Soliciting Fan Thoughts on EON
BrianRSheridan
Posts: 7MI6 Agent
Greetings. I am making an academic presentation at a conference about 007 and its fandom. I would like to hear your opinions about how EON has treated James Bond fans. Do you think they have provided enough support? Not enough support? Or has EON provided too much fanservice to the detriment of the Bond franchise? Your responses can include thoughts about all aspects of Bond from the movies to the merchandising. Thanks!!!!
Comments
Can you give us a little more insight into the context of your presentation? "007 and its fandom" is a pretty broad and well documented subject. Who is your audience - film students?
I think most of us won't have a strong opinion on how "EON has treated its fans" other than appreciating that they have a fairly difficult job, as you can't please all the people all of the time. EON is in business to make money, and the market for Bond films is wide-ranging - not just to please die-hard fans but to make films which will receive the widest audience. In this respect, they usually do a solid job against some tough competition, respecting the character of Bond and the constraints around that character for the most part. In terms of how they otherwise 'treat' fans, it's pretty much as GassyMan has said. Our major source of frustration is the length of time between theatrical releases.
Have you seen 'Everything or Nothing: the untold story of 007'?
Yes, they are out there to make as much money as they can, but translating those elements I mentioned to the screen that only the top ten percentile of fans would recognize, vs. substituting those things with some filler sequences to chalk up screen time shows that they're not always out to make a quick buck.
CR is a great example, having its source material 50 years removed, and we get the attempted poisoning to represent the gun-disguised-as-cane assassination attempt in the casino, as well as that expansive sequence of the Miami airport bomber to represent the couple of inept Bulgar bombers from the novel. Then in the end is that operative with an eye-patch glass lens, just like in the book; most people wouldn’t have gotten that little detail that was meant for only the most ardent fans.
Actual interaction with EON isn't required. It is the fandoms perceptions of how they are treated. I read comments here about complaints that EON does little to attract new fans to the franchise like ST or Star Wars does.
So I'm looking to hear opinions.
Thanks,
Brian
Yup-seen it numerous times. I've been a HUGE Bond fan since my mother went into labor with me at the double feature of DN & FRWL. I've been on this board as "Newsman" for awhile. Thanks for your thoughts.
But Bond got along fine without such a grassroots effort because films don't require ratings and cancellations. To my knowledge, there's never been a fan-based push for anything significant, nor have fans generated the sort of homegrown efforts -- in the form of fanzines, fan films, and letter writing campaigns -- that Star Trek created. In addition, Eon has seen many cooks in the kitchen.
Yes, the Broccoli family has been there to cash a lot of checks, but Saltzman and, arguably, Richard Maibaum and Terrence Young were critical to making the films viable, too. With Star Trek, a lot came from Roddenberry, at least until he lost his marbles and found the franchise essentially taken away from him by any numbers of folks.
With Star Trek, there seemed to be a stronger sense of integrity to the franchise, at least until the more recent reboots. By this, I'm not referring to a moral issue but rather that the various series and films despite their aesthetic differences and various lapses in continuity could be taken as still being all one tapestry. With rare exception, actors weren't recast, for instance, and storylines often crossed with one another. The universe had an intact history. In this sense, not only could fans grow older with the franchise, but new fans could join and share a relatively common experience with those others.
Things are much shakier with Bond in that different actors have played the part and many of the films seem to have no relation at all to any other, both in plot and in execution, beyond the basics of cast and character. A Bond fan could have been with the films from the beginning or joined in the early 2000s and have very different expectations of what a Bond film is, for instance, and this accounts in part for all of the diverse opinions of fans on this board and others. In this sense, the studio again really has no obligation to fans beyond the ticket (and DVD) buyers of the moment.
Servicing the fans with nostalgia and homages could be taken at least one of two ways: A post-modern recognition that, indeed, there is a kind of "meta" umbrella of expectation among Bond fans, who now have an aural and visual language for what they expect to see (The Bond theme; him in a dinner jacket); lazy storytelling on the part of the writers, directors, and producers, who rather than come up with more unique and creative elements of their own, just look backwards to see what surface-level aesthetics they can apply to the movies.
I tend to think it's a lot more the latter than the former, though the fad for the past 10 years of so with prequels has been, indeed, to regurgitate a lot of what we've seen before in a "retro" way. I don't think this is servicing the fans so much as just following the trends. While the film producers, I'm sure, publicly acknowledge the importance of the fans, and some or all of them may actually believe that, their behavior for at least the past 20 years suggests they're far more interested in just selling tickets to whoever will buy them than pleasing the various pockets of interested parties who know that Bond's wife was named Tracy or that he drove a DB5.
You've asked a very open ended question, so I'll try my best to be as brief as possible.
I'm a fan of both Star Trek and James Bond. In your OP, you asked if EON has provided enough support to fans of the series. Likewise, I'm guessing you're asking the same of Paramount/CBS in their treatment of Star Trek.
The fact is though that "fans" is a very broad body of people each wanting different things. C&D was right, they can't please everybody all the time - in fact, I agree with everything in his post. EON has a very difficult job, and for the most part they have done well.
As a "purist", though, I am, however, finding it difficult to reconcile the fact that some of the films have had a very different feel to the Fleming novels, and while I appreciate that there are times when they need to cater for a wider audience, I think that they have, on occasion, crossed a line into what I would consider a "disrespectful" treatment of Fleming's work - particularly during the 1970s with the first "reinvention" after Connery retired from the role, although none are quite as horrendous as Brosnan's last Bond film, Die Another Day.
I am also somewhat disturbed at the continuing rumours that, in a more diverse, tolerant and accepting world, the next actor to play James Bond might not even look like James Bond. This disturbs me greatly. James Bond is a character created by Ian Fleming and has an established background story, and an established appearance. For an actor to play the part, they have to look the part.
There ought to be a balance between catering for a "wider audience", as it were, without completely alienating the die hard fans that have been there since the beginning.
I'm also not a fan of the Kelvin universe Star Trek. I do not understand why they can't just re-enact the early years of Kirk going on adventures that have not been shown before, while keeping the timeline untouched simply by following established cannon. In other words, fill in the gaps between episodes of the original series, instead of reinventing the timelines and the characters altogether.
There are differences in the formula between a good film, or even a great film, and one that fits in well with the franchise. It is possible for a film to be simultaneously a good film while being a terrible James Bond/Star Trek flick. The Kelvin universe Star Trek films are good films, but I'm not sure that they're particularly good Star Trek.
From my point of view I think both EON and Paramount/CBS should be catering for the die-hard fans of the respective franchises first and foremost. While the vast majority of installments on both franchises are very good, there are the outliers in which both EON and Paramount/CBS have apparently tried to win over a new audience of which I have personally not been a fan. I'm not saying that they shouldn't do that - indeed, they should, but I think the execution of such concepts are flawed.
It is worth point out that CR owed a fair bit to Fleming's novel and so would not have been the risk take it was without that story coming back into the clutches of EON. His diverse templates forced them to take chances rather than make Dr NO The Sequel and so on.
Agree with Gassy Man about his post, they do tend to chop and change directors, often picking those who are unsuitable really, yet are very loyal to Wade and Purvis, the scriptwriters. There is no five-year plan or vision, but they are good at marketing the films. That should not be taken for granted.
Roger Moore 1927-2017