Ben Hecht script for Casino Royale found by Jounalist Jeremy Duns
Nicholas Meadows
Posts: 9MI6 Agent
Author, Jounalist and Fleming Scholar Jeremy Duns has found a lost script for Casino Royale that was published in The Sunday Telegraph this past weekend. It's a must read.
Follow the below instructions to get access to the article as it appeared in the paper.
1. Click here: http://dailytelegraph.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx
2. Scroll down until you find the cover of the arts magazine 'Seven', with Mark Ruffalo on the cover, and click on it.
3. Now scroll down the Table of Contents on the right of the Seven cover to page 21, 'Oscar Special', and click it.
4. Click 'Free Trial' and fill in your email address.
5. Read pages 22, 23 and above all DON’T MISS page 25, which is mostly why this is worth doing.
Jeremy will have more details about this and more at his blog. The article is an editied version and hopfully The Debrief will have the article up in full soon. -{
http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com/
It's the best blog on Fleming and has loads or articles about Fleming/Bond and spy fiction. If you have read 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming by Donald McCormick then you will want to read the recent blog post. Then after reading about it at The Debrief, go to Guy Walters blog at The Telegraph.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/guywalters/100077600/james-bond-ian-fleming-and-the-spy-who-didnt-love-him/
Follow the below instructions to get access to the article as it appeared in the paper.
1. Click here: http://dailytelegraph.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx
2. Scroll down until you find the cover of the arts magazine 'Seven', with Mark Ruffalo on the cover, and click on it.
3. Now scroll down the Table of Contents on the right of the Seven cover to page 21, 'Oscar Special', and click it.
4. Click 'Free Trial' and fill in your email address.
5. Read pages 22, 23 and above all DON’T MISS page 25, which is mostly why this is worth doing.
Jeremy will have more details about this and more at his blog. The article is an editied version and hopfully The Debrief will have the article up in full soon. -{
http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com/
It's the best blog on Fleming and has loads or articles about Fleming/Bond and spy fiction. If you have read 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming by Donald McCormick then you will want to read the recent blog post. Then after reading about it at The Debrief, go to Guy Walters blog at The Telegraph.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/guywalters/100077600/james-bond-ian-fleming-and-the-spy-who-didnt-love-him/
Comments
And thanks for posting this Mr Meadows, this and your Ian Fleming bio makes for some interesting titbits...
Roger Moore 1927-2017
http://jeremyduns.net/2013/09/06/rogue-royale/
This ebook is required reading for Bond fans. Based on Duns' description, Hecht's script for CR was superb--darker than any Bond film would dare, yet graced with the style and wit of one of Hollywood's greatest screenwriters. It would have made an incredible movie, perhaps an even better one than the Craig version. Duns is to be congratulated for his incredible discovery of Hecht's drafts--the most exciting Bond-related find in decades--and for writing such an engrossing and informative essay on their genesis and content. Let's hope these scripts will eventually be published with Duns' essay as an introduction.
I've also contributed a review to the amazon page (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00F0LCJY4/ref=cm_cr_thx_view) of this ebook, which tells the story of the "The Greatest James Bond Never Made."
here is a direct link to the complete article in The Telegraph, no need to subscribe
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/jamesbond/8345119/Casino-Royale-discovering-the-lost-script.html
(I presume its the article Agent Meadows is trying to send us to, his links lead me nowhere)
This is holy grail type stuff, the article consists of lengthy detailed plot summaries from various drafts Ben Hecht wrote for Casino Royale in the early 1960s, generally following Fleming's plot, but adding several characters and major action set-pieces. There would have been some big action scenes in the brothels of Hamburg, approximately where we got the airport sequence in the Craig version.
Hecht wrote Hitchcock's Notorious, as well as various other classic films. Notorious is exactly the tone I'd like to see for a 1960s version of Casino... , slightly more morally ambiguous and even sordid than the Connery films (hey, there's brothels, it's gotta be sordid!).
(Turns out he's also responsible for the codename theory, as a fallback in case they couldn't get Connery. But the original intent doesn't sound much worse than "this never happened to the other fellow")
EDIT: Revelator - your link to Jeremy Duns' blog isn't working, but this takes me there. http://www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2014/5/30/rogue-royale-the-lost-bond-film-by-the-shakespeare-of-hollywood
I'll have to try to get ahold of his complete e-book.
It's a compilation of various related things he's written in the past, nearly 800pages long, also including the Dennis Wheatley article we've discussed elsewhere, and I can see he's somehow found an unused Casino Royale script written by Joseph Heller I want to read all about! Not sure what everything else is, but there's a lot of it. Something about Per Fine Ounce I think, something else I need to learn more about.
(Only thing is he should have used internal hyperlinks in his table of contents. 800 pages is too many to scroll through looking for the start of an article. But cannot complain about the wealth of content or the depth of his research)
I stumbled across this because our old pal Revelator posted about it in a competing Bond-fan forum. Come back, Revelator, we need you!
Roger Moore 1927-2017