"I Wrote James Bond Movies. The Amazon-MGM Deal Gives Me Chills."
Bond on the Run
Posts: 6MI6 Agent
An interesting guest essay in The New York Times from John Logan who was a writer on Skyfall and Spectre:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/31/opinion/amazon-mgm-james-bond-bezos.html
Comments
Fine words and thoughts from Mr Logan. I hope he and others like him are listened to.
His comment about the focus group for Sweeney Todd is hilarious.
I think it's easy to romanticize Eon as a loving curator of James Bond, but it means ignoring how they've failed, too. Weren't the shortcomings of Spectre a result of them doing fan service no one wanted at the expense of giving us a great story? Having Blofeld be Bond's foster brother is exactly the kind of stupid idea a stereotypical Hollywood suit would come up with.
Lots of people say Disney "ruined" Star Wars, conveniently forgetting about Jar Jar Binks or George Lucas adding cheesy CGI creatures to the first trilogy. But this lifelong Star Wars fan is pretty grateful for the Mandalorian, a Disney product.
I have no idea what Amazon will do with Bond but:
1.) They don't have him yet (creatively speaking).
2.) There's no guarantee that they will do any worse with him than the current producers.
Good words from John Logan and from @Cheverian
Regarding Spectre, it is interesting to note that Fleming himself wrote a story where Bond encountered the murderer of his childhood mentor Hannes Oberhauser - in a way you can kind of understand how you might extend that idea and make the murderer into a proper Bond villain who runs an evil organisation in the present day. And once you've done that, why not make him Blofeld?
I'm not saying it's right per se, -or that they really did enough with the idea- just that I can see how the thought process would make sense when you're in the position of writing it.
You’re absolutely right about the thought process. Combine it with the desire to personalize the Craig era stories (which many here have felt was a mistake) and you can understand how they arrived where they did.
i was unaware of that unwritten Fleming story, but it makes me wish we had seen a better version of that plot come to the big screen. Instead they went with a Luke “I am your father” twist making Blofeld the author of all Bond’s pain. If Oberhauser’s killer had simply been a Spectre agent who led to the introduction of an impersonal Blofeld, I would have found the movie far more satisfying but that’s just my opinion, of course.
Oh it wasn't unwritten: I'm referring to Octopussy.
Fleming was personalising his Bond stories in a not-dissimilar manner. Even ignoring Octopussy, you've then got Bond going after Blofeld for revenge in YOLT.
I've never read Octopussy (obviously!). Nor have I been one to object to some of the stories being personal. It made sense in YOLT just as I think QoS makes sense as a follow up after CR.
My one regret about Craig's time as 007 is we didn't get to see him as a cold-blooded professional after Casino. Lots of people here have wanted a "Bond on a mission" story. One reason, for that, I think is that an impersonal plot would actually round out Bond's character. Doing his duty for Queen and country as an assassin would better illustrate that he became the man Vesper feared he would become.
I really enjoyed reading John Logan's thoughts and his reflections on his time working on Bond and other projects - a refreshing point of view on the creative process in this day and age.