Ben Hecht script for Casino Royale found by Jounalist Jeremy Duns

Lest we be worried by an unfamiliar newcomer posting a story that requires many links and so on, this is also up and running on the mi6 website and it's fascinating stuff, with ideas that would have worked brilliantly in Craig's CR, makes you wonder.

And thanks for posting this Mr Meadows, this and your Ian Fleming bio makes for some interesting titbits... 

A followup: Jeremy Duns has recently published Rogue Royale, an ebook 'director's cut' essay on Ben Hecht's 1960s drafts for the never-made film version of Casino Royale. Further information and links to the eBook's Amazon page are here:

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.

BUMP

here is a direct link to the complete article in The Telegraph, no need to subscribe
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/fil … cript.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/ … -hollywood
I'll have to try to get ahold of his complete e-book.

Last edited by caractacus potts (26th Mar 2018 23:36)

Jeremy Duns has made Rogue Royale available, along with several other pieces of Bond and spy oriented research, as part of a free ebook downloadable as pdf here, entitled Need to Know: An Archive of Journalistic Pursuits

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!