Bond. Litigious Bond

Yesterday, I talked about how George Lazenby got his lucky break and a chance to be James Bond.  But there's also an interesting story that I didn't know about Sean Connery, or more importantly, why Connery came back in 1983 to do Never Say Never Again.

You see, Dear Reader, back in the beginning, Ian Fleming had a friend by the name of Kevin McClory.  McClory and Fleming (and a few others) would all kick around story ideas, and write screenplay treatments for Fleming's new sensational literary hero.  One of these became the script for Thunderball.

However, both Fleming and McClory ultimately claimed rights to the screenplay, and it was promptly embroiled in a long series of legal rights battles (it was originally going to be the first film).  The courts eventually decided in McClory's favor, and he was all set to use it to launch a competing Bond franchise (can you imagine?), so the producers at Eon (Broccoli et al.) cut a deal-- McClory would get sole producer credit (and presumably gobs of money) for Thunderball if they could make it as part of the main franchise with Connery and the gang.

McClory continued to have dreams of parlaying Thunderball's success (it remains the best earning Bond film after adjustment for inflation) into his own Bond Empire, but he was unable to acquire the rights to any of the other properties from Fleming, leaving him with just the one film.  So what was he to do?  Why, make it again, of course!

So almost 20 years later he set out to remake it bigger and better.  Roger Moore was Bond now, though, and probably had little interest in the Non-Eon production, and frankly was a different kind of Bond anyway and would have been a poor fit for the script.  Fortunately, Connery was still around.  And if you'll recall, he parted company with Eon on somewhat acrimonious grounds.  When McClory approached him with the idea of revisiting his glory days (and presumably gobs of money), he was naturally receptive.  And thus we got Thunderball 2: Electric Boogaloo-- Never Say Never Again.

Bond. Brazen Bond

Back from vacation!  During which, I watched a documentary about the history of the Bond films, from which I learned some things.

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for George Lazenby.  Part of it is just perversity, due to his one-off status, but I really did think that On Her Majesty's Secret Service was a pretty good film.  But there was a lot more going on behind the scenes than I ever realized.

For starters, the role of Bond was only available because Connery had walked out on a multi-movie deal with one left to go.  Connery's relationship with the producers had always been a little complicated-- on the one hand, they recruited him from more or less nowhere, and had to really fight the studio to let him play the part instead of some more established actor.  So they were his champion in one regard.  On the other hand, as a newcomer, he didn't have the leverage that an established actor would have had, so they didn't have to pay him as much, and he rapidly began to chafe under circumstances that he saw as exploitative.  Eventually, after You Only Live Twice (screenplay by Roald Dahl), he'd had enough and walked out.  So there was this movie that needed to get made, and no Bond.

According to the documentary, Lazenby had been waiting for just this opportunity.  According to him, he dressed himself up as Bond in a fancy suit and watch, and more or less forced his way into an interview, lying outrageously in order to convince the producers that he could do the job.  Basically, because (in his mind), playing Bond would mean that he'd get all the chicks.  Seriously, that's what he said in the documentary!  That was, he claimed, basically the whole point of the exercise.  The Wikipedia article about him suggests that this is a slight exaggeration-- while he didn't have much acting experience, he was a professional model, and had had some success in TV commercials, one of which may have landed him an actual interview.

And then, by the time the movie was wrapped and ready for release, he had turned into a hippie, decided that the violence of the character was inappropriate, and that the franchise was destined to be forgotten.  Oh, well.  Everyone makes mistakes.

Seriously Funny

I have to admit, the more I see of him, the less I understand what all the fuss was about Charlie Chaplin.  Ok, the Eating of the Shoe was amusing, and the Dance of the Dinner Rolls was charming.  But, somewhere, somehow, it just doesn't grab me.

On the other had, Buster Keaton is freaking hysterical.  If you have access to Hulu, go look up Buster Keaton's Short Films.  Something about his casual acceptance and nonchalance in the face of ever-increasing bizzareness is very appealing, and even some of the gags that are blatantly obvious will still startle an outright laugh out of me.  And some of those stunts are amazing.  Things that would be done with CGI these days were done by him (and the others) with props and really good timing.  Funny and impressive.  Go watch.

Danny Kaye died and went to Valhalla

No, really.

When actor, singer and comedian Danny Kaye died, may or may not have been rewarded by an afterlife of continual combat, death, glory, and resurrection in the halls of the Viking gods (probably not).  But he was interred in Kensico Cemetery, in the hamlet of Valhalla, NY (part of Mount Pleasant in Westchester County) back in 1987.

He wasn't much of a fighter, but given his history of entertaining the troops, it's not hard to imagine him stopping by to lead a rousing chorus of "Who dropped the mead barrel?" up there in the halls of Asgard anyway.

Radio Noir, or possibly Radio Jaune.

There's an episode of the old radio show version of Phillip Marlowe entitled "The King in Yellow."

I'm... kind of afraid to listen to it.

Not really important

I just learned that Benedict Cumberbatch is going to be the voice of Smaug in the upcoming Hobbit movie(s) against Martin Freeman's Bilbo.

Pardon me while a squee like a little girl.

Squee!

Craft service is not catering

Pretty much just what the title says.

If you're working hard on a movie set, especially one with a reasonably solid budget (the new installment of Pirates vs. Dinosaurs vs the Harlem Globetrotters, perhaps) then round about noonish a catering truck will deliver a few meal options for your lunching pleasure.  A few hours later, you may once again be feeling peckish (those basketball game scenes vs the velociraptors really take it out of you), but the caterers are long gone.  The tables of water and snacks (fruit, chips, maybe some cold cuts if you're lucky) are provided instead by craft services, which is apparently a completely different operation, run by different people, and possibly even with a different union.

Grunka Lunka Dunkity Dingredient

According to Julie Dawn Cole's memoir, the casting of the Oompa Loompas raised some difficulties.  In order to find actors who met the various, shall we say physical requirements, the producers ended up scouring circuses across Europe (filming was in Bavaria).  This led to a remarkable troop of actors who were consummate professionals, who lacked a single common language, and who apparently had a propensity for rather extravagant partying.  An odd combination, certainly, but one that definitely got results-- their performance was even more impressive with that in mind.

Their makeup also had its demands.  The Oompa Loompas were typically the first ones to arrive, and the last to leave.  On the one hand, a hell of a way to make a living.  But on the other, they're now cultural icons.  So perhaps it was worth it.

Unexpected Cameo

I just saw actor Mike Farrell (most famously having portrayed one Cpt. B.J. Hunnicut)... on an episode of The Monkees.

That's right-- in 1966, nearly 10 years before his appearance on M*A*S*H, he was a strapping young agent for the Central Intelligence Service, tasked with helping the Monkees stop the dangerous Dragon Man's attempts to steal the Doomsday Bug.

Actually, now that I think of it, I'm not sure he had any lines.  But he was very tall and clean-cut, and I guess that's what mattered.

Bacon scripting

Two small things today.

First-- today I learned that the line "s%%%g;"* in a Perlscript, which should do nothing, will actually cause otherwise inexplicable problems.  Learning this took me about an hour, which is sad, but at least the script works now, which is a good thing.

Second, I verified that Bacon numbers are calculated using film roles only, which is sad, because I also learned that if they included stage performances as well, I would have a Bacon number of 4.

*Basically, the line means s(earch) for the character string between the first two percent signs, replace it with the character string between the second and third percent sign, and do it g(lobally) throughout the document.  So it should have replaced nothing with nothing, and therefore done nothing (it had been left in by accident anyway).  Instead, it caused random bits of file to disappear.

The cost of entertainment

Back from vacation!  Did you miss me?

While I wait for the crickets to stop chirping, here's what I learned on vacation-- hopefully it may be of some use to somebody.  Eventually.

A "half-hour" television program (actually 23 minutes plus commercials), watched on my iPhone via Hulu.com consumed approximately 65 MB of my plan's allotment cellular data.  34 minutes of music downloaded from Pandora consumed 15 MB of data.

If this is indicative (for proper results, I should have measured several shows of varying lengths and averaged the results out), I should be able to watch at least 15 hours of television on my phone per month and still allow a decent amount for browsing, etc.  And I basically don't have to worry about Pandora at all-- I'd have to listen to close to 2 hours a day (assuming I wasn't also watching TV) before nearing my limit.  Even if I gave up on podcasts and listened exclusively to Pandora on my work commute, I'd still be nowhere near that.

Chris Barrie

It turns out that Amazon Instant Video has basically all of Red Dwarf, including seasons and specials that I didn't even know existed.  So I've been happily devouring it all over again, and I noticed something that I was unaware of the first time around, when it came out in the late 1980s.

At the time, it was very clear that the audience was intended to identify with the character of Dave Lister, the "sole surviving human being," and the other characters were just foils for him to react to.  And that was fine.  I sympathized right along with the slacker slob, and hated his dead holographic bunk mate Arnold "Smeg-head" Rimmer (played by Chris Barrie), just as I was supposed to.  And now, from my changed perspective, that's still true, although it's clearer that the character of Lister is occasionally even more of a rat bastard than Rimmer, if perhaps not quite so superficially dislikable.

However-- I also can't help noting, on a more meta level, that Chris Barrie was/is a vastly superior actor.  For example, in several episodes, for a variety of reasons, Barrie was called upon to imitate or in some way play one of the other characters (mind swapping, memory alteration, damage to his holographic circuits, etc.).  And it was frequently brilliant.  He captured their physical mannerisms, their vocal inflections, often uncannily.  And in the episode where Rimmer and Lister swapped bodies, this was made rather starkly evident-- Craig Charles, the actor who played Lister, was just basically himself with Barrie's voice overdubbed, but Barrie really became Lister, in a manner becoming an actor on a (frankly) much better show.  Honestly, Red Dwarf is fun, but wow, was it also bad.

So here's to you, Chris Barrie, the unsung hero (at least as of season 4, I've still got a ways to go) of Red Dwarf.  He's done other things, including some supporting roles in big-ticket movies, and one long run as the star of a show I've never heard of (probably because it was only on BBC) called The Brittas Empire.

True confessions

In every "reality show" competition-type television program, there will be little interstitial bits where one of the participants will be telling "the camera" something-- going over what they were thinking when something happened, or describing how they feel about the other participants, or whatever.

I've always assumed that they just filmed about 15-20 minutes worth of material and then showed the best 10 seconds worth, but apparently, at least for some of the seedier, more desperate-for-ratings shows, they actually indulge in quite a bit of fakery.  Clips are taken way out of context, or even overdubbed.  Contestants are asked extremely leading questions, or coached, or in some cases outright lied to in order to provoke a particular reaction that fits with the producers' vision of a good dramatic story.

It's not like I didn't take it with a bit of fleur de sel when one Top Cheftestant was snarky about another.  After all, they're isolated, in the heat of a long contest, and of course the producers want to be able to field a cast of heroes and villains for the fans to argue about.  But I have to admit, I was kind of surprised at the lengths some shows will go to.

Hi-Yo Black Beauty, Away!

The Lone Ranger is (canonically!) the grand-uncle of the Green Hornet.  That is to say, John (or possibly Dan; the Lone Ranger's first name was not well specified in the original materials) Reid's nephew's son was Britt Reid, who fought crime as the anti-hero The Green Hornet, using the resources of the family publishing empire which was built on the proceeds of the family silver mine (the source of the Lone Ranger's silver bullets).