It’s crazy. Only a year ago audiences were getting ready for the arrival of the next James Bond film No Time to Die. Flash forward a year and here we are again, awaiting the same movie. Also a year ago I reviewed an intriguing new book by Mark Edlitz called The Many Lives of James Bond (reviewed here at borg). I instantly loved that Edlitz wasn’t the typical non-fiction franchise tie-in writer–he was a diehard fan and loved Bond as much as I did (actually more). And it came through in his interviews with some of the key people in front of and behind the lens, as well as those who dabbled in the James Bond creative space over the years. As luck would have it, Edlitz is back with more from his research. In his new book The Lost Adventures of James Bond, Edlitz recounts story treatments, screenplays, and more, adventures that didn’t make it to the screen or your bookshelf. More Roger Moore as Bond. More Timothy Dalton as Bond. More Pierce Brosnan as Bond. Who’s in?
Sometimes you can align the right fan with a project and come up with something great. Add Mark Edlitz to that list and his fascinating, broad look at the James Bond franchise inThe Many Lives of James Bond: How the Creators of 007 Have Decoded the Superspy. As audiences get ready for 2020’s No Time to Die, the franchise continues to be as popular as ever, through new fiction and non-fiction books, comics, music, posters, and more. But how do you translate the master British spy from Ian Fleming’s original stories into new stories, or adapt the character to the big screen, to audio books and radio plays, and to spin-off comic books and novels? Mark Edlitz is a long-time fan who took his tape recorder along to Bond conventions over the years and interviewed everyone he could find in front of and behind the camera, then expanded that into people behind the books and everything else he could find. The result is the largest collection of Bond oral histories anywhere. The result is The Many Lives of James Bond, now available for the first time, from Lyons Press.
Supplemented with sketch art (from artist Pat Carbajal) and peppered with black and white photographs of the interview subjects, Edlitz makes up for some of the big creators he was unable to interview by interviewing people close to them. Interviewing people is not easy: Sometimes the subjects aren’t good at being interviewed, and oftentimes subjects are evasive for whatever reason. But most subjects in the book said they felt a certain family connection to the honor of working on a Bond project, and were open with their thoughts. It’s full of all kinds of surprises, and more insights than you can imagination about being Bond, from interviews with Roger Moore and George Lazenby, a stunt double, Hoagy Carmichael and David Niven’s sons (Fleming’s initial visions for Bond), and Glen A. Schofield, who provides his account of working with Sean Connery as voice over actor in a video game 20 years after his last Bond performance. The Many Lives of James Bond also looks back to some early, pre-Bond film era performers.
Edlitz covers casting the role and directing Bond (from movie directors Martin Campbell (GoldenEye, Casino Royale), Roger Spotiswoode (Tomorrow Never Dies), and editor and unit director John Glen (who worked on eight films with four Bond actors)), writing words and working with the famed producers who own the Bond legacy (from interviews with more than a dozen writers, including three-time Bond screenwriter Bruce Feirstein), creating music for Bond (from songwriters Leslie Bricusse (Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice) and Don Black (who wrote songs for five films)), creating clothes for Bond (from Jany Temime (Skyfall, SPECTRE)), and even marketing Bond (in movie posters created by Robert McGinnis (Diamonds are Forever, Live and Let Die), Rudy Obrero (Never Say Never Again), and Dan Goozee (Moonraker, Octopussy, A View to a Kill)), all while trying to be faithful to Fleming’s vision while adapting when necessary to changing times.
Back to the Future is a sci-fi classic that should be on the list of everyone’s favorite films. It spawned two sequels that didn’t capture the magic of the original, but gave audiences an excuse to go to back to the theater to see what Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly, Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown, and the awesome DeLorean time machine had been up to. Or will be up to.
Back to the Future, called BTTF for short by its fan followers, was not a franchise that provided all the extras for fans of bigger sci-fi and fantasy franchises like Star Wars or Star Trek or Lord of the Rings would produce–no endless list of action figures, tabletop games, video games, comic book series, or tie-in novels, although there have been the odd sample of each of these over the years. With the modern age of retro as cool, it’s interesting even more BTTF ephemera is available now than ever before.
