Why do Eon keep using Neal Purvis & Robert Wade ?
John from Cork
Posts: 129MI6 Agent
Eon have hired new writers a couple of times only to revert to Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, I personally would have dispensed with Purvis &wades services 20 years ago.
Comments
It's quite simple- Neal & Robert have possession of the wax effigy of Kevin McClory that Cubby used to stick pins in every night, and Michael & Barbara don't want this being public knowledge so keep rehiring them.
I've never quite got the issue with them.
Yes, I think they’re treated a bit harshly. While some of their tropes have worn thin (how many times has Craig’s Bond quit the service/gone rogue?), I don’t view their body of work as clearly inferior to the stuff from the 70s and 80s. Spectre was utter rubbish, but John Logan shoulders some of the blame for that one. And although DAD was a mess of a film, there were some interesting ideas in that one, such as Bond being captured for an extended period of time and needing to reestablish his credibility , and dealing with a double within MI6. The trouble was the film didn’t get enough mileage out of these threads. The capture is resolved too quickly, and the double can only ever be Miranda since no other possible candidates are introduced. But if you put aside DAD and Spectre, I don’t think P&W have done badly.
Yeah I think every Bond film they've been on has brought at least one or two big ideas that felt fresh. It's easy to forget how thrilling and different TWINE sounded before it was released: Bond actually gets injured, MI6 HQ gets attacked, and M gets kidnapped!
Prior to that the only time the Bond films ever did anything vaguely unexpected or out of the ordinary with the character was LTK.
EON has tried but it is simply not too successful at getting other writers in.
Wade and Purvis' stuff tends to get rewritten, often with an overhaul. Some don't like that, but the fact it needs it is not great. For instance, Apted's wife was brought in on the dialogue for TWINE. The director redid the third actor DAD. Haggis felt CR needed a third act, which he provided, in Venice. I sort of know why this occurred, I see their points of view, but the days of Maibaum knocking out a satisfying script seem long gone.
As for the other talents, Haggis was brought in for QoS and paid a lot to to something basically that got rejected, ditto the Boyle idea for NTTD. I don't really see the reasoning behind this - paying someone a shed load of money and costing you time too only to say, ah, I see where you're going with this but no thanks. Find out what the idea is first, eh? Delays with QoS cost it - the new script was never ready - and it's costing a fortune not to release NTTD which is in danger of not breaking even because of the pandemic affecting cinemas.
So they go back to their safe bet. W+P.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Quantum of Solace was made in a writers' strike so I'm not sure that's entirely fair.
I don't think that scripts getting rewritten is that awful either: Hollywood has worked that way for decades. That's what Maibaum did on films like Octopussy.
I think you mean 670 million, Gymkata. 😊
only somebody truly Evil could expect that amount of money
I know about that MI6-hq story, I was the one who posted it on Random Chat!
My point with QoS is that yes it was done in the writer's strike - but because they got Haggis in with his big idea (Bond discovers Vesper had a child he hadn't known of, the film would end with him dumping said child in an Romanian orphanage, that's a cheery ending eh, rightly vetoed by Michael G Wilson) and that put the film back so a) They had to go with a new story and b) It coincided with the strike. Didn't the Notting Hill director also pull out because the script wasn't ready? So they went with Marc Forster who really didn't have the right touch.
In fact, come to think of it QoS seems like a dress rehearsal for NTTD!
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I think if anything, P&W actually do better than the fancy writers who get brought in! The third act we got in DAD couldn’t possibly have been an improvement since it’s perhaps the most ridiculous part of any Bond film (in fact, everything before the Ice Palace is actually pretty solid). CR didn’t need the third act in Venice; Fleming’s more subdued ending is better, and P&W were right to retain it having already added multiple action pieces in the earlier parts of the film.
And then there are all of the rejected ideas that you reference, and more, which always sound worse to me than what P&W wrote. We’ll see how Fukunaga does with his NTTD re-writes, but I’m not feeling too optimistic.
Again, I’ve certainly lodged my share of complaints about Purvis and Wade over the years, but on the whole I think I they’ve done a good job.