Tag: Sean Connery

DR NO 2 GREEN LIT

HOLLYWOOD – James Bond film Dr No to finally get a sequel.

James Bond fans are finally going to see what happens next to their favorite secret agent 007 in a new sequel planned for the 1963 film Dr No. The original film starred Sean Connery as the suave British spy, pitted against Joseph Weisman’s eponymous villain. Fans of the movie reacted to the news with delight.

James Bond fan club president Elspeth McGiver spoke to the Studio Exec:

A dream come true. Dr No was such an exciting action film, with everything you could want. It seemed ludicrous that they never made a second movie. Especially when far worse characters seem to get long running series these days. Jason Bourne and Jack Reacher, urgh!

The new movie features a story about Dr No returning from the dead mutated by the radiation from the nuclear bomb he was using to ransom the world. Ursula Andress, Wiseman and Connery are all on board and Brett Ratner is understood to be directing.

Dr. No will be released in 2018.

SCRIPT LEAK: DANNY BOYLE’S 007 JAMES BOND

HOLLYWOOD – The script of Danny Boyle’s Bond 25 has leaked onto the internet.

The new James Bond director Danny Boyle is furious that the first draft of the script for the film has leaked onto the internet.

We publish an extract from the first few pages which we obtained from an anonymous source called Ewan McGregor.

EXT. EDINBURGH. DAY.

JAMES BOND runs down the street clutching a six pack of TENNENTS SUPER STRENGTH LAGER.

JAMES BOND (V.O.)

Choose being chased by Helicopters. Choose Walther PPK and a license to kill. Choose Bond girls and Austin Martins. Choose ejector seats and Union Jack parachutes. Choose Grace Jones and Christopher Walken. Choose Q and pens that fire lasers.

EXT. PARK. DAY.

SICK BOY and JAMES BOND have an air rifle and are aiming at random strangers. A skinhead with a bulldog.

SICK BOY 

(SEAN CONNERY accent)

Do you have the beasht in your shights 007?

JAMES BOND

Yesh.

INT. SLUM HOUSE. NIGHT.

James Bond is shooting up heroin. M comes in. 

M

007 what’s the meaning of this? You’re supposed to be on a mission in Brazil.

JAMES BOND

FFfffffffuck offfff.

Bond collapses. 

M

Oh my God, he’s overdosing.

SHIRLEY BASSEY sings ‘Perfect Day’.

 

THE END.

 

For more Script Leaks, Click Here. 

 

JAMES BOND SNIPER SPEAKS OUT

HOLLYWOOD – Talking EXCLUSIVELY for the first time, James Bond sniper Arthur Whistle spills the beans on his job.

Arthur Whistler is in every James Bond movie though you’ve never seen his face. He’s the sniper who has followed the pacing secret agent that began every film except Dr No. This is an extract from his autobiography License to Be Shot.

I began working at Elstree in 1964 just after I got out of the library. I knew Maurice Binder from his brother who was a wall hanger. In those days walls weren’t built from the ground up but were hung on hooks. And he did that. Maurice said to me ‘How do you fancy shooting someone Wednesday?’ I was free so I took the job. It was supposed to be Sean Connery, but he couldn’t be arsed, so tried to shoot the stunt double. I was all set up. Maurice had his camera aligned using mirrors so he could get a view right down the gun barrel. But then at the last minute the blighter swiveled and shot directly at me. I was so surprised I got a nose bleed and the blood ran down the camera lens. Maurice was not a very forgiving man and swore extravagantly at me. Yet when I went to see Dr No, they’d kept the blood in. 

Different Bonds, James Bonds.

We didn’t film a new sequence for every movie. But we did re-do it when there was a new Bond and Sean Connery finally pulled his finger out to do one. Each time Maurice swore that I’d be able to get a shot away and yet each time it was I that got shot. It became a bit of a game. Roger Moore practiced his hip swivel for days. Timothy Dalton came from the theatre so he alway projected! Pierce Brosnan was Irish so he spent half the day facing in the wrong direction. Because he was Irish. That is to say stupid.

Daniel Craig.

Now we have Daniel Craig and he’s very modern and gritty, but he’s also very sweet. When he came in to film his sequence, he brought jam doughnuts for everyone. The crew and everyone. I’m 91 now so I do tend to shake a little and my memory isn’t what it used to be. I told him that I was sorry about making him do it again and again and then someone realized I’d put live rounds in the rifle. I always do, I told them. For realism. Daniel was a bit upset. And I didn’t get a second jam doughnut.

License to Be Shot is released on Amazon and is available in all good book stores.

SIR EDWIN FLUFFER RECALLS CHARLTON HESTON

HOLLYWOOD- Sir Edwin Fluffer once again delves into his personal memoirs – soon to be published as ‘Not THAT Kind of Fluffer!!!’ – to recall the actress they called the ‘Holy Arse’: Charlton Heston.

Years ago Technicolor was quite the in thing and I was all for it. I know that Spencer Tracy wasn’t a fan, but that was only because it made his knees look silly. There was a time when if you were filming a biblical epic it had to be in Technicolor, or Charlton Heston would refuse to have anything to do with it! 

They were lovely pictures to make, even if they all ended up as long as the Roman Empire, and if truth be told they weren’t really that difficult. All you had to do was put on a toga, swap your brogues for a nice pair of sandals, and remember to say ‘aye’ instead of ‘yes’.
To this day I’ll still tell anyone who’ll listen about the time we were standing at the bottom of a mountain waiting for Heston to make his was back down with the Ten Commandments, and I bet Yul Brynner $15 that he wouldn’t be able to remember them all. He got stuck after the first three and started blabbering on about guns instead, and poor old Yul had to pay up! 

The only bit I didn’t enjoy was the chariots, because as soon as Heston got behind a horse good manners went out the window and he’d start racing around like a mad man and try to knock you over. I was also in that one with Betty Taylor where she played Cleopatra, what was it called? Memory falters. 

During the death scene I had a lovely bit of comic business where it was revealed that I was terribly afraid of the asp, and my delivery of the line ‘why did it have to be snakes?’ brought the house down! Sadly the film was already running at over three weeks long and my part ended up on the cutting room floor, but when I suggested to little Stevie Spielberg that he use it in Raiders of the Lost Ark he jumped at the chance. Spielberg repaid the favour by casting me as Harrison Ford’s father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but I had to let Sean Connery have the part after I broke one of his golf clubs. 

Incidentally it was my idea that he should have a bash at a Scottish accent in The Untouchables, but that’s another story…

ROGER MOORE WILL NOT RETURN AS JAMES BOND

LONDON – Roger Moore has definitively ruled out the possibility of his return as James Bond, when Daniel Craig finishes his current contract which will see him star in another two outings as 007.

‘I’m already too old,’ Sir Roger Moore quipped. ‘And in another three of four years time, I’ll be 87-88. Perhaps I could play his grandfather. Ha ha.’

I had no sooner started scribbling ‘Roger Moore confirmed as 007’s grandfather in new Bond film’ when Sir Roger’s hand gripped my wrist in a steely grip.

‘I was joking,’ hissed the no-longer twinkly septuagenarian. 

Although to be totally honest I have considered returning from time to time. I see what Daniel is doing, the running and the jumping, the having sex in the shower with women who have been abused since childhood, and I think, “I’d like a bit of that”, but then I notice he doesn’t ever seem to have time for a cigarette and when it comes down to it there’s not that much shagging.

So that’s a definite maybe?

No. Absolutely not.  

And what if Sean Connery…?

Then yes.

Moonraker 2 will be released in 2017.

HIDDEN GEMS: 14. GOLDFINGER

Hidden Gems brings to light little known film gems which have somehow slipped through the collective cinematic consciousness. You’re welcome.

A British secret agent with a ‘license to kill’. A villainous German with a lust for gold. A beautiful woman with the unlikely moniker, Pussy Galore. I know it sounds like a bad Austin Powers movie, but in actual fact it is an action packed spy film from 1964. This obscure little film is an absolute gem. Starring former Manchester United footballer Sean Connery as James Bond 007, the movie begins with the English superspy blowing up some large tanks of heroin and he then proceeds to get entangling with card cheat and eccentric millionaire Auric Goldfinger, played by Gert Frobe. Smelling something fishy, Bond is soon on his tail across Europe, playing golf with him in England before almost being castrated by laser somewhere in the Austrian Alps. A plot emerges to destroy the gold supply of the US and thereby boost Goldfinger’s own holdings. Along the way we meet fiendish henchman Odd Job (Harold Sakata) with his razor sharp bowler hat and the aforementioned Pussy, played by ex-Avenger Honor Blackman, Galore.

The style is cool; the action slickly played with enough wit to belie its own frequent ridiculousness and there is fun to be had all round. Bond is equipped with a series of gadgets by Q, his quartermaster, including a beautiful silver Aston Martin with features including ejector seat and machine guns.  One can only wonder why the James Bond character never quite took on. Perhaps if he had been played by an American – after all by the sixties Britain was obviously a spent power on the world stage and the idea that it would be an English secret agent to save the day beggars belief. Perhaps the nascent feminist movement could no longer stomach the scene in which Bond cures Pussy of her lesbianism via judo and a hay stack. Or perhaps we as a culture just watch something this good and think it’ll never be better. Let’s not go on and on. Let’s stop now we’re at the top of our game.

 For more Hidden Gems CLICK HERE.

47 FILMS: 14. ROBIN AND MARIAN

In our continuing series of ’47 Films to see before you’re murdered in your dreams’, we look at Richard Lester’s revisionist middle aged Robin and Marian.

American director, Richard Lester’s career is a wonder to behold. Based in Britain for the most part he was responsible for putting The Beatles on films, some rollicking Musketeers, the best Superman movie ever made, and the only Flashman film.

His humor was a surreal and sixties but dabbed with melancholy. In this retelling of the Robin Hood legend, we meet Robin (Sean Connery with authentic Nottingham accent) with King Richard the Lionheart (Richard Harris) in the dying days of the Crusade. Robin and Little John (Nicol Williamson) are utterly exhausted with the killing and on Richard’s death return to England. The years have changed everything, but some things are the same. Marian (Audrey Hepburn) is in a convent and Robin’s old adversary the Sheriff of Nottingham (Richard Harris) is taxing the country into submission at the behest of King John (Ian Holm).
In contrast to Ridley Scott’s recent flap, Lester’s film takes an ‘idea’ of the aging hero and actually does something with it. Connery and Hepburn are superb as characters whose lives essentially went wrong and have a final chance of happiness. The cast is crammed with brilliant cameos and the script by William Goldman’s smarter brother James (writer also of The Lion in Winter) gives a sharp brooding intelligence to the proceedings. The action is suitably creaky and geriatric, and buckles remain resolutely unswashed, but this is one of the few Robin Hood films where you actually care for the characters.

For more of our 47 Films series CLICK HERE.

SIR EDWIN FLUFFER RECALLS JAMES BOND

HOLLYWOOD- Sir Edwin Fluffer once again delves into his personal memoirs – soon to be published as ‘Not THAT Kind of Fluffer!!!’ – to recall James Bond.

Only the other day I was talking to me dear old friend Olivia DeHavilland, (She’d dialled the wrong number and it took quite some time to convince her I wasn’t her chiropodist) and she asked me that question so many women have asked me before. “Neddy.”, she purred, “You’re a suave, if occasionally violent, alcoholic; why did you never give us your James Bond?”
 

“Maybe 50 years ago,” I laughed, before coughing only the way an elderly man who’s been on 40 a day for as long as he is able to remember can. 

It’s true I was approached about the role many many years ago, but the producers felt that my reputation as a suave if occasionally violent alcoholic wasn’t what they were looking for. I threw my drink in Cubby Broccoli’s face and left the room with as much dignity as a man who’d just wet himself could muster, and thought that was the end of it. Then only last year, my agent gave me the news that darling Sean Connery had been persuaded to come out of retirement and don the tuxedo one last time for Never Ever Say Never Again Ever Again. Would I like to play his arch-nemesis Blofeld? It took me just three weeks to negotiate the contract, and I was on set. The first day’s filming went well even though I hadn’t been able to remember any of the lines, and I retired to my dressing room. It was there I discovered that I’d come out in a terrible rash! I went to my usual doctor, who was as surprised as me to find it wasn’t a recurrence of the old problem. Turns out I was allergic to the cat that had spent the day fast asleep on my lap! 
We managed to renegotiate my shooting schedule while the props team worked on a prosthetic moggie for me to toy with menacingly, but then disaster – Sean found out that he was double booked with a pro-celebrity golf tournament and the project was shelved. There has been some talk recently of reviving it, with Diane Keaton in the main role as she can provide her own tux.
But that’s another story…

47 FILMS: 2. OUTLAND

47 Films to see before you’re murdered in your dreams continues with Sean Connery Sci-Fi Outland.

A lone space Marshal, O’Neill (Sean Connery) on a moon of Jupiter – although set on Io the film was actually filmed on Ganymede for budgetary reasons – has to contend with a corrupt mining company which would rather see its workers die one by one raving in the depths of drug induced psychosis than see its quotas suffer. When O’Neill won’t let go of the investigation and his family desert him, mining boss Wizard (Peter Boyle) calls in some hired guns to off the plucky law man.

Having made the wonderful Capricorn One, Peter Hyams garned a reputation for himself as having balls of 100% brass in 1984 when he made a sequel to 2001: a Space Odyssey. Outland is a work of fantastic gritty and chunky science fiction and carries on from Alien the idea of a proletarian space age, when those in the suits will be the miners and the Parkers of the world and not the preppy military types. Connery’s glum O’Neill – heaven forfend he should ever play Scottish – is a guardian of an unappreciative working man. The violence is brutal; the setting is perfect with a real world of drab clunkiness and the sense of dread as the killers approach palpable. In a swipe at Alien (the balls on this man), the poster line for the film was ‘Even in Space Man’s worst enemy is Man’.

Outland was so successful it was later remade in black and white as a Western and renamed High Noon and a new Outland remake is currently in production.  

For more of our 47 Films to see before you’re murdered in your dreams Click HERE.

TERRENCE MALICK TO DIRECT BOND 25

HOLLYWOOD – Although Spectre hasn’t yet been released talk is already rife about the follow up Bond film, known simply as Bond 25.

Daniel Craig recently confirmed that he would be signing on for another two Bond films, which will make him the third most Bond of the Bond actors to have played Bond, after Roger Moore and Sean Connery.

A massive explosion of news on Bond 24 came with the confirmation that Terry ‘The Machine’ Malick will be taking on directorial duties for the latest installment of the most popular action franchises in cinema history. Malick first made his name with Badlands back in 1973 and then became notorious for the time between projects: there was a gap of some twenty years between Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998). 

Daniel Craig greeted the announcement with some confusion: ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. However, the producers have made a habit of taking directors from smaller independent films and giving them the reigns: Sam Mendes being the latest example of this.

Although Malick has not himself commented on this latest project, a spokesperson close to him said that ‘Terry is looking forward to exploring 007’s spiritual dimension. There will be guns, gadgets and girls, but there will also be whispered voice overs imploring an ineffable god for signs of grace as well as magic hour photography and perhaps even a dinosaur or two.’

Estonian composer Arvo Part has also been added to the team to provide a stirring minimalist soundtrack. The film is not due for release until at the earliest 2016 and so time enough for Terry (at his current rate) to make another 6 or 7 films.

SEAN CONNERY: MEMOIR EXTRACTS 1.

HOLLYWOOD – The Studio Exec is proud to announce that it has been given permission to publish extracts from Sean Connery’s forthcoming memoir Shaken Not Shtrirred.

I first met Loish Maxwell when we were doing a read-through of Dr. No, my first James Bond film. I wash very nervoush and I read my first line with shome trepidation: ‘Ah Missh Moneypenny’.

Loish looked at me astonished.

‘What wash that?’ She shaid.

I repeated the line, a bit nonplusshed. It had sheemed alright to me.

‘But it’s Missh Moneypenny,’ she shaid.

‘That’sh what I shaid,’ I told her. Terrence shaid not to worry I was going to get elocution lesshonsh before the shoot and sho I did.

Three weeksh in Harely Street shaying, ‘She Shells She shells on the She Shore.’ I told them they ought to get one more difficult.

That one wash a walk in the park!

Anyway, shooting began and it all went off brilliantly. Loish became a very good personal friend, even though she was a girl and a bit lippy, and a Canadian to boot!

Shaken not Shtirred will be available from Amazon and all major bookshops.

DWAYNE THE ROCK JOHNSON TO STAR IN ZARDOZ REMAKE

HOLLYWOOD – Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is to star in, as well as write and direct a new remake of the 1974 science fiction film Zardoz.

Widely considered one of the strangest films ever made, Zardoz originally starred Sean Connery and was directed by John Boorman. It tells the story of a giant flying head that spews guns and tells the Slayers to kill and not have babies. Dwayne Johnson spoke exclusively to Studio Exec about the project:

When I was first approached to act properly in movies I always had the dream of some day doing something as wonderful as Zardoz. It’s a film I’ve greatly admired for years. Films these days are simply unambitious and way too normal, including my own, with perhaps the exception of Southland Tales, but Zardoz is just a treasury of nutsy drug induced flim-flam.

How do you feel about directing?

It’ll be easy. I’m going to take a lot of LSD.

Can you tell us about your role?

I’m playing Zed and I want to keep it very close to the original concept, especially the costumes. The body hair will be a challenge. Connery was one of the most hirsute actors of the seventies, and, as we all know, the seventies were the hay day of hairiness.

What other hairy actors do you admire?

Peter Sellers. Burt Reynolds.

Other than body hair how else will you approach the film?

I will update the special effects obviously. They are the weak point of the original film. And I shall also make Zardoz more kid friendly. I think Zardoz has a lot to say to young people. So I’ll try to keep the nudity down to an absolute minimum. The studio will probably insist on changing the name somehow, but I’ll fight them on it.

Journey 4: From the Earth to Zardoz will be released in 2016.

SEAN CONNERY CONFIRMED FOR STAR WARS VII

HOLLYWOOD – Disney have officially confirmed that Sean Connery will come out of retirement to play a prominent character in the upcoming Star Wars VII.

“I needed somebody to play a Sean Connery type character,” said director J.J. Abrams:

The problem was that Sean had officially retired so I thought the character would have to be rewritten. Fortunately his agent heard that we wanted him and he got in touch and told us he was interested.

Abrams refused to disclose exactly how much Connery was paid for the role (rumoured to be around 25 million dollars ) but he was happy to talk about working  with the actor:

He’s an old school pro. As soon as he put on the costume he slipped right into the role. He was  just a joy to work with. The very first day we met he called me Brian and began reciting lines of The Untouchables script at random. Then at a script read through he kept calling me Hitch and re-enacted a few scenes from Marnie. I couldn’t believe how much of a joker he was but his agent said that was just his way and that he’s a natural comic. I mean the guy spent the entire shoot pretending he didn’t know where he was and claimed that his agent was drugging him. Then he’d look really confused, start to cry and said all he wanted to do was to go home, watch Murder She Wrote and have a nice cup of tea. His sense of humor was refreshing because a lot of these modern actors take themselves  way too seriously. I think the day he pretend to wet himself in the middle a scene was my favourite of his practical jokes. Everyone just cracked up and he looked so sad and disorientated. You know they say George Clooney knows how to have fun on a film set but Connery is the master. 

Stars Wars VII is due for release in December, 2015.