Will new Bond author have to endure this?
TOOTS
Posts: 114MI6 Agent
Rhett, Scarlett and Friends Prepare For Yet Another Encore by MOTOKO RICH, NY Times 16.05.2007
Interesting piece about restrictions and rules imposed by another literary estate.
What fetters would IFP place on the new adult Bond author?
M can't be a traitor?
Bond can't be [insert special interest group most annoying to Daily Mail/Express reader here]
Bond can't have sex with [insert special interest group most annoying to Daily Mail/Express reader here]
What rules do you think will be imposed on C-Bond Author?
Nigel Smith brought James Bond his coffee as 007 was ploughing through that morning's SIGINT. Upon taking a sip Bond frowned: "This isn't my Jamaican Blue Mountain, Nigel. Has 008 been poncing my supply again?"
"No, sir, actually a missive from the MicroGlobe One Oversight Committee. Fair Trade only now."
Ever since M had come out of the closet and continued a public relationship with a female assistant to the Nigerian High Commission (well, that short hair had always been a bit butch), things had certainly changed. Was the Service being compromised? Bond certainly thought so but it made his job easier. He had to report to his controller by satellite squirt in the afternoon. He hoped Al-Zaquaari in Tehran would be there to get his signal.
Interesting piece about restrictions and rules imposed by another literary estate.
What fetters would IFP place on the new adult Bond author?
M can't be a traitor?
Bond can't be [insert special interest group most annoying to Daily Mail/Express reader here]
Bond can't have sex with [insert special interest group most annoying to Daily Mail/Express reader here]
What rules do you think will be imposed on C-Bond Author?
Nigel Smith brought James Bond his coffee as 007 was ploughing through that morning's SIGINT. Upon taking a sip Bond frowned: "This isn't my Jamaican Blue Mountain, Nigel. Has 008 been poncing my supply again?"
"No, sir, actually a missive from the MicroGlobe One Oversight Committee. Fair Trade only now."
Ever since M had come out of the closet and continued a public relationship with a female assistant to the Nigerian High Commission (well, that short hair had always been a bit butch), things had certainly changed. Was the Service being compromised? Bond certainly thought so but it made his job easier. He had to report to his controller by satellite squirt in the afternoon. He hoped Al-Zaquaari in Tehran would be there to get his signal.
Comments
Loved the post, especially the Mail/Express bits. John Gardner is on record as complaining about the restrictions he had to work under, and it's worth commenting that such changes he made (eg Bond being promoted to Captain rather than Commander, the Q'ute character) were rapidly dispensed with by Raymond Benson. At a guess the new author would have to work within the same guidelines as previous continuation authors and have 007 operating in the here and now but remaining in his prime agewise and interacting with the usual supporting cast, at least to an extent.
I think these set of restrictions are really tying down a potential author's creativity. That doesn't do the franchise any good. I take it that Bond isn't allowed to smoke or drink, either ... or what about gambling? Would the people addicted to gambling complain?
As far as I'm concerned, Ian Fleming's novels are the only "proper" Bond books.
By MOTOKO RICH
It’s taken 12 years, three authors and one rejected manuscript, but tomorrow will be another day when “Rhett Butler’s People,” the second sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind,” is published this fall.
Less a conventional sequel than a retelling from Rhett Butler’s point of view, the new book, to be published by St. Martin’s Press in November, is written by Donald McCaig, a former advertising copywriter turned Virginia sheep farmer who has written well-reviewed novels about the Civil War.
The book, at a little over 400 pages, will be a slip of a novel compared with the original, which ran more than a thousand pages. “Rhett Butler’s People” covers the period from 1843 to 1874, nearly two decades more than are chronicled in “Gone With the Wind.” Readers will learn more about Rhett Butler’s childhood on a rice plantation; his relationship with Belle Watling, the brothel madam; and his experiences as a blockade runner in Charleston, S.C.
Most of all, readers will get inside Rhett’s head as he meets and courts Scarlett O’Hara in one of the most famous love affairs of all time.
With the publication of “Rhett Butler’s People,” St. Martin’s will at last have the chance to begin recouping the $4.5 million advance it agreed to pay the Mitchell estate for the right to publish a second sequel. The publisher has high hopes for the book’s commercial prospects, with an anticipated first print run of more than a million copies.
But the new book is also, in some senses, a bid for redemption by the estate of Margaret Mitchell, who died in 1949 and steadfastly refused to write a sequel to “Gone With the Wind” herself. When Alexandra Ripley’s “Scarlett,” the first sequel, was published in 1991, it was a blockbuster best seller — it has sold more than six million copies to date worldwide — but suffered a critical drubbing. (Five years ago Ms. Mitchell’s estate unsuccessfully tried to block publication of “The Wind Done Gone,” Alice Randall’s unauthorized parody told from the perspective of a slave whose mother, Mammy, was Scarlett’s nanny.)
This time around, the lawyers who manage the business affairs of the Mitchell estate aimed higher. “What we were most interested in was a product of high literary quality,” said Paul Anderson Jr., one of three lawyers who advises the estate, held in trust for the benefit of Ms. Mitchell’s two nephews. “We were looking for something not to make a quick buck, but something that would be lasting.”
The search for the right author was an epic saga of its own. It began in 1995, when the estate commissioned Emma Tennant, an English novelist who had written a well-regarded sequel to Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” to write a sequel to the sequel of “Gone With the Wind.”
Ms. Tennant’s contract specified that she retain Ms. Mitchell’s tone, vision and characters. It also forbade Ms. Tennant from including “acts or references to incest, miscegenation, or sex between two people of the same sex.”
When Ms. Tennant submitted a 575-page manuscript, entitled “Tara,” it picked up where Ms. Ripley, who had set much of “Scarlett” in Ireland, left off, returning Scarlett to Georgia.
Unfortunately, the lawyers for the estate and editors at St. Martin’s thought it was too British in sensibility. They fired Ms. Tennant and legally prohibited her from ever publishing her manuscript.
Stranded without an author, the estate and St. Martin’s next approached Pat Conroy, the Southern novelist best known for “The Prince of Tides,” who had written an introduction to the 60th-anniversary edition of “Gone With the Wind.”
Thorny contract talks ensued. Concerned that the estate’s lawyers would impinge on his authorial freedom, Mr. Conroy joked publicly that he would open his sequel with this line: “After they made love, Rhett turned to Ashley Wilkes and said, ‘Ashley, have I ever told you that my grandmother was black?’ ”
Mr. Anderson, who was not involved in negotiations with Mr. Conroy but whose father was, said the estate never would have put editorial constraints on Mr. Conroy. “Everyone understood that there would be nothing in a contract with him that would prohibit him from including miscegenation or homosexuality, if that’s what he wanted to put in there,” he said. “He, after all, is an artist.”
Mr. Conroy remembers the negotiations differently. In an interview he said the estate’s lawyers never stopped trying to prohibit him from including miscegenation or homosexuality, or from killing off Scarlett O’Hara. In the end, Mr. Conroy said, he pulled out of talks with the estate because he did not believe he would be given true editorial freedom.
With nothing to show after four years, St. Martin’s publisher, Sally Richardson, and executive editor, Hope Dellon, began searching for a new writer. Finding a promising candidate proved difficult.
Finally, Ms. Dellon walked into a bookstore and found a copy of “Jacob’s Ladder,” a Civil War novel by Mr. McCaig.
She liked what she read, and called Mr. McCaig, who said he had never even read “Gone With the Wind.” Once he did, he was intrigued. Right from the start, he said, he knew he wanted to tell the story from Rhett Butler’s point of view, against the backdrop of the Civil War.
“The Civil War has a tremendous moral and emotional force,” Mr. McCaig said in a telephone interview. “You take the Civil War out of it and have the epic love story and everything else is kind of ‘oh dear.’ ”
Mr. McCaig took on the commission, he said, out of “six parts hubris and four parts poverty.” He declined to disclose how much the estate was paying him.
He spent six years researching and writing, digging in historical archives and going out in a skiff in Charleston Harbor to re-enact Rhett’s efforts to get through naval blockades, nearly running aground on a breakwater one night.
His wife, Anne, produced 100 pages of meticulous chapter outlines for “Gone With the Wind,” so that Mr. McCaig would be able to follow the original’s timeline as he wrote.
He delivered chapters to his editors as he finished them. Occasionally the lawyers for the Mitchell estate would be invited to weigh in as well.
“It was a rocky road,” Mr. McCaig said. “There were a lot of people involved and a lot of different needs. It’s a much more complex environment than most novels are written in.”
Mr. Anderson said the estate’s lawyers, having learned from their experiences with Ms. Tennant and Mr. Conroy, tried not to interfere with the content of the novel too much. Bowing to changing mores, Mr. McCaig’s contract acknowledged the necessity of “modernizing the treatment of the sensitive areas of race and sex to reflect the changes in public attitudes during the period of more than 60 years since the publication of the original novel.”
In the end Mr. McCaig included a minor interracial affair and one suggestion of closeted homosexuality (not Ashley Wilkes’s). More controversial, though, were sprinklings of a racial epithet within various characters’ dialogue, a point that concerned the estate’s lawyers.
“It’s an issue that we thought should be considered,” Mr. Anderson said. “It’s an explosive term from a social point of view.”
Mr. McCaig pointed out that the use of the word was historically accurate, and that it cropped up in “Gone With the Wind.” The word made it into the final manuscript.
Mr. McCaig declined to reveal much about the plot of “Rhett Butler’s People,” but he did say it opened with a duel between Rhett and Belle Watling’s brother, Shadrach, an episode that is referred to briefly in “Gone With the Wind.” He also acknowledged an important plot line concerning a child, possibly the son of Rhett and Belle. And an excerpt from a scene released by St. Martin’s shows the teenage Rhett being punished by his father and sent to work for Belle’s father as a laborer on the rice plantation where Rhett grew up.
Following up on a follow-up inevitably has its challenges. “I’m almost certain that there’s going to be people who really have a bone to pick with ‘Gone With the Wind’ who are going to take it out on this,” Mr. McCaig said. “There’s going to be adoring fans who find places where I distorted the true meaning of the original. And there’s going to be some people who think it’s a pretty good book.”
Shame on you Toots - fall??
As someone who lives in the UK you should know that it's pronounced Autumn.
If not, it is unforgivable.
The article in question was written by an American reporter for an American newspaper,so in this instance, this form of English would be considered correct.
As Shaw once noted, our countries are divided by a common language.:)
Back to the topic:
I like to think that IFP wouldn't be presumptous enough to tell an author such as Ken Follett or Frederic Forsyth how to write a James Bond novel--but I've been wrong before...
Posterity
by Philip Larkin
Jake Balokowsky, my biographer,
Has this page microfilmed. Sitting inside
His air-conditioned cell at Kennedy
In jeans and sneakers, he’s no call to hide
Some slight impatience with his destiny:
‘I’m stuck with this old fart at least a year;
I wanted to teach school in Tel Aviv,
But Myra’s folks’ – he makes the money sign -
‘Insisted I got tenure. When there’s kids – ’
He shrugs. ‘It’s stinking dead, the research line;
Just let me put this ba$tard on the skids,
I’ll get a couple of semesters leave
To work on Protest Theatre.’ They both rise,
Make for the Coke dispenser. ‘What’s he like?
Christ, I just told you. Oh, you know the thing,
That crummy textbook stuff from Freshman Psych,
Not out of kicks or something happening –
One of those old-type natural fouled up guys.’
Very funny, but *I* was defending you! As W.G. has confirmed the writer of the piece is from the United States, thus the use of American English is perfectly fine.
Personally I really hope that neither Follett nor Forsyth is the new Bond author. I'm not a fan of either, and I do not think their respective styles are anywhere close to Bond. I could be completely wrong, however as they are rather large names I doubt they would be interested in writing a continuation novel anyway.
But I too have been wrong before. . .
Ah, but very rarely.
Thanks for the defense, buddy.
I figure it should Tom Clancy or Tom Harris writing Bond. Or even John Grisham. Guaranteed sales. Perhaps Bond should work for the CIA. They really need to Americanize him to sell more books Stateside.
They could always decide to skip the formalities and call him "Jim".Of course he'd also need a really powerful sidearm--like a miniaturized Howitzer, for example...
Yeah, man, like way coool! Thad'd be baaaad! And make it the best Barnd book, like, ever.
It'd be hellacious.The bomb.Trick.
And no more teasing:this Jim Bond guy would be conducting an unhidden affair with Moneypenny.I see Elizabeth Berkeley as Penny.It'd be a real stretch for her.Penny and Jim could occasionally do the deed on top of her desk just before he enters M's office.As for M...Man?Woman?Crossdresser?Needs a shave either way..Eddie Izzard might like playing M.Then again,Al Pacino would bring an element of subtlety to the part.
It would be the shizzel on my rizzle! Yeah, Barnd and Dollarcent could really git it orn! While Tanner and Robinson watch and film it to download on YouTube. We could cut to Gogol watching it (er, this is literary Bond - Robinson and Gogol did not exist in that world - Ed.). Screw that!
Well, trannies don't go down well in the Mid-West (if you catch my drift) so scrub Izzard. Pacino - yeah but Corleone in charge of the CIA. How about we make Charlton Heston the head of an intelligence service (never done that before ;-) ). Or Sam L Jacko.
Fiona: But of course, I forgot your ego, Mr. Bond. James Bond, who only has to make love to a woman and she starts to hear heavenly choirs singing.
TOOTS and Lazenby880 and I were only joking about Americanizing 007.
The individual the Ian Fleming estate has selected to write the special 2008 James Bond novel has not been identified at this time.
Ian Fleming Publishing has said,however,that this particular writer is an established author.IFP will announce his name sometime next year.We'll just have to be patient a little while longer.
LOL