Baz strikes with Bond 25 plot spoiler

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Like it says in the headline, it’s a spoiler so stop reading if you don’t like them.

Bond 25’s story line concerns “genetic warfare” and one reason scribe Phoebe Waller-Bridge was hired was to “boil it down,” the Daily Mail’s Baz Bamigboye reported.

Bamigboye quoted a studio executive as saying:

“The movie’s premise is genetic warfare, which is fascinating — but you gotta boil it down and make it accessible”

Bamigboye didn’t identify the executive or say which studio he works for. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is 007’s home studio. A joint venture between MGM and Annapurna Pictures will distribute Bond 25 in the U.S. while Universal will release the movie internationally.

“And that’s why Phoebe was hired,” the scribe quoted the executive as saying. “She has somehow made sense of it.”

The Daily Mail scribe didn’t provide many additional details.

An Eon Productions press release last month said the story involves “a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology.”

A number of writers, also including Neal Purvis and Robert Wade as well as Scott Z. Burns, have also worked on the script.

The Mail on Sunday reported in April that Waller-Bridge had joined the roster of writers. But the MI6 James Bond website said earlier this month that Waller-Bridge had begun work earlier.

Bamigboye has had a number of Bond stories proven correct this decade. Among them was a March 2017 story that Purvis and Wade had been hired to start work on Bond 25’s script.

Five-O writer tells anecdotes about the series

Jerome Coopersmith’s title card for Nine Dragons, a ninth-season episode of Hawaii Five-O

Jerome Coopersmith, a writer on the original Hawaii Five-O series, chatted recently with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser about his time on the 1968-80 show.

Coopersmith, 93, wrote or helped write 32 episodes, including three featuring arch-villain Wo Fat.

According to the story, Coopersmith wrote his scripts at his home on Long Island. He would then take them to the CBS mailroom in New York City and they’d be flown overnight to Los Angeles.

Five-O had production offices in both Hollywood and Hawaii. Coopersmith also flew to Los Angeles for meetings with producers.

He was busiest on the series during the fourth through eighth seasons. He departed after penning the first two episodes of the ninth season.

Some of the highlights in the article include:

Ideas for scripts: “Some were suggested by the producers, but for the most part, the ideas came from reading the newspapers,” Coopersmith told the newspaper.

“A fabulous variety of crimes are committed every day,” the scribe added. “All I had to do was figure out how to transplant them to Hawaii, and how to make the criminals smarter than they are in real life so that it would take ‘Five-O’ an hour to catch up with them and not just five minutes. In real life most criminals are stupid.”

Local actors on Five-O: Creator-executive producer Leonard Freeman “wanted authentic Hawaiian faces on the ‘Five-O’ team,” Coopersmith told the Star-Advertiser. “That’s why he cast it that way.

“Besides his fondness for locals, there was another reason. When you cast Hollywood actors from the mainland you have to pay their travel and living expenses on Oahu, which strains the budget.”

While the article is of interest for fans of the original Five-O, some caveats are in order.

Coopersmith mis-remembers some details. He describes writing a 1975 episode titled Diary of a Gun. A cheap handgun keeps changing hands, with tragic events occurring.

“CBS was afraid of doing the show, but Len Freeman and (star) Jack Lord were strongly for it, and it was done,” Coopersmith told the newspaper. Problem: Freeman died in early 1974.

Coopersmith also tells anecdotes about Nine Dragons, a two-hour Wo Fat episode that led off the ninth season (1976-77). He mentions Bob Sweeney prominently.

Problem: Sweeney, whose title was supervising producer, worked on the show during the fourth through seventh seasons. He had departed Five-O long before Nine Dragons.