Ben Hecht script for Casino Royale found by Jounalist Jeremy Duns

Author, Jounalist and Fleming Scholar Jeremy Duns has found a lost script for Casino Royale that was published in The Sunday Telegraph this past weekend. It's a must read.

Follow the below instructions to get access to the article as it appeared in the paper.
1. Click here: http://dailytelegraph.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx
2. Scroll down until you find the cover of the arts magazine 'Seven', with Mark Ruffalo on the cover, and click on it.
3. Now scroll down the Table of Contents on the right of the Seven cover to page 21, 'Oscar Special', and click it.
4. Click 'Free Trial' and fill in your email address.
5. Read pages 22, 23 and above all DON’T MISS page 25, which is mostly why this is worth doing.

Jeremy will have more details about this and more at his blog. The article is an editied version and hopfully The Debrief will have the article up in full soon. -{

http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com/

It's the best blog on Fleming and has loads or articles about Fleming/Bond and spy fiction. If you have read 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming by Donald McCormick then you will want to read the recent blog post. Then after reading about it at The Debrief, go to Guy Walters blog at The Telegraph.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/guywalters/100077600/james-bond-ian-fleming-and-the-spy-who-didnt-love-him/

Comments

  • Napoleon PluralNapoleon Plural LondonPosts: 10,239MI6 Agent
    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... :)
    "This is where we leave you Mr Bond."

    Roger Moore 1927-2017
  • Nicholas MeadowsNicholas Meadows Posts: 9MI6 Agent
    Thanks. I got quite excited about this story and didnt see it on here so thought why the devil not. I am glad you didnt think it was a spam as it was quite a few links, but each compliments the other, I felt. :)
  • RevelatorRevelator Posts: 556MI6 Agent
    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.
  • RevelatorRevelator Posts: 556MI6 Agent
    A quick update: Jeremy Duns has updated his ebook with more excerpts from Hecht's script, including Bond's final scenes with Vesper. If you haven't downloaded it already, do so!
    I've also contributed a review to the amazon page (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00F0LCJY4/ref=cm_cr_thx_view) of this ebook, which tells the story of the "The Greatest James Bond Never Made."
  • caractacus pottscaractacus potts Orbital communicator, level 10Posts: 3,907MI6 Agent
    edited March 2018
    BUMP

    here is a direct link to the complete article in The Telegraph, no need to subscribe
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/jamesbond/8345119/Casino-Royale-discovering-the-lost-script.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/2014/5/30/rogue-royale-the-lost-bond-film-by-the-shakespeare-of-hollywood
    I'll have to try to get ahold of his complete e-book.
  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,177MI6 Agent
    Crikey. Never read this before. Very intriguing. Ben Hecht is a phenomenal screenwriter (Notorious is probably the greatest thriller ever made - certainly in the b&w era) and to turn such gems into garbage feels like a sacrilege. Charles Feldman clearly had no soul.
  • caractacus pottscaractacus potts Orbital communicator, level 10Posts: 3,907MI6 Agent
    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!
  • emtiememtiem SurreyPosts: 5,686MI6 Agent
    Thank you; yes probably lots of good stuff in there, but without more descriptive titles it's hard to know where to start!
  • Napoleon PluralNapoleon Plural LondonPosts: 10,239MI6 Agent
    Another 10 year old thread is back!
    "This is where we leave you Mr Bond."

    Roger Moore 1927-2017
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