-------------------- "Lotta people go through life doing things badly. Racing's important to men who do it well. When you're racing, it's life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting."
-Steve McQueen as Michael Delaney, LeMans
Registered: Mar 1999
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David, you should watch that movie. Anyway, I've watched a movie days after an opening. I just came back from seeing the Time Machine.
-------------------- "It speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow, it's not all going to be over with a big splash and a bomb, that the human race is improving, that we have things to be proud of as humans." -Gene Roddenberry about Star Trek
Registered: May 1999
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I am giggling at the thought that anyone had to write a script for the James Bond movies. These movies are essential to the truth which some have observed on Hollywood movies for years: the industry is in the business of releasing movies that were manufactured in a cookie factory.
Since the first film, Dr. No, the plot has been the same. Bad villian, good hero, attractive babes, alot of boom-booms in bed and in the action sequences, etc.
Registered: Sep 1999
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Well, originally, the scriptwriting of Bond movies consisted of making a screenplay out of one of Fleming's books. I don't knwo what they do now. Do the scriptwriters actually write the stories? Or are they based off the books by the person(s) who took over after Fleming?
Registered: Mar 1999
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There are people writing Bond novels today, and there are people writing Bond screenplays. I do not think the two are necessarily connected anymore, but then I have no deep knowledge of the phenomenon.
Registered: Mar 1999
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No, they are not. Bond got promoted to Captain in the books, but remains a commander in the films.
The books do make some attempt to follow the film chronology. For instance, they retired the original M and replaced him with a lady who may or may not look like Judy Dench. They also make varying attempts to keep up with Bond's new rotating gun habits (although that seems to depend on whether the author approves of the gun or not).
Several of the original Bond films were very different from the books. "The Spy Who Loved Me" bares almost no resemblence to the original book of the same name, for instance.
I'd actually also argue quite strongly that Hollywood has become a cookie-cutter industry. Sure, there are the mindless blockbusters, which snobby teenagers who spend all their free time on Star Trek bulletin boards look down upon, but then there's also more complex stuff. In the past 5 years, we've had classics like Momento, Fight Club, LA Confidential, and others that I can't think of right now. All did exceedingly well, and all were quite clever. Even stuff like The Sixth Sense is hardly mainstream Hollywood.
Registered: Mar 1999
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