Looking through John Logan's script for "Spectre"

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  • Creasy47Creasy47 In Cuba with Natalya.Moderator
    Posts: 40,369
    RC7 wrote: »
    boldfinger wrote: »
    Murdock wrote: »
    My dream would be a New York set Bond adventures with the Spang Brothers as the villains.
    Played by Brendan Gleeson and Ray Winstone :-)!

    Both played by Tom Hardy... Damn.

    Put the brothers from 'Legend' up against Bond, and you'll have yourself something unique to the Bond series: a hammer fight.
  • RC7RC7
    Posts: 10,512
    Creasy47 wrote: »
    RC7 wrote: »
    boldfinger wrote: »
    Murdock wrote: »
    My dream would be a New York set Bond adventures with the Spang Brothers as the villains.
    Played by Brendan Gleeson and Ray Winstone :-)!

    Both played by Tom Hardy... Damn.

    Put the brothers from 'Legend' up against Bond, and you'll have yourself something unique to the Bond series: a hammer fight.

    Would be quite something, eh? Craig vs two Hardy's + hammers.
  • Creasy47Creasy47 In Cuba with Natalya.Moderator
    Posts: 40,369
    You don't know how happy it would make me to see something like that.
  • MurdockMurdock The minus world
    Posts: 16,328
    boldfinger wrote: »
    Murdock wrote: »
    My dream would be a New York set Bond adventures with the Spang Brothers as the villains.
    Played by Brendan Gleeson and Ray Winstone :-)!

    Well my dream casting back a few years back would have been Michael Madsen and the late James Gandolfini as the Spang Brothers. :)
  • Posts: 5,767
    Murdock wrote: »
    boldfinger wrote: »
    Murdock wrote: »
    My dream would be a New York set Bond adventures with the Spang Brothers as the villains.
    Played by Brendan Gleeson and Ray Winstone :-)!

    Well my dream casting back a few years back would have been Michael Madsen and the late James Gandolfini as the Spang Brothers. :)
    Good call too! But I think the violence and menace projected by Gleeson and Winstone could be untoppable :ar! .
  • TheWizardOfIceTheWizardOfIce 'One of the Internet's more toxic individuals'
    Posts: 9,117
    Aren't we getting a bit carried away here? I feel someone needs to point that the obvious point that the Spangs are rubbish. Straight from Fleming's cartoon American gangster collection along with the cheesy hoods convention and Horror and Sluggsy. Dear old Ian was great at creating villains but when he turned his hand to American mafia types the results are generally pretty embarrassing.


    Ray Winstone as a Bond villain? Dear oh dear.
    'Do you expect me to talk Ray?'
    'No you slaaaag Bond. I expect you to fackin' die you c**t!'

    Although it would be worth having him appear as Hannes Oberhauser just so he can say to Franz and Bond 'I'm the f**king daddy!'

    I think as a general rule of thumb when casting Bond villains a good starting point is they shouldnt really be a West Ham fan.
  • RC7RC7
    Posts: 10,512
    Aren't we getting a bit carried away here? I feel someone needs to point that the obvious point that the Spangs are rubbish. Straight from Fleming's cartoon American gangster collection along with the cheesy hoods convention and Horror and Sluggsy. Dear old Ian was great at creating villains but when he turned his hand to American mafia types the results are generally pretty embarrassing.


    Ray Winstone as a Bond villain? Dear oh dear.
    'Do you expect me to talk Ray?'
    'No you slaaaag Bond. I expect you to fackin' die you c**t!'

    Although it would be worth having him appear as Hannes Oberhauser just so he can say to Franz and Bond 'I'm the f**king daddy!'

    I think as a general rule of thumb when casting Bond villains a good starting point is they shouldnt really be a West Ham fan.

    Ha ha, I initially thought he was taking the piss.
  • MurdockMurdock The minus world
    Posts: 16,328
    Just because they may have been rubbish in the Novel doesn't mean they can't be adapted into something new and interesting.
  • Posts: 5,767
    Aren't we getting a bit carried away here? I feel someone needs to point that the obvious point that the Spangs are rubbish. Straight from Fleming's cartoon American gangster collection along with the cheesy hoods convention and Horror and Sluggsy. Dear old Ian was great at creating villains but when he turned his hand to American mafia types the results are generally pretty embarrassing.


    Ray Winstone as a Bond villain? Dear oh dear.
    'Do you expect me to talk Ray?'
    'No you slaaaag Bond. I expect you to fackin' die you c**t!'

    Although it would be worth having him appear as Hannes Oberhauser just so he can say to Franz and Bond 'I'm the f**king daddy!'

    I think as a general rule of thumb when casting Bond villains a good starting point is they shouldnt really be a West Ham fan.
    Talk about getting carried away :-)) ...

    I don´t see how the Spangs are more cartoonish than most of Fleming´s other villains. And the gangster collection did with little changes appear in the cinematic GF, so why can´t they be updated and used?

    I always liked how Bond hardly catches a glimpse of the Spangs, which many people unfortunately seem to interpret as under-exposure.

  • Posts: 2,887
    boldfinger wrote: »
    I always liked how Bond hardly catches a glimpse of the Spangs, which many people unfortunately seem to interpret as under-exposure.

    I think they are under-exposed, which is why, despite having lots of potential, they're not considered first-tier villains. Jack Spang is pretty much a non-entity. Seraffimo has some good villainous scenes--his brutal treatment of the salon girl, his Western fetishism, his interrogation of Bond--but he needed one or two more to really come alive.
  • MurdockMurdock The minus world
    Posts: 16,328
    If Bond 25 goes with a Blofeld in prison plot, he could use his pull to get the Spang Brothers to attempt to kill Bond and Swann. Plus we've never really seen Bond take on the Mafia before. And since Bond isn't MI6 anymore currently there would be some great potential.
  • Posts: 1,407
    Murdock wrote: »
    If Bond 25 goes with a Blofeld in prison plot, he could use his pull to get the Spang Brothers to attempt to kill Bond and Swann. Plus we've never really seen Bond take on the Mafia before. And since Bond isn't MI6 anymore currently there would be some great potential.

    That's actually a pretty terrific idea that I would be very ok with seeing
  • MurdockMurdock The minus world
    Posts: 16,328
    bondbat007 wrote: »
    Murdock wrote: »
    If Bond 25 goes with a Blofeld in prison plot, he could use his pull to get the Spang Brothers to attempt to kill Bond and Swann. Plus we've never really seen Bond take on the Mafia before. And since Bond isn't MI6 anymore currently there would be some great potential.

    That's actually a pretty terrific idea that I would be very ok with seeing

    Thank you. They could film part of the movie in New York as incentive to bring Dan back into the role so he would be closer to home. :D
  • royale65royale65 Caustic misanthrope reporting for duty.
    Posts: 4,417
    007 in New York 'eh?
  • MurdockMurdock The minus world
    Posts: 16,328
    Makes sense to me. ;)
  • DoctorKaufmannDoctorKaufmann Can shoot you from Stuttgart and still make it look like suicide.
    Posts: 1,261
    I believe, I read somewhere, that in a first draft (Logan?) Tanner commits suicide, and that M, Moneypenny and Q get killed by Blofeld. I can't remember, it was around the Sony Leaks affair in late 2014. Anybody can verify or approve it, or was this just some wild hoax on the net?
  • PropertyOfALadyPropertyOfALady Colders Federation CEO
    Posts: 3,675
    That is true.
  • WalecsWalecs On Her Majesty's Secret Service
    Posts: 3,157
    Afaik, Tanner committed suicide after he was revealed a mole. M was supposed to turn out a traitor at some point, but the actor refused to play a villain and Denbigh was created instead. I don't think Q or Moneypenny were ever meant to be killed.
  • DoctorKaufmannDoctorKaufmann Can shoot you from Stuttgart and still make it look like suicide.
    Posts: 1,261
    Walecs wrote: »
    Afaik, Tanner committed suicide after he was revealed a mole. M was supposed to turn out a traitor at some point, but the actor refused to play a villain and Denbigh was created instead. I don't think Q or Moneypenny were ever meant to be killed.

    Ah, yes. Thanks for clearing that up.
  • RemingtonRemington I'll do anything for a woman with a knife.
    Posts: 1,532
    So it looks like SP was doomed from the start LOL.
  • PropertyOfALadyPropertyOfALady Colders Federation CEO
    Posts: 3,675
    Does anyone know where that notes document went with everything in chronological order?
  • DoctorKaufmannDoctorKaufmann Can shoot you from Stuttgart and still make it look like suicide.
    Posts: 1,261
    Would also like to read it. If somebody knows somebody who knows somebody who ...
  • PropertyOfALadyPropertyOfALady Colders Federation CEO
    Posts: 3,675
    I know that it was on somewhere very public. It was a forum or something.
  • Posts: 4,400
    I was looking through Some Kind of Hero and gleamed some nuggets about SP:
    • John Logan wrote a two-arc film that focussed on Central Africa as a location and the gold-pan mining.
    • The original finale sounded fantastic. There'd have been some massive intelligence-gathering event at Westminster and a tanker would on the Thames next to the building with a bomb on it.
    • There would be a gun fight in Parliament and a chase that ended at the top of Big Ben!
    • It was Logan who used the MI6 team more. Apparently, P&W and Mendes didn't like it as it felt too like the Mission: Impossible films. Mendes vetoed Q going on the mission with Bond and getting kidnapped.

    Also, I looked through the Sony leaks and found that Africa figured in Logan's draft and Bond was going to meet Blofeld for the first time in a diamond mine.However, MGM execs felt it was too similar to Silva's island from Skyfall. For all intents and purposes, they had cast Chiwetel Ejiofor.

    chiwetel-ejiofor.jpg

    Once they re-tooled the script, some executives were even pushing to turn Blofeld into a woman and to cast Meryl Streep(!)....I'd love to see her as a Bond villain.

    meryl-streep-devil-wears-prada.jpg?w=780
  • mtmmtm United Kingdom
    Posts: 14,861
    Wow, Streep would be amazing; would it have been interesting enough for her, though? I'm not sure. They definitely need to get a female villain next time though.

    I was listening to the new Smershpod today which dealt with Spectre, and one of the contributors is a writer who suggests that a big issue with the film is that C and the Nine Eyes gets explained to Bond at length at the beginning, but after that he doesn't really intersect with that plot again, and certainly never meets C again, so it's a lot of time wasted. His suggestion is that C and Spectre's surveillance network should have framed Bond for some massive crime or something in the first act, tying their stories together more.
    I'm not 100% sure about that suggestion, but I guess it would make Blofeld more 'the author of all his pain' in that movie. I think it would be interesting to try and rewrite Spectre: there's something in there.
  • MakeshiftPythonMakeshiftPython “Baja?!”
    Posts: 7,999
    I believe Tilda Swinton was another possible candidate for female Blofeld.

    And it needs to be noted that in the Some Kind of Hero book that the foster brother element was not P&W’s idea but rather it was Michael G. Wilson’s. So, credit where credit is due.
  • Posts: 21
    Does anyone actually have those early drafts?
  • MalloryMallory Do mosquitoes have friends?
    Posts: 2,032
    @mtm I think with Spectre there are little individual scenes, sequences and lines of dialogue that work. But the fatal flaw is that the story and script just doesn't work.

    I have read the October 2014 'shooting script' and when compared to the final product, some of the changes made were for the better, some worse, but ultimately the core idea was so poor and underdeveloped, only a complete head to toe rewrite of the whole story and structure could really improve it, and they just didn't have the time to do that.

    I cant work out how it took Broccoli, Wilson and Mendes until Summer 2014 to realise their script was so poor. I mean what were they doing between Jan 2013 and then? P&W's involvement was first announced June 2014, and they essentially had a very short window to make any major changes as the film was racing into pre-production, building sets, booking shooting locations, cast and crew, ahead of a December production start date.

    I just smacks of Broccoli, Wilson and co being asleep at the wheel.
  • mtmmtm United Kingdom
    edited July 2020 Posts: 14,861
    Mendes recently commented that the third act 'fell apart' on him and he had to scrape the rest of the film together. I'm not sure anyone was asleep, they just couldn't make it work. Presumably they also had a few uncredited script doctors working on it too that we've never heard about, most big films seem to.

    I'd love a clever script editor who knows about structure and storytelling to do a little dissection of it and maybe even try to fix it, I love that stuff. There's a script editor called Andrew Ellard who does that on Twitter occasionally, quite often with Doctor Who, and I find it very interesting to read.
  • Posts: 4,599
    I like the idea of C framing Bond. His clear agenda was to replace the doube O team with high tech surveilance etc and seeing a key member of the team fail (ie Bond) would have proved confirmation at the highest level. Bond could have been briefed to monitor a high level diplomat who, whilst being shadowed by Bond, is shot with bullet from PPK etc. M is torn between trusting Bond's word and the forensic evidence etc. ( "A licence to kill is also a licence not to kill. ") This clearly would have raised the stakes between C and Bond which was lacking to say the least.
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