The Millionaires Club

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From: Hamsterwheel

Not quite, really tangled web “ Never Say Never Again had its origins in the early 1960s, following the

controversy over the 1961 Thunderball novel.[4] Fleming had worked with independent producer Kevin McClory and scriptwriter Jack Whittingham on a script for a potential Bond film, to be called Longitude 78 West,[5] which was subsequently abandoned because of the costs involved.[6] Fleming, "always reluctant to let a good idea lie idle",[6] turned this into the novel Thunderball, for which he did not credit either McClory or Whittingham[7] McClory then took Fleming to the High Court in London for breach of copyright,[8] and the matter was settled in 1963.[5] After Eon Productions started producing the Bond films, it subsequently made a deal with McClory, who would produce Thunderball, and then not make any further version of the novel for a period of ten years, following the release of the Eon-produced version in 1965.[9]
In the mid-1970s, McClory again started working on a second adaptation of Thunderball and, with the working title Warhead, he brought writer Len Deighton together with Sean Connery to work on a script.[10] A lawsuit with Eon Productions ended in a ruling that McClory owned the sole rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld, forcing Eon to remove them from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).[11] The script initially focused on SPECTRE shooting down aircraft over the Bermuda Triangle, before taking over Liberty Island and Ellis Island as staging areas for an invasion of New York City through the sewers under Wall Street. The script was purchased by Paramount Pictures in 1978.[11] The script ran into difficulties, after accusations from Danjaq and United Artists that the project had gone beyond copyright restrictions, which confined McClory to a film based only on the novel Thunderball once again, the project was delayed.[9]
Towards the end of the 1970s, developments were reported on the project under the name James Bond of the Secret Service,[9] but when producer Jack Schwartzman became involved in 1980, and cleared a number of the legal issues that still surrounded the project,[11][4] he decided against using Deighton's script. The project returned to the original nuclear terrorism plot of the original Thunderball, in order to avoid another lawsuit from Danjaq, and after McClory saw Jimmy Carter mention the issue in a 1980 presidential debate with Ronald Reagan.[12] Schwartzman brought on board scriptwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr.[13] to work on the screenplay. Schwartzman wanted him to make the screenplay "somewhere in the middle" between his campier projects such as Batman, and his more serious projects such as Three Days of the Condor.[11] Connery was unhappy with some aspects of the script, and asked Tom Mankiewicz, who had rewritten Diamonds Are Forever, to work on it however, Mankiewicz declined, as he felt he was under a moral obligation to Albert R. Broccoli.[14] Semple Jr. ultimately left the project, after Irvin Kershner was hired as director, and Schwartzman began cutting out the "big numbers" from his script to save on the budget.[11] Connery then hired British television writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais[12] to undertake re-writes, although they went uncredited for their efforts, despite much of the final shooting script being theirs. This was because of a restriction by the Writers Guild of America.[15] Clement and La Frenais continued rewriting during the production, often altering it from day to day.[11]
The film underwent one final change in title: after Connery had finished filming Diamonds Are Forever, he had pledged that he would "never again" play Bond.[10] Connery's wife, Micheline, suggested the title Never Say Never Again, referring to her husband's vow,[16] and the producers acknowledged her contribution by listing on the end credits "Title Never Say Never Again by Micheline Connery". A final attempt by Fleming's trustees to block the film was made in the High Court in London in the spring of 1983, but this was thrown out by the court and Never Say Never Again was permitted to proceed”

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Never been a big Bond fan, watched Never Say Never Again - I'd never actually seen ... [more]

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