All because a load grown-ups who have’t fully adjusted to the fact their no longer children, think that when they says the date out loud, it reminds them of the line, ‘May the force be with you’. I know, I feel bad for even acknowledging it’s a thing. Don’t misunderstand me. ‘Star Wars ‘ was a great film. Was, not is, as Yoda might say.
I was 10 when I saw it and it was like nothing I’d ever seen. But then I was 10, and at 10 it doesn’t take much to excite a boy. Well maybe not in 2024 but in 1977? The main thing I remember about it though – apart from the bit near the end where the rebel ships attack the Death Star, which was easily the best part – was queuing up around the block beforehand and having to keep our coats on in the cinema because there was a heating strike.
But quite why it has become some kind of revered cultural artefact, as opposed to the entertaining yet ephemeral piece of tat it was, is a constant source of bemusement to me. It has spawned sequels and prequels, standalone films set within its own universe and television shows. In fact the only truly innovative thing that ‘Star Wars’ ever did was to create a lucrative world of merchandising opportunities, where all manner of ways to induce pester power from children to divorce parents from their money were dreamt up.
Some of these children have never quite recovered from their childhood and even though they look like adults, are desperate to recreate it. But just like an addict nothing searching to recreate the feeling of their first hit, nothing will ever be as good as the first time. So despite being powerful studio heads, movie executives or other equally valuable members of society, they keep on churning out more of the same in the mistaken belief it is has deeper meaning beyond simply funding their coke habit.
My last few posts have not been about especially frothy and lightweight topics, so you’ll be delighted to read that I’ve decided to put my earnestness to one side and instead focus my attentions on the worlds most famous secret agent, James Bond.
I’ll try and be as brief as possible, because eventually I’m going to name the person who I think has been more of enemy to Bond than SMERSH, Blofeld and Oddjob combined and the reasons why I think that.
First of all however, I need to be clear about which James Bond it is I’m discussing. Is it the Bond of the books or the Bond of the movies?
There’s the Bond of the original looks penned by Ian Fleming. There are 12 of these and 2 books of short stories. Fleming died in 1964, and the first ‘continuation novel – which either kept a beloved character alive or kept a lucrative cash cow going , your pick – was written in 1968 by Kingsley Amis.
So far, six authors have written a total of 25 such books, some writing Bond as existing in the modern age, others writing their Bond as existing within the timeframe of gaps of Flemings originals. With me so far? Original Bond and ‘Continuation’ Bond.
Then there’s also ‘Spin Off’ Bond, the ‘Young Bond’ book series – started in in 2005, two authors and nine books – which has the schoolboy Bond doing things that only exist because of the authors guaranteed payday, the ‘Double 0’ series that doesn’t feature Bond at all but instead the lethal licence holders – one author, two books, and most bizarrely of all, ‘The Moneypenny Dairies’ one author, three books.
Therefore a compelling case could be made for suggesting that the Fleming estate, who commission these ‘continuation’ ad spin-off books, have not exactly covered themselves in glory when discussing who has tarnished the Bond of the literary world. However, they are but amateurs when it comes to disgracing the world of Bond. Reading all the guff that followed the news that the Broccoli family have upped sticks and handed full creative control to Amazon for the film rights, one might think that the Bond films were great masterworks of cinema, rather than being little more than ‘Carry On’ films, albeit with better production values. A lump of coal has more in common with a flawless diamond than the films have with the books. The films took the books title, characters names and basic plot and essentially made up the rest and not even that in the recent ones.
In the original Fleming books – two of which contained nine short stories – Bond sleeps with fourteen women. The films though turned the Bond of the books into little more than a sexually transmitted disease in a tuxedo, while avoiding all references to his borderline sadistic, clearly misogynistic and other qualities that not suited to thrilling cinematic romps. Another bugbear is that in the books Bond is often in real danger, and has only his courage to rely on. There are hardly any gadgets and the ‘Q’ in the books is simply the quartermaster who gives Bond advice on guns. The films? Things got so bad that Eddie Izzard even did a sketch about it
So in the same way as the Fleming estate, the Broccoli family can quite legitimately be accused of tarnishing the name of Bond. But even they are not the villains here. Nor is it Jeff Bezos, despite him looking like Blofeld and being a megalomaniac billionaire who controls a vast retail and media empire and dreams of conquering space. I mean, if he had a furry white cat he couldn’t be better suited to the role.
No, the person I hold uniquely and irrevocably to blame for all of the ills that have befallen James Bond since 1970 is George Lazenby.
‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ (OHMSS), the only film in which he played Bond, is by quite a wide margin easily the best Bond film ever. If you think otherwise, you’re wrong. Unusually faithful to the plot of the book, great cinematography, real emotional heft, a great soundtrack and above all, in Lazenby a Bond who could fight. Just 20 minutes in and already we are treated to two fight sequences that make one realise just how poorly served by Connery we were. Critics often suggest that Lazenby couldn’t act, as if Connery was treading the boards instead of water, using his Bond pay checks to fund his forays into doing Ibsen and Shakespeare between, rather than playing himself in every film he was in. He even played the commander of a Russian nuclear submarine with a Scottish accent in ‘The Hunt for Red October. He really put the con into Connery.
Far from being a flop, as received wisdom has it, OHMSS was a hit, not a huge one, but enough of one for Lazenby to be offered a seven movie deal. Had he accepted, we’d have got Bond out for revenge, a Bond fuelled by single-minded desire to kill the person who had killed his wife, only minutes after getting married. That Bond had talked about giving up being a spy, so more ruthless, more character driven Bond might have been ours. Audiences would have believed in a simple quest for revenge more than an implausibly far fetched scheme for world domination. But we had to wait until 1989 and Timothy Daltons ‘Licence to Kill’ to get that Bond.
But he didn’t and Connery, together with acting so wooden he was fire risk, returned in ‘Diamonds are Forever’ a film that pretended that the events of OHMSS had never happened and instead reverted back to the Bond of underground lairs built out of dormant volcanoes. Had he accepted, we would have spared Roger Moores Bond, all the eyebrow acting, smutty innuendo, safari suits and the endless product placement.
Everyone wanted Lazenby. But he said no. And that’s why he’s the real villain. Because he promised so much, a glimpse of what was possible but was never to be.To make one Bond film and for it to be the best of the entire series, isn’t a really high bar. But I still daydream about how subsequent films might have focused upon Bonds quest, with him only being a secret agent incidentally, and only then when it coincided with his goal.
One of the greatest tricks that Hollywood has ever managed to pull off, is to hoodwink the public into thinking that the most important part of the word show-business is ‘show’ and that the business part of it doesn’t mean what business is commonly accepted to mean. That is, selling a thing to people and selling enough of that thing to make a profit.
I was thinking this the other night as I watched the Oscars, specifically my last blog, where I referenced ‘Winnie-the-Pooh; Blood and Honey’ a 2023 slasher movie that despite being widely acknowledged as one of the worst films ever, was made on a budget of $100,000 but netted a global box office of about $5,000,000 – and to which a sequel is planned. And why wouldn’t it be? A profit margin of 4,900% is the very definition of a successful business venture, which only highlights the almost awe inspiring financial failures that made up the majority of films 2023.
Most films fail to recoup their production and marketing budgets and it is an accepted truism in the movie business that whatever the actual production budget for a film is, one should also allow about half of that amount for that to cover the associated costs that accompany the selling of it, the marketing, the distribution, and all of the other the blah, blah, blah it entails. Some films spend way more than that.
Take ‘Barbie‘,for example one of last years most successful films. It cost $135 Million to make, made $1.4 Billion globally, but reportedly had a marketing budget of $150 Million. Whist those are big numbers, they’re nowhere near as big as Winnie’s 4,900%. profit. And that is nowhere ‘The Blair Witch Project’ which while costing $60,000 to make implausibly made $248,638,099, a profit of 414,300%.
So its worth bearing in mind, when thinking of Martin Scorceses’ critique of Marvel films not being real cinema and dismissivly comparing them to rides at theme parks, that theme parks only exist to entertain and that if they don’t, then the public will vote with their feet. Much like they did with his latest cinematic bum number, ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, which worked out costing $1Million for each of its 200 minutes, but had a paltry total box office of $157 Million.
So for all of the gushing press that the Oscars have generated, about how it is attempting to become more inclusive, more diverse and more whatever it pretends to be ,the one thing it is and always has been, is massively condescending about the kind of films that most people see. If there was one moment above all else that typified this this achingly superior attitude, it was when the host, Jimmy Kimmel, read out a tweet from Donald Trump. The tweet, essentially mocking of the entire ceremony, and Kimmel in particular.
Of course this played out well. Kimmel knew his audience, knew that their illiberal liberality would approve his sneering tone, knew well that the cheers and applause would follow, knew also that he was addressing not the television audience, but thousand or so packed into that theatre gleefully staring back at him.
It proved that whilst showiness is a business, it is a business increasingly out of touch with the consumers it depends on.
the brilliantly leaping gazelle 