Tonight I went to the Aero in Santa Monica, one of two venues for the American Cinemateque (the other is the Egyptian in Hollywood), for a screening of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Released in 1969, OHMSS is the sixth James Bond film and the only one featuring Ozzie George Lazenby as everyone's favorite MI6 agent. It's also notable for being the film where Bond gets married...only to have his bride shot and killed minutes after the wedding.
While it's number six in the movie series, it was number eleven in the series of books by Ian Fleming, published in 1963, the year the second Bond film, From Russia with Love (the fifth book, published in 1957, not to confuse you or anything), came out. Yes, before you ask, I did read the Ian Fleming books. Granted, it did take a while to get to them. Meanwhile, I devoured the movies a million times over starting around third grade or so. I remember one summer during my middle school years in the late eighties, the summer of '88 specifically, when I watched all of them in sequence, one day at a time over the course of fifteen days. The Living Daylights, the fifteenth film, released in 1987, was the newest one at the time. Since I was living with my mom, that meant my summers were spent with Dad in Jersey. Only, Dad wasn't around much. He worked up in his office on the second floor or taught summer school at Temple U., occasionally taking business trips to Washington, D.C. I didn't take up reading as a hobby until the summer of '89, and I couldn't play Dungeons & Dragons on the Commodore 64 forever. Solution? Movies! I couldn't drive yet so was prisoner to the library of VHS and, yes, Beta. And it was thanks to having both kinds of players that we got all the Bond films without paying for them. We'd rent them on one format and record them on a blank tape in the other format. The vast majority were rented on VHS and recorded onto Beta. Except for The Living Daylights. We rented that one on Beta and recorded it over onto VHS. I'm not sure why, but in hindsight I have to believe that by 1988, it was pretty clear who'd win the format dual. It's funny, I remember thinking how weird it was to have watched the first fourteen Bond films on Beta and then switch to this other, different format called VHS, which was pretty soon the only format.
My Bond fandom cooled off as the eighties became the nineties and I morphed into the abominable teenager. I didn't rekindle my Bond passion until the spring and summer of 1998 as I was finishing up my bachelor's in Film and Media Arts at Temple U. I don't know how or why. I guess, since it had been quite a while, I had the jones for a Bond reunion. I went to my local Best Buy in South Jersey and bought all the Bond films on these brand new VHS editions with cool covers that MGM had recently released. By that point, the Bond films numbered eighteen, the newest one being 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, the second with Pierce Brosnan as Bond and Judi Dench as M (Judi Dench as M is one of the most brilliant examples of casting against type you'll ever see). Yes, I watched them in sequence, but no, I didn't watch one per day over consecutive days or what have you. Far from it. This was during the spring '98 semester, don't forget, my final semester. As in, I was heads down working on my senior capstone film project in addition to juggling all my other courses and working part-time at a law firm in downtown Philly, an experience I've since channeled into the Jellwagger serial on this very blog (like Jellwagger, I was a data entry clerk for the firm's marketing department). It was nuts and a half. But that's okay. I was older, more mellow, at least relative to my halcyon middle school days, so I was in no hurry to blitz through Bond. I'd watch one on the weekend and then perhaps the next one the following weekend. Or I could go several weekends before the next one. Did I mention it was a hectic time?
Even now, a dozen years later, I distinctly remember the feeling of rediscovery, starting with the opening gun barrel sequence. Sometimes they'd recycle the same sequence for several films, but a lot of times they'd use one and never use it again. OHMSS is of course a prime example. That's the only one with Mr. Lazenby, so the gun barrel opening for that could never be used again. I remember watching it on that new VHS edition. It was around April or May at this point. Graduation was weeks away, and I found a spare two hours one Saturday afternoon to fire up OHMSS in the living room when my dad and stepmom weren't around. When I saw that opening gun barrel with George, it felt like I was seeing it for the first time. It could've easily been ten years since I'd last seen it, not since that double-oh-summer of '88. The jazzy version of the gun barrel theme music, which now seems entirely appropriate after having seen George Lazenby in person, added to the newness. It was so different after the first five films, which used the more traditional gun barrel music we all know and love. And then of course, when Roger Moore took over Bond in the early seventies starting with the eighth film (based on the second book), Live and Let Die, it completely changed yet again. Anyways, you see what I mean. It took me all summer to finish up the Bonds. Even after I graduated at the end of May, my pace remained deliberate. Part of it was that I threw myself in full-time at that law firm in Philly to save as much money as I could before heading across the country to pursue my masters in creative writing at USC. I remember watching Live and Let Die around the time of the commencement, and then going a month or more before finally reaching the ninth film, The Man with the Golden Gun, which has Christopher Lee as the title villain. Did you know Christopher Lee is Ian Fleming's cousin? I didn't either until recently. Anyways, by the time Mom and I were heading across the country in my jam packed Sentra, I'd gotten up to A View to a Kill, the fourteenth film and the last for Roger Moore. While the title is taken from a Bond short story in the eighth book, For Your Eyes Only, the plot is completely different.
While of course I never had the chance to watch any Bond films during the ten-day adventure, I did involve them in a certain sense, and not just them, but all the movies I owned (and all on VHS, this was 1998, don't forget, and I didn't own a DVD player until 2002). Well, what happened was, and this is of course so ridiculous in hindsight, but I was afraid that leaving my two duffels full of VHS tapes in the car would damage them due to the heat that cars are so good at containing in the summer. My mom thought I was being an idiot. She never said it, but I could see it in her face. During the entire road trip, at every hotel, I'd lug both duffels of movies into the hotel room where they would be nice, safe, and cool. I'd park them in that sliver of floor space you usually get between the second bed and the wall.
I resumed the series literally the day my mom left me in L.A. We arrived on a Sunday, and she stuck around until Wednesday to help me move in and all that stuff. The day she left still ranks as one of the most traumatic days of my life. Not until the moment I saw her drive off in the Super Shuttle did I stop to ponder the implications of living three thousand miles away from the only world I'd ever known. After she was gone, I walked in a daze to the parking lot behind the Radisson where we'd been staying and drove my Sentra up the street and around the corner to my new studio digs. That night I watched the fifteenth Bond film, The Living Daylights. I enjoyed watching it and all. I didn't even mind Timothy Dalton so much, but I'll never forget that feeling of butterflies. I'd been trying to distract myself from it all day by keeping myself busy with unpacking and trekking the couple blocks down to USC campus to explore. But once I was settled for the night, my stomach was anything but. Those butterflies wouldn't sit still. I even remember thinking I'd start crying at any moment. But I survived. I enjoyed the film, had a decent night's sleep, and felt better the next day. To cap off day two of my new life, I watched number sixteen, License to Kill. The night after that? Number seventeen, GoldenEye, Pierce Brosnan's first one. I remember that third day being a Friday, which I decided right then and there was going to be my pizza day going forward. I had a Domino's across the street, so I walked over, picked up a pie, and brought it back to munch on during the film. As you can see, I settled in pretty fast and got over the butterflies. I can't remember if I watched Tomorrow Never Dies the next night, but I got to it soon enough.
I shouldn't talk about those early L.A. days without mentioning the GoldenEye video game for the N64. I became a console gamer the summer of '88. Yes, the same summer I spent at my father's in New Jersey watching all the Bond films. When I wasn't watching Bond or playing the Commodore 64, I helped my best pal Dave, the first person I met when we moved to Jersey in January 1983, deliver newspapers. This was the local paper, the Burlington County Times. When I flew back to Mom's in North Carolina in August, I had something like a hundred bucks in my pocket. Back then, to a kid who just turned twelve, that was a small fortune. You think I put it away for a rainy day or, heaven forfend, used it on school supplies or new clothes? Hell to the naw. I made Mom take me to that local box store near our place, a local version of K Mart, I'm drawing a blank on the name, where I put the cash on the barrel and walked out with a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I remember it came with a game cartridge featuring both Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt. Around the time I moved back up to Jersey for high school in 1990, Nintendo released its next generation console, the Super NES. Sega, meanwhile, responded with the Genesis. I have no idea why, maybe I wanted to try something different, but I got the Genesis. That got me through high school and most of college. And then in 1997, around the time I was going from junior to senior at Temple U., I decided to go back to Nintendo. Sega's third generation console was the Saturn, which I recall didn't get favorable reviews. Nintendo's N64, however, was getting glowing reviews. Better yet, one of the first games released for the N64 was GoldenEye. Yes, as in a video game adapted from the eponymous Bond movie.
Bond mania was back. Six years had elapsed between Licence to Kill, Timothy Dalton's swan song, and Pierce Brosnan's intro with GoldenEye. I forget the details, but the Bond producers, Barbara Broccoli, wife of the original Bond producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, and her stepson Michael Wilson, got embroiled in a lawsuit with Ted Turner about rights to show the Bond films on one of his networks. TBS, I believe. The Broccoli family has a history of taking over-the-top measures to protect the Bond franchise. A few years ago I saw Pierce Brosnan at the ArcLight Hollywood for a Q&A following a screening of his 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. This was in 2004, two years after his fourth, and what would be his last, Bond film, Die Another Day. Someone in the audience asked him if he'd be back for a fifth Bond film. Poor Pierce had no idea. He said the Broccolis had his number if they wanted to negotiate a new contract. Around that same time, he was quoted in an interview saying about the Broccolis and their approach to Bond films: "They're too scared. They feel they have to top themselves in a genre which is just spectacle and a huge bang for your buck. But I think you can have your cake and eat it. You can have real character work, a character storyline and a thriller aspect and all kinds of quips, asides, the explosions and the women. We're just saturated with too many overblown action films with no plot. That's ludicrous. It's so damn crazy! That's absolutely sheer lunacy because Casino Royale is the blueprint of the Bond character. You find out more about James Bond in that book than in any of the other books. I would love to do a fifth Bond and then bow out, but if this last one is to be my last, then so be it. My contract is up. They can do it or not."
Not long after that, someone from the Broccoli office gave Brosnan a ring-a-ding to say they were giving him the ring-a-ding-dump. I read, I think it was in Entertainment Weekly, that Brosnan was shocked by the abrupt manner with which they dropped him like a bad habit. The films were admittedly getting a bit stale. While I enjoyed the first and third ones he did, GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough (despite the horrific casting of Denise Richards as a nuclear goddam scientist), Tomorrow Never Dies and especially Die Another Day were ho-hum. If the Broccolis weren't happy with them, they have no one to blame but themselves. Pierce was awesome as Bond. Once he knew he wouldn't be Bond anymore, though, he was quoted as saying: "It never felt real to me. I never felt I had complete ownership over Bond. Because you'd have these stupid one-liners - which I loathed - and I always felt phony doing them. I'd look at myself in the suit and tie and think, 'What the heck am I doing here?' Such sentiments were nothing new. That was always the frustrating thing about the role. Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson play it so safe. The pomposity and rigmarole that they put directors through is astounding....I can do anything I want to do now. I'm not beholden to them or anyone. I'm not shackled by some contracted image." He later clarified that he was definitely grateful for how those four films collectively bolstered his stardom and clout in the industry. The Bond studio, MGM, even gave him office space for his own production company, Irish Dreamtime, which released that great little Irish film Evelyn in the fall of 2002, around the same time as Die Another Day. Just to make sure people didn't misunderstand him, he said: "Look, I'm thankful, the role made me an international star. I've been in the backwaters of Papua New Guinea and heard, 'Hey, Bond.'"
Anyway, the point of all that was, back when Pierce first became Bond in GoldenEye, it was a big deal, and Nintendo jumped on that double-oh-band wagon in brilliant fashion. GoldenEye was one of the first games for that platform and remained one of the most popular. Even if you're not a hardcore Bond fan like me, it's still an awesome game. The graphics and especially the sound, and how the sound effects were so true to the Bond sound effects style (that'll make sense if you're a Bond fan), were awesome. If I recall correctly, the game let you choose the level of difficulty, and I set it at the most difficult one. Hey, I'm a Bond fan, if I'm going to beat a Bond game, I want it to be worth the effort. And quite a bit of effort it took. By the time I moved out to L.A. in August of 1998, I still hadn't beaten it. Get this: During the two days I stayed with Mom before she and I set off on our ten-day cross-country trip, I went to the trouble of unpacking the N64 so I could continue working on GoldenEye while she was at work. From what I recall, I actually made some progress and finished off a level or two. I eventually beat it after settling in at SC. But man, it was tough.
I didn't mean to take you down that massive digression from tonight's screening, but it wouldn't feel right to talk about my attending this or any Bond event without giving you my Bond background. Hopefully it helps you appreciate how cool it was for me to see George Lazenby in person at long last, and how cool it is to see any Bond film, especially the older ones, on the big screen. This was my second time seeing OHMSS in the theater, the first time as part of a five-day ten-film Bond festival at the Nuart in West L.A. The Five Faces of Bond was such a smashing success and got more butts in those art house seats in five days than the Nuart probably sees in a month or more. Why they haven't done a Bond festival since is a complete mystery. I'd hate to think the Broccoli family put the kibosh on it.
OHMSS features none other than Telly "Kojak" Savalas as Bond's arch nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld. This was two years before he started Kojak. Bond forms an alliance with this other European crime lord named Drago to track down Blofeld. Drago only agrees to help Bond if Bond agrees to go out with his suicidal daughter, Tracy. At first, Bond and Tracy's relationship is perfunctory, but soon enough they fall in love, which makes it complicated when Bond has to leave her to go after Blofeld. Suffice it to say that Bond foils Blofeld's plans and marries Tracy, only to have Blofeld and his henchwoman Irma Bunt shoot her dead on the Autobahn right after the ceremony. Roll credits.
Yes, it's a downer ending. It was the only Bond film with a downer ending before Casino Royale. When you watch the Bond films in sequence, it's quite jarring to go from Connery to Lazenby, but George grows on you. I think the film's great overall for how it bucks the Bond formula by devoting a significant amount of celluloid to Bond's romancing Tracy and for how, while Bond wins in one sense, he also loses in a very real other sense. Some fans call OHMSS the best Bond film ever. I don't think so. I think they say that because the book on which it's based is generally considered one of the strongest Bond books. It's definitely a terrific film, though, don't get me wrong. Pierce Brosnan calls it his least favorite Bond film. I have no idea what he's talking about or why he'd think that. Did he like The Man with the Golden Gun better? I'd be surprised.
Let's get to the Q&A with the inimitable George Lazenby. This kat was a character and a half. When Pierce Brosnan was asked about the other actors who played Bond, he said about George: "George is just an angry, old, pissed-off guy. He was never an actor, but some pissed-off Aussie who doesn't know how to show his feminine side. I met him, and he's got that kind of brittle edge to him." Pierce was very complimentary about all the other Bonds, especially Sean Connery, who he said will always be the real Bond to him. That's understandable, especially since Goldfinger was one of the first movies he ever saw on the big screen as a wee lad in Ireland. He's also very complimentary of Daniel Craig.
During the Q&A tonight, George Lazenby didn't strike me as bitter or pissed off at all. That might've been because of all the fans in the audience, which obviously put him in a good mood. He did mention that his former tennis pro wife, Pam Shriver, recently filed for divorce. That was a bit of a shocker, I had no idea. I know they've been together a good while and officially tied the knot about ten years ago. They have a house in the Hollywood Hills, and she makes her living now as a tennis analyst and commentator on ESPN. Pam always struck me as very attractive, not to speak of smart, so I was jealous of George when he landed her.
But let's not dwell on downer subject matter since he didn't. The overall tone of tonight was one of comedy. George had us rolling on our Bond-loving asses, recounting his halcyon days with a straight face. Originally from Queanbeyan, New South Wales, Australia, a town George described as your typical Nowheresville type of place, he moved to London in the sixties, when he was in his twenties, to be a model. He had no trouble finding work or, apparently, women. George said one of the things that made it so easy to pick up women was how stiff and conservative English guys were. Unlike in Queanbeyan, he didn't have any competition. He said his hometown had about five guys for every one girl, so the competition was fierce. London was the opposite with plenty of women and guys who weren't trying very hard apparently. Swearing he wasn't exaggerating, George said he scored literally every night, that he was "living the sixties with all the women on the pill." Even that gets old, I guess, because he said that in the late sixties he was burned out and left London for Paris. He was sharing a flat with an actor friend, with whom he shared women, even though this actor apparently had a girlfriend back in London. Anyway, George said the R&R didn't last long before his agent phoned and told him to go back to London and get back to work. Even George's actor buddy concurred. This actor buddy also made George take that girlfriend in London to some movie premiere. In stark contrast to Pierce Brosnan, who discovered his love for movies, as I mentioned above, during his childhood in Ireland, George Lazenby never had any such cinematic love affair. As a youngster in Oz, he was more of an outdoorsy type guy. Going to these premieres in London marked the first time he started going to movies on any consistent basis.
Anyway, so George followed everyone's advice and went back to London to work again. This is when he met Dyson Lovell, an actor about his age who was starting to get into the producing side of things. His acting credits included guest stints on The Saint and The Avengers, which of course starred George's eventual OHMSS wife, and he played Rawdon Crawley in a miniseries adaptation of Vanity Fair. He never did get involved in the Bond franchise, either as an actor or producer. When he finally did start producing, he did stuff like The Champ, the Mel Gibson version of Hamlet, and that awesome TV movie Merlin with Sam Neill that came out in '98, just before I moved to L.A. I rented that when I was living at SC and really enjoyed it. Dyson also did Lonesome Dove, another TV masterpiece, IMHO. So he's done some great stuff, but apparently he's not the nicest man in the world, at least he wasn't when George knew him. George said that Peter Hunt, who directed OHMSS, called Dyson Lovell and Bond producer Harry Saltzman "the two most ruthless people in the film business."
Upon returning to London, George met Dyson to talk about the transition from modeling to acting. It got off to an inauspicious start when George showed up at Dyson's office for the interview and got kicked out straightaway for looking like shit. George said he was wearing street clothes, had big sideburns, all that stuff. Ever determined, he tracked down Sean Connery's barber, got a shave, haircut, buff, and polish, bought a proper English suit, and went right back to Dyson's office. He loitered out of sight until the receptionist wasn't paying attention and then walked straight into the man's office.
George said he fed Dyson a load of bullshit about having acted in TV shows and movies all over the world. And since you didn't have things like the Internet and IMDb back then, coupled with George's charm and charisma, Dyson lapped it up. As it happened, Harry Saltzman's office was across the street. Dyson wasted no time in heading over to tell him about George. The fifth Bond film, You Only Live Twice, was already in the can, and Sean Connery didn't want to do Bond anymore (although he would come back one last time for number seven, Diamonds Are Forever). Dyson knew Harry was looking for a new Bond and thought George was a good candidate.
George said that when he showed up for the interview, Harry wasn't wearing shoes, and he told Harry point blank that he wasn't in the mood to look at the man's socks. That's just the kind of attitude Harry was looking for, as well as George's self-assurance around women. And so George became the next Bond. He said that when he told OHMSS director Peter Hunt about how he'd lied his way into the job, Peter literally fell out of his chair laughing. The humor, however, didn't last. According to George, Peter came to resent how he'd conned Harry. I'm sure there was more to it than that. Remember, George had no acting experience. They started shooting, and Peter realized his James Bond had no idea how to act. This was Peter's directing debut. And it was a Bond film for Pete's sake, so you've got double-oh pressure here. George said things got so bad that Peter refused to talk to him and communicated by passing notes via a production assistant. During the second week of filming, on March 11, 1969, Peter celebrated his forty-fourth birthday. The producers threw him a party for which all the cast and crew were invited. George said that Harry got Peter a big mink coat or something. When Peter showed up to the dinner, he saw George sitting on one side of Harry with an empty chair on the other side for him. What did he do? He walked out. Harry gave the coat to George.
George swore he made an honest effort at becoming a better actor. For that last scene when Tracy's shot and Bond cradles her body in his arms, George said he worked really hard on preparing and crying at just the right time and all that. When he showed up to shoot the scene, he nailed it with real tears and everything. What did Peter do? He made George redo the scene without tears, and that's what you see in the final cut.
Regarding his relationship with leading lady Diana Rigg, George said all the rumors were true: She didn't like him. Apparently his reputation with the ladies preceded him. When they first met, Diana asked him to hold back on the philandering and sleeping around while they were shooting the film. George interpreted that as her trying to control him. What happened was, one day he was having sex with the receptionist from the hotel where the cast and crew were staying in Switzerland. Not only that, but they were having sex in a tent that belonged to the film's stunt crew. Apparently they agreed to let George borrow it for the romp, but what he didn't know was that they'd pull up the tent at the very moment Diana walked by.
You won't be surprised to learn that George got along great with Telly Savalas. He said Telly always showed up on the set with an entourage, including a lot of his Greek-born and Greek-American family. I saw a documentary on Telly on A&E once and recall how he grew up in a tightknit family in New York with Greek immigrant parents who forbade English in the household. During downtime on the set, George and Telly and the Savalas clan would play cards. Telly was especially interested in all the per diem George wasn't using. At first, the producers were going to give George a per diem of a hundred bucks. George heard that Sean Connery got a thousand and somehow convinced them to give him a thousand as well. What's more, he never had to use it. Remember, he was James Bond. Wherever the guy went, drinks were on the house. The meals were paid for. You believe that shit? A thousand bucks a day. Mind you, this was '69. Adjusted for forty years' inflation, we're talking a good six grand a day. Considering that Bond flicks take a couple months to shoot, you're looking at six figures, and that's in addition to the salary for the film and any percentage of receipts. Harry Saltzman was convinced Telly would take George to the cleaners and told Telly to leave his Bond alone.
The other Telly story George related was about the watch Dana Broccoli got for her husband Cubby, the other main Bond producer besides Harry Saltzman. George thought the watch was ugly. Telly really liked it, though, and went out and got himself one. He thought George should have one too. So Cubby gave George his, and George didn't have the heart to reject it. He still has it today.
It was inevitable George would have to explain why he only did one Bond film. I know it's something I've always wondered. He told us point blank we could all thank Ronan O'Rahilly. You may not have heard of him, but have you heard of Radio Caroline? When those DJs set up shop on a boat and broadcast whatever they wanted so as to circumnavigate (pun intended) record company and BBC control? They basically repurposed this old ship and sailed it off the coast of Britain, just outside British territorial waters, and became a floating independent radio station. You may have seen or heard of the 2009 film Pirate Radio with Philip Seymour Hoffman. While that was fictional, it was inspired by Radio Caroline, and some of the characters in the film are composites of real people. Anyway, Ronan O'Rahilly was the brain behind that. He was an Irish guy around the same age as George. By the time George was making OHMSS, Radio Caroline was already five years old, making Ronan a name to conjure and a force to reckon with. George didn't say how they met, but they became friends during the sixties. He had a lot of respect for Ronan. Apparently Ronan helped book George on a talk show the same time John Lennon was there. George idolized Lennon so that was a huge deal for him.
Now you might wonder why the producers would want George back? He lied to them to get the part and followed that up by pissing off both the director and the leading lady. Well, what happened was, Cubby and Harry didn't make George sign a contract before shooting the film. The suits back at United Artists, the Bond franchise's parent studio, were livid. With no tie to a contract, George had de facto clout. The suits brought him into a room and made him this incredible offer. First, they offered him a contract to do another seven Bond films. Seven. By now you can see how lucrative doing one Bond film is, now imagine seven. But wait, it gets even sweeter. They pointed at this shelf full of books and told George he could pick any book on that shelf and they'd make it into a movie with him in the lead and that he'd get a million bucks per picture, and that he could do that between Bond films.
For whatever bizarre reason, Ronan was convinced the Bond franchise was over. He said the Bond character was a dinosaur out of touch with his times and would never survive the seventies. You believe that shit? What's worse, George believed him and turned down the contract. You should've heard the groans in the audience. Roger Moore, who played Bond in seven films after Connery came back one last time for Diamonds Are Forever, has said that he knew George at the time and has seen him several times since. George told him, like he told us tonight, that it was rotten advice and he should never have listened to Ronan. He didn't sound bitter or angry at Ronan at all, I should add. In the end it was George's fault, right? And who knows? At the time, with the sixties about to become the seventies, and Vietnam and all the political unrest, maybe Bond was starting to feel irrelevant. And for a while, maybe it seemed Ronan was right. When Diamonds Are Forever came out two years later, it wasn't very well received, and justifiably so. To this day it ranks as one of the worst films in the franchise. I saw it not too long ago at the ArcLight Hollywood, and when it was over and we were walking out, I overheard someone say, "The whole thing is such a mess." But then along came Roger Moore who made a bloody fortune across seven films. By the time he was on his third one (tenth overall), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), he was pulling in something like five percent of the gross, a massive piece of the action.
"I was an idiot," George said tonight. So instead of making zillions playing Bond, George said he traveled to Malta, bought a catamaran, and sailed to Sicily with his girlfriend. Eventually he was flat broke, broke up with his girl, and went back to Queanbeyan and moved back in with Mom. He didn't sulk for long, though. He moved to Hollywood and leveraged his contacts to drum up a career. Only two years after OHMSS, he starred in and co-executive produced (with Ronan, ironically) Universal Soldier. And he kept at it from there and toughed out a career, settling in the Hollywood Hills where he still lives today.
Among the projects he almost did was that terrific eighties show The Equalizer. The way George told it tonight, he was sitting around with Mike Sloan, a prolific TV writer-producer, and pitched him the idea for the show. Next thing he knows, The Equalizer debuts in '85 with Mike Sloan credited as the creator and Edward Woodward as the title character. George didn't say outright that Mike Sloan stole his idea and stabbed him in the back, but the implication was clear. George swears he's not bitter, about the The Equalizer or Bond or anything else, nor did he seem that way. He recalled running into Sean Connery in a restaurant and showing him a newspaper clipping that said George was bitter. They shared a laugh about that.
Speaking of The Equalizer, George told us his fellow Ozzie Russell Crowe is making a movie version of it. He recalled taking Russell under his wing when Russell was an unknown actor in L.A. trying to make it in the biz. At the time George was spending the majority of the year at his house in Hawaii, and he basically let Russell live rent free in his L.A. apartment. As you can imagine, any starving actor would kill for that arrangement. George also advised Russell that if he wanted to find work, best to hide that Ozzie accent and learn to talk Yankee, which Russell obviously took to heart. When I first saw him in L.A. Confidential, his American accent totally fooled me. I had no clue he was Australian until sometime afterward. You might think Russell and George are still friends, but no. George has tried repeatedly to contact him since Russell went big time, but apparently Russell won't talk to him anymore. Are you noticing a trend? George seems to have this effect on people.
One more name you can add to that list is Kevin McClory, the producer who tried to start a rival Bond franchise with Sony. He had the rights to Thunderball, the fourth film that came out in '65. And then in '83 he remade it as Never Say Never Again, which was a completely redundant movie that I'm amazed he thought was a good idea. He tried to take it further by making more Bond films that would be original stories instead of recycled ones. Barbara Broccoli and her stepson Michael G. Wilson, as well as the suits at UA, took McClory and Sony to court and convinced the judge to block McClory from ever making another Bond film again, which of course was the ideal outcome. George's only relationship to McClory was hitting on his girlfriend in a bar in Germany. George swears he didn't know the girl was taken. It didn't help that she was responding to his advances. Whatever the case, chalk up Kevin McClory as another potential movie biz contact whom George alienated. Not that it matters now. McClory passed away four years ago.
Someone asked him about his military experience. George was very handy with a rifle. His dad taught him how to shoot from the age of five and was a tough instructor. He said Dad kicked his butt after every miss. By the time he was out of high school, his aim was needlepoint accurate. The Australian Army used him as a sniper.
And that's George Lazenby. No bullshit. What you see is what you get. While it's too bad about Pam Shriver divorcing him, at least they have three younglings who George says melt his heart. He just wishes he'd had them twenty or thirty years ago when he wasn't such a "softy," as he put it. He did have two kids in the seventies with Christina Gannett, whom he met on the set of Universal Soldier. One of them died in 1994 from brain cancer at the age of twenty. George never talked about that or his marriage to Christina. The other child is a daughter named Melanie who's in her late thirties and works in Manhattan as a very successful real estate agent. After all the people George has managed to piss off, I wonder if Melanie and Dad have a relationship?
While it's number six in the movie series, it was number eleven in the series of books by Ian Fleming, published in 1963, the year the second Bond film, From Russia with Love (the fifth book, published in 1957, not to confuse you or anything), came out. Yes, before you ask, I did read the Ian Fleming books. Granted, it did take a while to get to them. Meanwhile, I devoured the movies a million times over starting around third grade or so. I remember one summer during my middle school years in the late eighties, the summer of '88 specifically, when I watched all of them in sequence, one day at a time over the course of fifteen days. The Living Daylights, the fifteenth film, released in 1987, was the newest one at the time. Since I was living with my mom, that meant my summers were spent with Dad in Jersey. Only, Dad wasn't around much. He worked up in his office on the second floor or taught summer school at Temple U., occasionally taking business trips to Washington, D.C. I didn't take up reading as a hobby until the summer of '89, and I couldn't play Dungeons & Dragons on the Commodore 64 forever. Solution? Movies! I couldn't drive yet so was prisoner to the library of VHS and, yes, Beta. And it was thanks to having both kinds of players that we got all the Bond films without paying for them. We'd rent them on one format and record them on a blank tape in the other format. The vast majority were rented on VHS and recorded onto Beta. Except for The Living Daylights. We rented that one on Beta and recorded it over onto VHS. I'm not sure why, but in hindsight I have to believe that by 1988, it was pretty clear who'd win the format dual. It's funny, I remember thinking how weird it was to have watched the first fourteen Bond films on Beta and then switch to this other, different format called VHS, which was pretty soon the only format.
My Bond fandom cooled off as the eighties became the nineties and I morphed into the abominable teenager. I didn't rekindle my Bond passion until the spring and summer of 1998 as I was finishing up my bachelor's in Film and Media Arts at Temple U. I don't know how or why. I guess, since it had been quite a while, I had the jones for a Bond reunion. I went to my local Best Buy in South Jersey and bought all the Bond films on these brand new VHS editions with cool covers that MGM had recently released. By that point, the Bond films numbered eighteen, the newest one being 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, the second with Pierce Brosnan as Bond and Judi Dench as M (Judi Dench as M is one of the most brilliant examples of casting against type you'll ever see). Yes, I watched them in sequence, but no, I didn't watch one per day over consecutive days or what have you. Far from it. This was during the spring '98 semester, don't forget, my final semester. As in, I was heads down working on my senior capstone film project in addition to juggling all my other courses and working part-time at a law firm in downtown Philly, an experience I've since channeled into the Jellwagger serial on this very blog (like Jellwagger, I was a data entry clerk for the firm's marketing department). It was nuts and a half. But that's okay. I was older, more mellow, at least relative to my halcyon middle school days, so I was in no hurry to blitz through Bond. I'd watch one on the weekend and then perhaps the next one the following weekend. Or I could go several weekends before the next one. Did I mention it was a hectic time?
Even now, a dozen years later, I distinctly remember the feeling of rediscovery, starting with the opening gun barrel sequence. Sometimes they'd recycle the same sequence for several films, but a lot of times they'd use one and never use it again. OHMSS is of course a prime example. That's the only one with Mr. Lazenby, so the gun barrel opening for that could never be used again. I remember watching it on that new VHS edition. It was around April or May at this point. Graduation was weeks away, and I found a spare two hours one Saturday afternoon to fire up OHMSS in the living room when my dad and stepmom weren't around. When I saw that opening gun barrel with George, it felt like I was seeing it for the first time. It could've easily been ten years since I'd last seen it, not since that double-oh-summer of '88. The jazzy version of the gun barrel theme music, which now seems entirely appropriate after having seen George Lazenby in person, added to the newness. It was so different after the first five films, which used the more traditional gun barrel music we all know and love. And then of course, when Roger Moore took over Bond in the early seventies starting with the eighth film (based on the second book), Live and Let Die, it completely changed yet again. Anyways, you see what I mean. It took me all summer to finish up the Bonds. Even after I graduated at the end of May, my pace remained deliberate. Part of it was that I threw myself in full-time at that law firm in Philly to save as much money as I could before heading across the country to pursue my masters in creative writing at USC. I remember watching Live and Let Die around the time of the commencement, and then going a month or more before finally reaching the ninth film, The Man with the Golden Gun, which has Christopher Lee as the title villain. Did you know Christopher Lee is Ian Fleming's cousin? I didn't either until recently. Anyways, by the time Mom and I were heading across the country in my jam packed Sentra, I'd gotten up to A View to a Kill, the fourteenth film and the last for Roger Moore. While the title is taken from a Bond short story in the eighth book, For Your Eyes Only, the plot is completely different.
While of course I never had the chance to watch any Bond films during the ten-day adventure, I did involve them in a certain sense, and not just them, but all the movies I owned (and all on VHS, this was 1998, don't forget, and I didn't own a DVD player until 2002). Well, what happened was, and this is of course so ridiculous in hindsight, but I was afraid that leaving my two duffels full of VHS tapes in the car would damage them due to the heat that cars are so good at containing in the summer. My mom thought I was being an idiot. She never said it, but I could see it in her face. During the entire road trip, at every hotel, I'd lug both duffels of movies into the hotel room where they would be nice, safe, and cool. I'd park them in that sliver of floor space you usually get between the second bed and the wall.
I resumed the series literally the day my mom left me in L.A. We arrived on a Sunday, and she stuck around until Wednesday to help me move in and all that stuff. The day she left still ranks as one of the most traumatic days of my life. Not until the moment I saw her drive off in the Super Shuttle did I stop to ponder the implications of living three thousand miles away from the only world I'd ever known. After she was gone, I walked in a daze to the parking lot behind the Radisson where we'd been staying and drove my Sentra up the street and around the corner to my new studio digs. That night I watched the fifteenth Bond film, The Living Daylights. I enjoyed watching it and all. I didn't even mind Timothy Dalton so much, but I'll never forget that feeling of butterflies. I'd been trying to distract myself from it all day by keeping myself busy with unpacking and trekking the couple blocks down to USC campus to explore. But once I was settled for the night, my stomach was anything but. Those butterflies wouldn't sit still. I even remember thinking I'd start crying at any moment. But I survived. I enjoyed the film, had a decent night's sleep, and felt better the next day. To cap off day two of my new life, I watched number sixteen, License to Kill. The night after that? Number seventeen, GoldenEye, Pierce Brosnan's first one. I remember that third day being a Friday, which I decided right then and there was going to be my pizza day going forward. I had a Domino's across the street, so I walked over, picked up a pie, and brought it back to munch on during the film. As you can see, I settled in pretty fast and got over the butterflies. I can't remember if I watched Tomorrow Never Dies the next night, but I got to it soon enough.
I shouldn't talk about those early L.A. days without mentioning the GoldenEye video game for the N64. I became a console gamer the summer of '88. Yes, the same summer I spent at my father's in New Jersey watching all the Bond films. When I wasn't watching Bond or playing the Commodore 64, I helped my best pal Dave, the first person I met when we moved to Jersey in January 1983, deliver newspapers. This was the local paper, the Burlington County Times. When I flew back to Mom's in North Carolina in August, I had something like a hundred bucks in my pocket. Back then, to a kid who just turned twelve, that was a small fortune. You think I put it away for a rainy day or, heaven forfend, used it on school supplies or new clothes? Hell to the naw. I made Mom take me to that local box store near our place, a local version of K Mart, I'm drawing a blank on the name, where I put the cash on the barrel and walked out with a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I remember it came with a game cartridge featuring both Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt. Around the time I moved back up to Jersey for high school in 1990, Nintendo released its next generation console, the Super NES. Sega, meanwhile, responded with the Genesis. I have no idea why, maybe I wanted to try something different, but I got the Genesis. That got me through high school and most of college. And then in 1997, around the time I was going from junior to senior at Temple U., I decided to go back to Nintendo. Sega's third generation console was the Saturn, which I recall didn't get favorable reviews. Nintendo's N64, however, was getting glowing reviews. Better yet, one of the first games released for the N64 was GoldenEye. Yes, as in a video game adapted from the eponymous Bond movie.
Bond mania was back. Six years had elapsed between Licence to Kill, Timothy Dalton's swan song, and Pierce Brosnan's intro with GoldenEye. I forget the details, but the Bond producers, Barbara Broccoli, wife of the original Bond producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, and her stepson Michael Wilson, got embroiled in a lawsuit with Ted Turner about rights to show the Bond films on one of his networks. TBS, I believe. The Broccoli family has a history of taking over-the-top measures to protect the Bond franchise. A few years ago I saw Pierce Brosnan at the ArcLight Hollywood for a Q&A following a screening of his 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. This was in 2004, two years after his fourth, and what would be his last, Bond film, Die Another Day. Someone in the audience asked him if he'd be back for a fifth Bond film. Poor Pierce had no idea. He said the Broccolis had his number if they wanted to negotiate a new contract. Around that same time, he was quoted in an interview saying about the Broccolis and their approach to Bond films: "They're too scared. They feel they have to top themselves in a genre which is just spectacle and a huge bang for your buck. But I think you can have your cake and eat it. You can have real character work, a character storyline and a thriller aspect and all kinds of quips, asides, the explosions and the women. We're just saturated with too many overblown action films with no plot. That's ludicrous. It's so damn crazy! That's absolutely sheer lunacy because Casino Royale is the blueprint of the Bond character. You find out more about James Bond in that book than in any of the other books. I would love to do a fifth Bond and then bow out, but if this last one is to be my last, then so be it. My contract is up. They can do it or not."
Not long after that, someone from the Broccoli office gave Brosnan a ring-a-ding to say they were giving him the ring-a-ding-dump. I read, I think it was in Entertainment Weekly, that Brosnan was shocked by the abrupt manner with which they dropped him like a bad habit. The films were admittedly getting a bit stale. While I enjoyed the first and third ones he did, GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough (despite the horrific casting of Denise Richards as a nuclear goddam scientist), Tomorrow Never Dies and especially Die Another Day were ho-hum. If the Broccolis weren't happy with them, they have no one to blame but themselves. Pierce was awesome as Bond. Once he knew he wouldn't be Bond anymore, though, he was quoted as saying: "It never felt real to me. I never felt I had complete ownership over Bond. Because you'd have these stupid one-liners - which I loathed - and I always felt phony doing them. I'd look at myself in the suit and tie and think, 'What the heck am I doing here?' Such sentiments were nothing new. That was always the frustrating thing about the role. Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson play it so safe. The pomposity and rigmarole that they put directors through is astounding....I can do anything I want to do now. I'm not beholden to them or anyone. I'm not shackled by some contracted image." He later clarified that he was definitely grateful for how those four films collectively bolstered his stardom and clout in the industry. The Bond studio, MGM, even gave him office space for his own production company, Irish Dreamtime, which released that great little Irish film Evelyn in the fall of 2002, around the same time as Die Another Day. Just to make sure people didn't misunderstand him, he said: "Look, I'm thankful, the role made me an international star. I've been in the backwaters of Papua New Guinea and heard, 'Hey, Bond.'"
Anyway, the point of all that was, back when Pierce first became Bond in GoldenEye, it was a big deal, and Nintendo jumped on that double-oh-band wagon in brilliant fashion. GoldenEye was one of the first games for that platform and remained one of the most popular. Even if you're not a hardcore Bond fan like me, it's still an awesome game. The graphics and especially the sound, and how the sound effects were so true to the Bond sound effects style (that'll make sense if you're a Bond fan), were awesome. If I recall correctly, the game let you choose the level of difficulty, and I set it at the most difficult one. Hey, I'm a Bond fan, if I'm going to beat a Bond game, I want it to be worth the effort. And quite a bit of effort it took. By the time I moved out to L.A. in August of 1998, I still hadn't beaten it. Get this: During the two days I stayed with Mom before she and I set off on our ten-day cross-country trip, I went to the trouble of unpacking the N64 so I could continue working on GoldenEye while she was at work. From what I recall, I actually made some progress and finished off a level or two. I eventually beat it after settling in at SC. But man, it was tough.
I didn't mean to take you down that massive digression from tonight's screening, but it wouldn't feel right to talk about my attending this or any Bond event without giving you my Bond background. Hopefully it helps you appreciate how cool it was for me to see George Lazenby in person at long last, and how cool it is to see any Bond film, especially the older ones, on the big screen. This was my second time seeing OHMSS in the theater, the first time as part of a five-day ten-film Bond festival at the Nuart in West L.A. The Five Faces of Bond was such a smashing success and got more butts in those art house seats in five days than the Nuart probably sees in a month or more. Why they haven't done a Bond festival since is a complete mystery. I'd hate to think the Broccoli family put the kibosh on it.
OHMSS features none other than Telly "Kojak" Savalas as Bond's arch nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld. This was two years before he started Kojak. Bond forms an alliance with this other European crime lord named Drago to track down Blofeld. Drago only agrees to help Bond if Bond agrees to go out with his suicidal daughter, Tracy. At first, Bond and Tracy's relationship is perfunctory, but soon enough they fall in love, which makes it complicated when Bond has to leave her to go after Blofeld. Suffice it to say that Bond foils Blofeld's plans and marries Tracy, only to have Blofeld and his henchwoman Irma Bunt shoot her dead on the Autobahn right after the ceremony. Roll credits.
Yes, it's a downer ending. It was the only Bond film with a downer ending before Casino Royale. When you watch the Bond films in sequence, it's quite jarring to go from Connery to Lazenby, but George grows on you. I think the film's great overall for how it bucks the Bond formula by devoting a significant amount of celluloid to Bond's romancing Tracy and for how, while Bond wins in one sense, he also loses in a very real other sense. Some fans call OHMSS the best Bond film ever. I don't think so. I think they say that because the book on which it's based is generally considered one of the strongest Bond books. It's definitely a terrific film, though, don't get me wrong. Pierce Brosnan calls it his least favorite Bond film. I have no idea what he's talking about or why he'd think that. Did he like The Man with the Golden Gun better? I'd be surprised.
Let's get to the Q&A with the inimitable George Lazenby. This kat was a character and a half. When Pierce Brosnan was asked about the other actors who played Bond, he said about George: "George is just an angry, old, pissed-off guy. He was never an actor, but some pissed-off Aussie who doesn't know how to show his feminine side. I met him, and he's got that kind of brittle edge to him." Pierce was very complimentary about all the other Bonds, especially Sean Connery, who he said will always be the real Bond to him. That's understandable, especially since Goldfinger was one of the first movies he ever saw on the big screen as a wee lad in Ireland. He's also very complimentary of Daniel Craig.
During the Q&A tonight, George Lazenby didn't strike me as bitter or pissed off at all. That might've been because of all the fans in the audience, which obviously put him in a good mood. He did mention that his former tennis pro wife, Pam Shriver, recently filed for divorce. That was a bit of a shocker, I had no idea. I know they've been together a good while and officially tied the knot about ten years ago. They have a house in the Hollywood Hills, and she makes her living now as a tennis analyst and commentator on ESPN. Pam always struck me as very attractive, not to speak of smart, so I was jealous of George when he landed her.
But let's not dwell on downer subject matter since he didn't. The overall tone of tonight was one of comedy. George had us rolling on our Bond-loving asses, recounting his halcyon days with a straight face. Originally from Queanbeyan, New South Wales, Australia, a town George described as your typical Nowheresville type of place, he moved to London in the sixties, when he was in his twenties, to be a model. He had no trouble finding work or, apparently, women. George said one of the things that made it so easy to pick up women was how stiff and conservative English guys were. Unlike in Queanbeyan, he didn't have any competition. He said his hometown had about five guys for every one girl, so the competition was fierce. London was the opposite with plenty of women and guys who weren't trying very hard apparently. Swearing he wasn't exaggerating, George said he scored literally every night, that he was "living the sixties with all the women on the pill." Even that gets old, I guess, because he said that in the late sixties he was burned out and left London for Paris. He was sharing a flat with an actor friend, with whom he shared women, even though this actor apparently had a girlfriend back in London. Anyway, George said the R&R didn't last long before his agent phoned and told him to go back to London and get back to work. Even George's actor buddy concurred. This actor buddy also made George take that girlfriend in London to some movie premiere. In stark contrast to Pierce Brosnan, who discovered his love for movies, as I mentioned above, during his childhood in Ireland, George Lazenby never had any such cinematic love affair. As a youngster in Oz, he was more of an outdoorsy type guy. Going to these premieres in London marked the first time he started going to movies on any consistent basis.
Anyway, so George followed everyone's advice and went back to London to work again. This is when he met Dyson Lovell, an actor about his age who was starting to get into the producing side of things. His acting credits included guest stints on The Saint and The Avengers, which of course starred George's eventual OHMSS wife, and he played Rawdon Crawley in a miniseries adaptation of Vanity Fair. He never did get involved in the Bond franchise, either as an actor or producer. When he finally did start producing, he did stuff like The Champ, the Mel Gibson version of Hamlet, and that awesome TV movie Merlin with Sam Neill that came out in '98, just before I moved to L.A. I rented that when I was living at SC and really enjoyed it. Dyson also did Lonesome Dove, another TV masterpiece, IMHO. So he's done some great stuff, but apparently he's not the nicest man in the world, at least he wasn't when George knew him. George said that Peter Hunt, who directed OHMSS, called Dyson Lovell and Bond producer Harry Saltzman "the two most ruthless people in the film business."
Upon returning to London, George met Dyson to talk about the transition from modeling to acting. It got off to an inauspicious start when George showed up at Dyson's office for the interview and got kicked out straightaway for looking like shit. George said he was wearing street clothes, had big sideburns, all that stuff. Ever determined, he tracked down Sean Connery's barber, got a shave, haircut, buff, and polish, bought a proper English suit, and went right back to Dyson's office. He loitered out of sight until the receptionist wasn't paying attention and then walked straight into the man's office.
George said he fed Dyson a load of bullshit about having acted in TV shows and movies all over the world. And since you didn't have things like the Internet and IMDb back then, coupled with George's charm and charisma, Dyson lapped it up. As it happened, Harry Saltzman's office was across the street. Dyson wasted no time in heading over to tell him about George. The fifth Bond film, You Only Live Twice, was already in the can, and Sean Connery didn't want to do Bond anymore (although he would come back one last time for number seven, Diamonds Are Forever). Dyson knew Harry was looking for a new Bond and thought George was a good candidate.
George said that when he showed up for the interview, Harry wasn't wearing shoes, and he told Harry point blank that he wasn't in the mood to look at the man's socks. That's just the kind of attitude Harry was looking for, as well as George's self-assurance around women. And so George became the next Bond. He said that when he told OHMSS director Peter Hunt about how he'd lied his way into the job, Peter literally fell out of his chair laughing. The humor, however, didn't last. According to George, Peter came to resent how he'd conned Harry. I'm sure there was more to it than that. Remember, George had no acting experience. They started shooting, and Peter realized his James Bond had no idea how to act. This was Peter's directing debut. And it was a Bond film for Pete's sake, so you've got double-oh pressure here. George said things got so bad that Peter refused to talk to him and communicated by passing notes via a production assistant. During the second week of filming, on March 11, 1969, Peter celebrated his forty-fourth birthday. The producers threw him a party for which all the cast and crew were invited. George said that Harry got Peter a big mink coat or something. When Peter showed up to the dinner, he saw George sitting on one side of Harry with an empty chair on the other side for him. What did he do? He walked out. Harry gave the coat to George.
George swore he made an honest effort at becoming a better actor. For that last scene when Tracy's shot and Bond cradles her body in his arms, George said he worked really hard on preparing and crying at just the right time and all that. When he showed up to shoot the scene, he nailed it with real tears and everything. What did Peter do? He made George redo the scene without tears, and that's what you see in the final cut.
Regarding his relationship with leading lady Diana Rigg, George said all the rumors were true: She didn't like him. Apparently his reputation with the ladies preceded him. When they first met, Diana asked him to hold back on the philandering and sleeping around while they were shooting the film. George interpreted that as her trying to control him. What happened was, one day he was having sex with the receptionist from the hotel where the cast and crew were staying in Switzerland. Not only that, but they were having sex in a tent that belonged to the film's stunt crew. Apparently they agreed to let George borrow it for the romp, but what he didn't know was that they'd pull up the tent at the very moment Diana walked by.
You won't be surprised to learn that George got along great with Telly Savalas. He said Telly always showed up on the set with an entourage, including a lot of his Greek-born and Greek-American family. I saw a documentary on Telly on A&E once and recall how he grew up in a tightknit family in New York with Greek immigrant parents who forbade English in the household. During downtime on the set, George and Telly and the Savalas clan would play cards. Telly was especially interested in all the per diem George wasn't using. At first, the producers were going to give George a per diem of a hundred bucks. George heard that Sean Connery got a thousand and somehow convinced them to give him a thousand as well. What's more, he never had to use it. Remember, he was James Bond. Wherever the guy went, drinks were on the house. The meals were paid for. You believe that shit? A thousand bucks a day. Mind you, this was '69. Adjusted for forty years' inflation, we're talking a good six grand a day. Considering that Bond flicks take a couple months to shoot, you're looking at six figures, and that's in addition to the salary for the film and any percentage of receipts. Harry Saltzman was convinced Telly would take George to the cleaners and told Telly to leave his Bond alone.
The other Telly story George related was about the watch Dana Broccoli got for her husband Cubby, the other main Bond producer besides Harry Saltzman. George thought the watch was ugly. Telly really liked it, though, and went out and got himself one. He thought George should have one too. So Cubby gave George his, and George didn't have the heart to reject it. He still has it today.
It was inevitable George would have to explain why he only did one Bond film. I know it's something I've always wondered. He told us point blank we could all thank Ronan O'Rahilly. You may not have heard of him, but have you heard of Radio Caroline? When those DJs set up shop on a boat and broadcast whatever they wanted so as to circumnavigate (pun intended) record company and BBC control? They basically repurposed this old ship and sailed it off the coast of Britain, just outside British territorial waters, and became a floating independent radio station. You may have seen or heard of the 2009 film Pirate Radio with Philip Seymour Hoffman. While that was fictional, it was inspired by Radio Caroline, and some of the characters in the film are composites of real people. Anyway, Ronan O'Rahilly was the brain behind that. He was an Irish guy around the same age as George. By the time George was making OHMSS, Radio Caroline was already five years old, making Ronan a name to conjure and a force to reckon with. George didn't say how they met, but they became friends during the sixties. He had a lot of respect for Ronan. Apparently Ronan helped book George on a talk show the same time John Lennon was there. George idolized Lennon so that was a huge deal for him.
Now you might wonder why the producers would want George back? He lied to them to get the part and followed that up by pissing off both the director and the leading lady. Well, what happened was, Cubby and Harry didn't make George sign a contract before shooting the film. The suits back at United Artists, the Bond franchise's parent studio, were livid. With no tie to a contract, George had de facto clout. The suits brought him into a room and made him this incredible offer. First, they offered him a contract to do another seven Bond films. Seven. By now you can see how lucrative doing one Bond film is, now imagine seven. But wait, it gets even sweeter. They pointed at this shelf full of books and told George he could pick any book on that shelf and they'd make it into a movie with him in the lead and that he'd get a million bucks per picture, and that he could do that between Bond films.
For whatever bizarre reason, Ronan was convinced the Bond franchise was over. He said the Bond character was a dinosaur out of touch with his times and would never survive the seventies. You believe that shit? What's worse, George believed him and turned down the contract. You should've heard the groans in the audience. Roger Moore, who played Bond in seven films after Connery came back one last time for Diamonds Are Forever, has said that he knew George at the time and has seen him several times since. George told him, like he told us tonight, that it was rotten advice and he should never have listened to Ronan. He didn't sound bitter or angry at Ronan at all, I should add. In the end it was George's fault, right? And who knows? At the time, with the sixties about to become the seventies, and Vietnam and all the political unrest, maybe Bond was starting to feel irrelevant. And for a while, maybe it seemed Ronan was right. When Diamonds Are Forever came out two years later, it wasn't very well received, and justifiably so. To this day it ranks as one of the worst films in the franchise. I saw it not too long ago at the ArcLight Hollywood, and when it was over and we were walking out, I overheard someone say, "The whole thing is such a mess." But then along came Roger Moore who made a bloody fortune across seven films. By the time he was on his third one (tenth overall), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), he was pulling in something like five percent of the gross, a massive piece of the action.
"I was an idiot," George said tonight. So instead of making zillions playing Bond, George said he traveled to Malta, bought a catamaran, and sailed to Sicily with his girlfriend. Eventually he was flat broke, broke up with his girl, and went back to Queanbeyan and moved back in with Mom. He didn't sulk for long, though. He moved to Hollywood and leveraged his contacts to drum up a career. Only two years after OHMSS, he starred in and co-executive produced (with Ronan, ironically) Universal Soldier. And he kept at it from there and toughed out a career, settling in the Hollywood Hills where he still lives today.
Among the projects he almost did was that terrific eighties show The Equalizer. The way George told it tonight, he was sitting around with Mike Sloan, a prolific TV writer-producer, and pitched him the idea for the show. Next thing he knows, The Equalizer debuts in '85 with Mike Sloan credited as the creator and Edward Woodward as the title character. George didn't say outright that Mike Sloan stole his idea and stabbed him in the back, but the implication was clear. George swears he's not bitter, about the The Equalizer or Bond or anything else, nor did he seem that way. He recalled running into Sean Connery in a restaurant and showing him a newspaper clipping that said George was bitter. They shared a laugh about that.
Speaking of The Equalizer, George told us his fellow Ozzie Russell Crowe is making a movie version of it. He recalled taking Russell under his wing when Russell was an unknown actor in L.A. trying to make it in the biz. At the time George was spending the majority of the year at his house in Hawaii, and he basically let Russell live rent free in his L.A. apartment. As you can imagine, any starving actor would kill for that arrangement. George also advised Russell that if he wanted to find work, best to hide that Ozzie accent and learn to talk Yankee, which Russell obviously took to heart. When I first saw him in L.A. Confidential, his American accent totally fooled me. I had no clue he was Australian until sometime afterward. You might think Russell and George are still friends, but no. George has tried repeatedly to contact him since Russell went big time, but apparently Russell won't talk to him anymore. Are you noticing a trend? George seems to have this effect on people.
One more name you can add to that list is Kevin McClory, the producer who tried to start a rival Bond franchise with Sony. He had the rights to Thunderball, the fourth film that came out in '65. And then in '83 he remade it as Never Say Never Again, which was a completely redundant movie that I'm amazed he thought was a good idea. He tried to take it further by making more Bond films that would be original stories instead of recycled ones. Barbara Broccoli and her stepson Michael G. Wilson, as well as the suits at UA, took McClory and Sony to court and convinced the judge to block McClory from ever making another Bond film again, which of course was the ideal outcome. George's only relationship to McClory was hitting on his girlfriend in a bar in Germany. George swears he didn't know the girl was taken. It didn't help that she was responding to his advances. Whatever the case, chalk up Kevin McClory as another potential movie biz contact whom George alienated. Not that it matters now. McClory passed away four years ago.
Someone asked him about his military experience. George was very handy with a rifle. His dad taught him how to shoot from the age of five and was a tough instructor. He said Dad kicked his butt after every miss. By the time he was out of high school, his aim was needlepoint accurate. The Australian Army used him as a sniper.
And that's George Lazenby. No bullshit. What you see is what you get. While it's too bad about Pam Shriver divorcing him, at least they have three younglings who George says melt his heart. He just wishes he'd had them twenty or thirty years ago when he wasn't such a "softy," as he put it. He did have two kids in the seventies with Christina Gannett, whom he met on the set of Universal Soldier. One of them died in 1994 from brain cancer at the age of twenty. George never talked about that or his marriage to Christina. The other child is a daughter named Melanie who's in her late thirties and works in Manhattan as a very successful real estate agent. After all the people George has managed to piss off, I wonder if Melanie and Dad have a relationship?
