James Bond Of The Secret Service to Thunderball to Warhead to Never Say Never Again

The story behind the James Bond movies is almost as wild as the stories onscreen.  Here’s the story behind Thunderball / Never Say Never Again and why Timothy Dalton only made two Bond movies:

In the late 1950s Kevin McClory (then an agent) approached Ian Fleming with the idea of writing an original James Bond screenplay to be called James Bond Of The Secret Service. The two of them along with screenwriter Jack Whittingham decided to create an international criminal organization for Bond to fight rather than SMERSH (the then name of the USSR counter-intelligence department). They brainstormed several ideas before settling on the one involving Ernst Stavo Blofeld and SPECTRE hijacking a NATO bomber for its nuclear weapons.

James Bond Of The Secret Service did not attract any studio attention. Fleming, never one to let material go to waste (viz Dr. No being a novelization of a TV pilot script to be called Commander Jamaica with Bond subbing for the eponymous commander), turned James Bond Of The Secret Service into Thunderball without informing McClory and Whittingham.

He also used their discarded brainstorming ideas in a chapter in which he described Blofeld's earlier, more successful plots.

When McClory found out he sued, got his name and Whittingham's on all subsequent editions of the book, and maintained screenrights to the novel.

Fleming, not caring about which rights he did / didn't own included Thunderball in the package of Bond novels and short stories he sold to Eon Productions (the only reason he didn't sell them Casino Royale is that he just sold it to another production company and those rights got passed around until they finally did the 007 parody in the 1960s).

McClory got a producer's credit on Thunderball the movie though he did nothing on the film. Years later he announced he intended to remake Thunderball as Warhead with Orson Welles playing Blofeld; nothing came of that. He created enough of a legal stink at that time that Eon killed off Blofeld (without referring to the character by name) in For Your Eyes Only and never referenced SPECTRE again until the Craig era (by which time they'd rounded up all the stray rights).

Warhead went nowhere but about the time Dalton began his short run as 007, Connery -- perpetually pissed off at Eon Productions -- agreed to star in McClory's remake of Thunderball, Never Say Never Again. Eon Productions stewed over this but a court decided in McClory's favor...

...then McClory announced that he would be starring Connery in a new series of Bond movies based on the plots Fleming described in that one chapter in Thunderball the novel.

Eon and MGM (their distributors at the time) went ballistic, lawsuits went flying, and until the matter was settled the Dalton series went on hiatus. By the time the dust settled Pierce Brosnan (whom Eon preferred but settled on Dalton due to scheduling conflicts) became Bond and all the rights to all the Bond stories wound up in their possession.

© Buzz Dixon