals and Hammer House Of Horror when NBC executives first contacted him about the idea of casting him as the title character in the new 007 series. The show’s producers were sure Brosnan would be ideal for the role, and after his first screen test for the series their conviction was only strengthened on this point. Before long the script for the pilot of the 007 reboot, which was already half-finished at the time of Brosnan’s screen test and would be completed around the time he officially signed the contract to join the series, was put into production with an eye towards having the pilot ready for the ’82-’83 fall season.

The new 007 series debuted on NBC in late September of 1982 with Brosnan firmly ensconced as the title character and Stephanie Zimbalist as a distinctly American Ms. Moneypenny. Reflecting the cultural changes of the previous two decades, the new incarnation of Moneypenny was more than just a secretary; she served as a de facto partner to Bond on many of his undercover missions. In some cases she would even see more action on(and off) the job than Bond himself did-- something that would have no doubt struck Bond’s creator as the height of irony....

 

 

 

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To Be Continued

 

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