Before ‘Never Say Never Again’, Sean Connery worked on a script for a true Bondian madness
Taking into account that it already has more than 60 years of history behind it, it is understandable that The James Bond film saga has been marked by chaos and legal battles at times.. Luckily, far from being strictly harmful, these ins and outs allowed stories like the ones I bring to you below to materialize, in which none other than Sean Connery serves as the protagonist.
Connery’s return
To tell it we have to go back to 1983, when the license took two different paths. On the one hand, in the month of July Roger Moore returned to life as agent 007 in ‘Octopussy’ while, on the other, Connery returned to the role of the British spy after 12 years in ‘Never Say Never Again’, the production directed by Irvin Kershner considered non-canonical as it was not produced under the EON label. But The plan for the Scotsman was not exactly this from the beginning.
As Connery himself explained, his role in the franchise did not imply being in front of it, but behind the cameras as a screenwriter. Together with writer Len Deighton he had to write a script for a new 007 adventure that would be played by a different actor, but The project, which was developed under the title ‘Warhead’, ended up being abandoned. And, the truth is, taking into account what transpired about him, we missed a real nonsense.
This is how Sean Connery described the plot intricacies of his workwhich included mechanical sharks:
“We had all kinds of exotic events. You know those planes that were disappearing over the Bermuda Triangle? SPECTER was doing that. There was an incredible fleet of planes under the sea, they had brought a whole world of things down there. They were going to attack the financial nerve center of the United States entering through the sewers of New York, which can be done, right on Wall Street. They would have mechanical sharks in the bay and they would take over the Statue of Liberty, which is quite easy, and they would have the. main line of troops at Ellis Island. That kind of thing.”
A Series of Unfortunate Events
The conception of ‘Warhead’ was the result of double games, betrayals and judicial tricks that could well be part of a spy novel. In the 60s, Ian Fleming wanted to adapt his 007 literary works to the big screen, and worked with producer Kevin McClory and screenwriter Jack Whittingham to carry it out. However, it was considered that The project was too expensive to materialize and ended up being put in a drawer… not for much longer.
And Fleming, presumably, decided to use McClory and Whittingham’s ideas to write the novel ‘Enter Thunderbolt’, in which his former colleagues were not credited. Of course, the producer did not hesitate to sue Fleming, winning the legal rights to the story in 1963 and starting the film project of his own ‘Thunderbolt’ in the mid-70s, which would end up being Connery’s ill-fated ‘Warhead’ and Deighton.
Finally, the madness with metal sharks and underground assaults on Wall Street It was left on the shelf due to legal problemsas it was not clear who owned the rights to names such as those of the SPECTER organization and its perfidious leader Blofeld, so the solution was to give birth to a ‘Never say never again’ that was still a kind of apocryphal remake of ‘Operation Thunder’ and whose filming, of course, Ian Fleming tried to stop unsuccessfully.
From all this drama I only draw one conclusion: I wish I could travel to the past and do everything possible for ‘Warhead’ to see the light of day. Something tells me that we missed a one-of-a-kind rarity that we would continue to remember with the same affection as other Bondian disasters like ‘Moonraker’.
In Espinof:
