Happy birthday (No. 96!) Norman Felton, the real Man From U.N.C.L.E.

We just wanted to wish Mr. Norman Felton a happy 96th birthday. It was Felton, looking for a change of pace from producing TV dramas, who spearheaded the project that would become The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Felton had a notion about a character he dubbed Edgar Solo, who seemed ordinary but worked for a special [...]

The Silencers preview of For Your Eyes Only’s ad campaign

One of the most famous James Bond movie posters was For Your Eyes Only, the 1981 Roger Moore 007 movie, where we see, in the foreground, a woman’s legs rather prominently. If you’ve forgotten, well, just CLICK RIGHT HERE. Fifteen years earlier, The Silencers, Dean Martin’s first screen outing as Matt Helm debuted. One version [...]

More about 007′s alcohol intake

After recovering from our hangover re-reading James Bond’s impressive drinking in Goldfinger, we had to go back over some our old copies of Ian Fleming novels. For example, there’s the first page of Thunderball: He had a hangover, a bad one, with an aching head and stiff joints…The one drink too many signals itself unmistakably. [...]

How much booze did 007 consume, anyway?

Short answer: a lot. Slightly longer answer: an impressive amount. One of our favorite examples from the literary Bond: Golfinger: Ian Fleming’s seventh 007 begins with James Bond in the Miami airport “with two double bourbons inside him” and nursing a third. Bond is rather moody, thinking about life and death, in particular how quickly [...]

Preposterous elements of Quantum of Solace

The media review website, Television Without Pity , is home to some of the snarkiest writing on the web, and is always an entertaining read. Staffer Zach Oat recently took a look at the Quantum of Solace DVD, in an effort to catalog some of the more… goofy… elements of the 22nd James Bond movie. [...]

TCM starts promos for 007/Connery movies

TCM has started running a promo for “star of the month” Sean Connery in May. As you might expect, it relies heavily on Connery appearances in his six James Bond movies filmed for Eon Productions. Throughout the promo, TCM uses the dots from the main titles of Dr. No superimposed over clips from that movies, [...]

Tribute to Cubby Broccoli on FelixLeiter.com

Over at FelixLeiter.com, there’s a tribute to 007 producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli. It quotes extensively from various books about Bond, including Broccoli’s autobiography. If you want to take a look just CLICK RIGHT HERE.

I Spy now on YouTube

YouTube recently cut a deal with Hollywood studios that is enabling complete episodes of some old TV shows to be on YouTube. One of the shows is I Spy, the groundbreaking 1965-1968 series that featured white and black agents paired together. It also helped make a star of Bill Cosby. So far, only five episodes [...]

Bond 23: 2010? (Unlikely) 2011? 2012?

It’s looking like there will be at least a three-year gap between 007 movies. It wouldn’t surprise us if it’s four. Last month, the Yorkshire Post published AN INTERVIEW with Eon Productions Ltd. bossman Michael G. Wilson. (We’ll also give a tip of the cap to the Commander Bond site that did AN ARTICLE where [...]

Ian Fleming’s fascination with bowties

Ian Fleming, besides being the creator of James Bond, also had a thing for bowties. Fleming (1908-1964) was photographed more than once sporting a bowtie. Once he finally had a deal to sell the film rights to 007, he felt bowties ought to be part of the proceedings. For example, he wrote in a memo [...]