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New audiobook editions of three James Bond novels are coming out in the U.S. starting next week and in the U.K, in 2025, Ian Fleming Publications announced.
The first to come out is a new audio version of You Only Live Twice, Ian Fleming’s 1964 novel, IFP said. It is due out on March 19 and will be issued by HarperCollins. The release coincides with the 60th anniversary of the novel’s publication. An excerpt from the announcement:
In celebration of its 60th anniversary, the first new recording to be released in the US will be You Only Live Twice, available on March 19th. Voiced by Eleanor Matsuura (best known for her roles in The Walking Dead & Spooks), travel to Japan, meet Kissy Suzuki and discover the terrifying Garden of Death.
Audio versions of Casino Royale and Live And Let Die, the first two Bond novels, are scheduled for March 26, IFP said.
“Casino Royale will be voiced by Richard Armitage (The Hobbit, The Stranger), with Live and Let Die read by Adjoa Andoh (Bridgerton, The Witcher),” according to the announcement.
Bond tries to secure Pussy Galore’s cooperation in Goldfinger.
The British Film Institute ignited intense discussion among James Bond fans this week. The BFI is coming out with a program of films scored by John Barry, including Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice, according to The Guardian.
Goldfinger includes a sequence where Bond (Sean Connery) wins over Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman). In the 21st century, this doesn’t always go over well.
The institute issued “trigger warnings” about the movies (which also include The Ipcress File) saying the films may have elements that may offend modern audiences.
An excerpt from The Guardian story:
A spokesperson for the BFI told the Guardian:
“As a cultural charity with responsibility for the preservation of film and moving image work and presenting it to audiences, we continuously face and deal with challenges presented by the history of film and television programmes and how they reflect views prevalent to their time.”
Some Bond fans consider this silly. Goldfinger’s 60th anniversary is this year. There has been plenty of time to hash over these issues.
A critic for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw, raised the question whether such warning were necessary.
Other fans say this is OK as long as the movies themselves aren’t altered.
For more than 50 years (at least in the U.S.), Bond movies had parental advisories attached when broadcast on the U.S.
In the States, the first Bond film shown on TV was Goldfinger in 1972 on ABC. The gunbarrel logo was taken out. Later Goldfinger showings saw the movie cut down further to meet a two-hour (with commercials) broadcast slot.
Similar cuts occurred with other Bond films. ABC’s most ambitious editing was a 1976 showing of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service where the order of scenes was changed with an American voice-over actor providing narration as Bond.
These issues persisted for years.
As recently as 2002, ABC used digital technology to make the panties of Plenty O’Toole (Lana Wood) in Diamonds Are Forever black where they were flesh-colored in the original 1971 film.
Other movies having nothing to do with Bond have gotten disclaimers similar to what the BFI is doing.
The Disney + streaming service added a disclaimer to Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier from 1955. Several years ago, the TCM channel in the U.S. had a showing of 1942’s Holiday Inn. The introduction, before the film began, cautioned the audience that Bing Crosby did a song number in blackface, which modern audiences abhor.
All of this points to complicated issues. The BFI controversy is not the last word.
The James Bond film franchise has been on the sidelines since the fall of 2021 when No Time to Die was released.
2022, for Eon Productions, was a year of celebration about Daniel Craig’s last outing as Bond plus the 60th anniversary of the franchise itself.
For 2023, there are issues related to the franchise and the overall movie industry.
Does Danjaq/Eon have a succession plan? Danjaq (the parent company) and Eon (which makes the movies) are a family business. A famous family business, to be sure. But a family business, nevertheless.
Family businesses can be hard to keep together as the third generation of a family takes over.
In the second generation of Danjaq/Eon, Michael G. Wilson is 81. Barbara Broccoli is 63. Outside the family, nobody knows about a succession plan. The conventional fan wisdom is that Gregg Wilson, Michael’s son, will continue to take on more responsibility while Barbara Broccoli continues.
Danjaq/Eon’s relationship with a new studio regime: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Danjaq’s long-time studio partner, was acquired by Amazon in 2021. When that happened, Eon’s Wilson and Broccoli said they wanted Amazon to keep MGM film executives Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy.
That didn’t happen. The two executives departed MGM in 2022 and landed at Warner Bros.
That raises the question of how well Danjaq/Eon is getting along with the Amazon-owned MGM. Nobody really knows, it’s not something either side is talking about.
Industry changes, rising budgets: No Time to Die had a production budget in the $300 million range (perhaps much more), not including marketing expenses. That makes it harder to turn a profit during a movie’s theatrical run.
In 2023, other films are running into the same math. Variety today published a story about the financial difficulties facing Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One. Both had big, $300 million (or more) budgets. Each is coming up short in their theatrical runs.
Meanwhile, cheaper movies such as Barbie (which has passed the $1 billion mark at the global box office) and Oppenheimer appear to be solidly profitable during their theatrical run before getting to pay-per-view and home video. Barbie’s budget was about $145 million, according to Variety, with Oppenheimer weighing in at about $100 million.
The Bond franchise has found itself in the blockbuster competition. But when the film Bond began 61 years ago, things were more modest. By the time You Only Live Twice (1967) came out, the budget for Ken Adam’s massive volcano set alone matched Dr. No’s $1 million production budget.
Since then, the series has expanded its scope, occasionally dialing things back before going big again. The last two entries, SPECTRE and No Time to Die, have been extremely expensive, even adjusting for inflation.
Of course, the industry itself is experiencing changes with streaming and other issues.
Where do you go from here? Danjaq/Eon is confronting many questions all at the same time. Craig is gone. A successor, presumably, will depend on who comes in as director. Do you stay with the uber-serious Craig tone? Or do you lighten up a bit?
In the summer of 2023, there are more questions than answers.
Definition of nuance: a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound.
These days, popular entertainment is either A (or A-Plus or A-Plus-Plus) or F (or F-Minus or F-Minus-Minus). There is no middle ground.
The most recent example is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Go to YouTube, and you can find many videos about how this is the worst-ever Indiana Jones adventure, if not the worst-ever movie of all time.
The film, apparently, has destroyed Indiana Jones for all time. It’s similar to how Star Wars: The Last Jedi forever ruined the Star Wars franchise and how producer Kathleen Kennedy destroyed a beloved property, if not two..
I get it. I’ve seen criticism of the James Bond franchise. Barbara Broccoli, so the thinking goes, ruined the cinematic James Bond by killing off the Daniel Craig version of the character.
In both cases, you’ve had movie series that have run for decades. Recent versions, to be clear, have disappointed many fans. On the other hand, there are alternate versions such fans like better.
When I selected the image for this post, I picked SPECTRE assassin Helga meeting her end in You Only Live Twice (1967). It was a bit of a gag. But a lot of fans take a serious view of this.
The image is symbolic of how many fans don’t approach such issues with nuance.
Ian Fleming, drawn by Mort Drucker, from the collection of the late John Griswold.
In the current James Bond timeshifted continuation novel by Charlie Higson, On His Majesty’s Secret there are references to 21st-century political issues in both the U.S. and Europe. Some literary Bond fans feel Higson went too far.
But what about the original Ian Fleming stories?
Fleming didn’t care much for labor unions: In Casino Royale, Le Chiffre was “undercover Paymaster” of a “communist-controlled trade union in the heavy and transport industries of Alsace and, as far as we know, an important fifth column in the event of war with Redland.”
Put another way, some unions were an extension of the U.S.S.R. in the 1950s.
In From Russia With Love, Bond’s housekeeper May tells her employer about a persistent caller “about the Televeesion.”
May says the man “‘flourished his union card. Said he had every right to earn his living. Electrician Union it was too. They’re the Communist one, aren’t they-s?'”
“‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Bond vaguely. His mind sharpened. Was it possible they could be keeping an eye on him?”
Fleming’s Bond was a defender of the British Empire: What’s so political about that? In some former British colonies such as India, the likes of Winston Churchill aren’t as beloved (in India’s case not beloved at all) as they are in the West.
Fleming, of course, lived through two world wars and served as a British Navy intelligence officer in the second. All of these issues were still fresh when Fleming wrote his Bond stories.
In You Only Live Twice, Bond has a long conversation with Tiger Tanaka of Japanese intelligence.
“In fact, you (the British) are doing very badly indeed in the opinion of your few remaining friends,” Tanaka says.
“Balls to you, Tiger!” Bond responds. “And balls again!…Let me tell you this, my fine friend. England may have been pretty thin by a couple of world wars, our welfare-state politics may have made us expect too much for free, and the liberation of our colonies may have gone too fast, but we still climb Everest and beat plenty of the world at plenty of sports and win Nobel Prizes. Our politicians may be a feather-pated bunch, but I expect yours are, too.” (emphasis added)
Fleming made the occasional political prediction: In The Man With the Golden Gun, Mary Goodnight is chatting with Bond about Cuba and Fidel Castro. ” I don’t think Castro can hold out much longer,” she says. “The missile business in Cuba must have cost Russia about a billion pounds…I can’t help thinking they’ll pull out soon and leave Castro to go the way Batista went.”
Cover to the first-edition U.S. hardback edition of You Only Live Twice
Can we bring some common sense to spoiler alerts?
Specifically, if a story is DECADES OLD, can we end the practice of saying, “spoiler alert”?
I was watching a James Bond fan video where the host said, “spoiler alert,” that James Bond killed Blofeld in the 1964 novel You Only Live Twice.
Really? Seriously?
In Citizen Kane (released in 1941), Rosebud is the sled.
In the movie version of Gone With the Wind (released in 1939), Rhett Butler doesn’t give a damn.
More recently, in No Time to Die (released in 2021 and which completed production in 2019), the Daniel Craig version of Bond died.
Good grief. Yes, people should be respectful of current movies and TV shows. Most are. But there is a radical interpretation of spoilers. Specifically, there is no statute of limitations. You should never, ever, talk about the ending of a story no matter how many decades have lapsed.
Over the weekend, the Mail on Sunday (Sunday edition of the Daily Mail) came out with a story that claimed Phoebe Waller-Bridge was Barbara Broccoli’s first choice to direct (and co-write) Bond 26.
The article had an April 1 time stamp. A gag? Perhaps, except most April Fool’s gags come out early in the day. The Mail story didn’t come out until 5:01 p.m. New York time, which means it didn’t come out until late in the day in the U.K.
More importantly, the story, well, reeked. Reeked of bad writing and a lack of reporting. I intended to ignore it. But, as Lt. Columbo observed many times, little things bother me. Or, to quote Kerim Bey (pointing to his nose), “This is an old friend of mine. And it tells me something smells.”
Waller-Bridge’s directing experience? The talented Waller-Bridge has acting, writing, and producing credits on her IMDB.COM ENTRY. Not so much for directing credits.
Do you really want to hand over a Bond film to a directing novice?
John Glen’s first film directing credit was For Your Eyes Only (1981). But Glen was a veteran film editor and second-unit director. He had lots of experience working in both TV and films. Glen’s IMDB.com entry includes a directing credit for the TV series Man in a Suitcase.
Who is/are Waller-Bridge’s co-writer/co-writers? The Mail doesn’t bother to say. Eon’s Barbara Broccoli said in September 2022 that veteran 007 film scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade will be summoned, yet again, to toil on Bond 26. But the Mail glosses over this.
How hard is it to direct a Bond movie? It’s really hard. Months of pre-productions. Months of filming. Months of editing and post-production. It’s as much directing an army as a film.
Got it. Easy peasy.
Lewis Gilbert was a veteran movie director when he accepted the job of directing You Only Live Twice in the 1960s. Gilbert was overwhelmed. So we’re going to have someone with no directing experience take on a job that has gotten even more complicated a half-century later.
While we’re at it, directors such as Josh Trank and Chloe Zhao stumbled when they took on huge films based on comic books. Zhao won an Oscar for directing Nomadland. Her efforts for directing Marvel’s The Eternals didn’t work out so well. The less said about Trank’s 2015 Fantastic Four movie, the better.
“This is an old friend of mine. And it tells me something smells.”
UPDATE (April 4): The byline on last weekend’s Mail story was Caroline Graham, a Los Angeles-based scribe. Graham co-wrote a November 2014 story for the Mail that said Christoph Waltz would play Blofeld in SPECTRE.
Cover to a U.S. paperback edition of Live And Let Die
Some Ian Fleming novels and short stories are being edited and altered to address racial issues, The Telegraph reported.
According to The Telegraph, Ian Fleming Publications “commissioned a review by sensitivity readers of the classic texts under its control.”
Many of the examples cited by The Telegraph concern Live And Let Die, Fleming’s second novel, which has sequences set in New York City.
An excerpt from The Telegraph article:
In the sensitivity reader-approved version of Live and Let Die, Bond’s assessment that would-be African criminals in the gold and diamond trades are “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much” becomes – “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought.”
Another altered scene features Bond visiting Harlem in New York, where a salacious strip tease at a nightclub makes the male crowd, including 007, increasingly agitated.
The Telegraph said other changes are being made:
The ethnicity of a barman in Thunderball is similarly omitted in new editions. In Quantum of Solace, a butler’s race now also goes unmentioned.
This all comes after The Guardian reported, some of author Roald Dahl’s children’s books have been changed “to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin.” (Dahl was also a screenwriter on the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice.)
“Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl’s work,” the Guardian said.
Various forms of entertainment have dealt with related issues for decades. In the 1990s, a cable TV version of a Bugs Bunny cartoon abruptly lopped off the end where Bugs, Elmer Fudd, and various Canadian mounties did a song in blackface.
Today, on TV and streaming services, there are disclaimers/warnings that appear ahead of a film.
The 55th anniversary of You Only Live Twice isn’t just a milestone for a memorable James Bond film. It’s also the anniversary for the beginning of the end of 1960s spymania.
The 007 film series led the way for spymania. Over the course of the first four Bond films, everything skyrocketed. Not only did the Bond series get bigger, but it also created a market for spies of all sorts.
By June 1967, when You Only Live Twice debuted, that upward trajectory had ended.
To be sure, Twice was very popular. But there was a falloff from its predecessor, 1965’s Thunderball. Twice’s box office totaled $111.6 million globally, down 21 percent from Thunderball’s $141.2 million.
The fifth 007 movie produced by Eon Productions didn’t lack for resources.
Twice’s famous volcano set cost $1 million, roughly the entire budget of Dr. No. Helicopters equipped with giant magnets swooped out of the sky. A seemingly endless number of extras was available when needed.
At the same time, the movie’s star, Sean Connery, wanted out of Bondage. Producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman adjusted the contract they had with the star. But their inducements were not enough.
You Only Live Twice marker in western Japan
It didn’t help that Broccoli and Saltzman themselves had their own, growing differences. Broccoli didn’t want to take on Connery as another partner — the same kind of arrangement Broccoli’s former partner, Irving Allen, bestowed upon Dean Martin for the Matt Helm movies.
Finally, there was another Bond film that year — the spoof Casino Royale, released in the U.S. less than two months before Twice. However, anybody who viewed Casino Royale’s marketing or trailers could mistake the Charles K. Feldman production for the Eon series.
Twice has a lot going for it. Ken Adam’s sets were spectacular. John Barry’s score was among the best for the Bond series. It was also the one film in the series photographed by the acclaimed director of photography Freddie Young.
In the 21st century, fan discussion is divided. Some appreciate the spectacle, viewing it as enough reason to overlook various plot holes. Others dislike how the plot of Ian Fleming’s novel was jettisoned, with only some characters and the Japanese location retained. Some fans even refer those changes as among the worst moves Eon ever made. CLICK HERE for a sampling. One example: “What led the producers to discard the Fleming trilogy (the biggest single gaffe in the series´ history) is inexplicable.”
The longer-term importance of the movie, however, is that Twice symbolizes how interest in the spy craze was drawing to a close. Bond would carry on, but others — including U.S. television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and I Spy — weren’t long for this world when Twice arrived at theaters.
April Fool’s Day is as good as any occasion to note this month marks the 55th anniversary of Charles K. Feldman’s Casino Royale, the producer’s 1967 send-up of 007.
Feldman, one-time agent (Albert R. Broccoli was one of his employees) turned producer, was nobody’s fool. He had produced films in a variety of genres such as 1948’s Red River (uncredited), 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire, 1955’s The Seven Year Itch and 1965’s What’s New Pussycat.
So, when he acquired the film rights to Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel in the early 1960s, Feldman recognized it had commercial potential even as the film series produced by one-time associate Broccoli and Harry Saltzman was getting underway in 1962.
Feldman tried to entice director Howard Hawks, his one-time colleague on Red River. Hawks was interested but the director backed out after seeing an early print of Dr. No with Sean Connery.
Feldman pressed on, signing distinguished screenwriter Ben Hecht to come up with a screenplay. Details of Hecht’s work were reported in 2011 by Jeremy Duns in the U.K. Telegraph newspaper. Hecht died in 1964, while still working on the project. In 2020, Duns uncovered additional details about an attempt by Joseph Heller to adapt Fleming’s first novel.
By the 1960s, Eon’s series was reaching its peak of popularity with 1964’s Goldfinger and 1965’s Thunderball. Broccoli and Saltzman agreed to a co-production deal with Kevin McClory, holder of the film rights for Thunderball.
James Bond, The Legacy, the 2002 book by John Cork and Bruce Scivally, presents a narrative of on-and-off talks between Feldman, Broccoli, Saltzman and United Artists, the studio releasing the Broccoli-Saltzman movies. In the end, talks broke down. (Behind the scenes, Broccoli and Saltzman had their own tensions to deal with, including Saltzman’s outside ventures such as his Harry Palmer series of films.).
So Feldman opted to go for farce, but not in a small way. His movie had an estimated budget, according to IMDB.com. of $12 million. The Cork-Scivally book put the figure at $10.5 million. Either way, it was more than the $9.5 million budget of You Only Live Twice, the fifth entry in the Broccoli-Saltzman series. Twice’s outlay included $1 million for Ken Adam’s SPECTRE volcano headquarters set.
Feldman’s film didn’t have that kind of spectacle. But he did pay money (or Columbia Pictures’ money) for talent such as John Huston (one of five credited directors), David Niven (playing the “original” James Bond, brought out of retirement, who implies the Sean Connery version of the Broccoli-Saltzman series was assigned the James Bond name by MI6), Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, Ursula Andress (now famous because of Dr. No), William Holden, Woody Allen and….well CLICK HERE to view the entire cast and crew.
Casino Royale, however, was less than the sum of its impressive parts. The humor is uneven, it doesn’t really have a story, despite employing a number screenwriters, including Wolf Mankowitz, who introduced Broccoli and Saltzman to each other.
The’67 Casino managed a reported worldwide gross of $41.7 million. That was good in its day, though less than a third of Thunderball’s $141.7 million global box office.
Much has been written since 1967 about the stressful production, including reported feuds between Sellers and Welles. Perhaps all that took a toll on the film’s producer. Feldman died in May 1968, a little more than 13 months after Casino Royale’s premier. He was 64.
The Spy Command 