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Why haven't we seen the screentests for the previous actors who tried out for Bond? This applies to those who were cast as Bond and those who weren't. I know some may not have screen tested, for others we've seen snippets (like James Brolin and Sam Neill).
For Brosnan we've seen a few pics from the first time he was up for it. With Craig, we've seen quick glimpses of his test.
However, it seems like EON has been sitting on all the footage of these tests but they've never been released. Why? Is it a rights issue?
Usually the actors don't want these screen tests out there - if its a poor screen test for example. Plus I suspect EoN didnt want to find themselves in a position where their pick for Bond was potentially being unfavorably compared to someone on a screen test.
I think it's interesting that we've never seen any of the winning actors' tests apart from photos, I guess the closest is the quick behind the scenes clips of Craig's one we saw on that doco. I wonder if it's because they were early sketches of the character and might jar a bit with the versions we saw in the films? Or maybe it's just a pure contractual thing: they'd need to be paid for their performances to be released and their film contracts are already quite complicated and it might not be worth the legal hassle?
I’m pretty sure Connery and Moore didn’t audition so that’ll be the reason we didn’t get anything from them. Maybe there’s a chance any test footage with Lazenby, Dalton, or Brosnan doesn’t actually exist anymore beyond set photos? There would have been little reason to actually show them publicly before DVDs anyway. These bits of film are easy to lose and even if archived they may have been destroyed to make space before the late 90s/2000s. Or they were just misplaced or deteriorated or whatever.
Generally though I guess it’s a combination of all those. If these screencasts do get released it’s generally many years after, and either it’s a case where they’ve survived/been preserved out of cinematic interest, or they’ve been found/were held by a third party and released by them (as seems to be the case with the 2005 auditions).
I’m guessing when they did those earlier screen-tests the idea of archiving them specifically for cinematic or public interest wouldn’t have been as major a factor as it is today. So I can easily imagine not everything surviving, or at least fully. I guess it’s also worth asking where the footage for, say, that Neill audition came from (was it archived directly by/at EON as a policy, or was it found through an individual who’d kept it maybe even by chance? ie - maybe it was kept by the casting director or one of the producers and acquired that way? Or even a third party. Might not be the case but it happens). But ultimately I don’t know and obviously some of these Bond auditions still exist or have been preserved. I’d be surprised if EON had an archive with every potential Bond audition from 1962 to now. Past a point I’m sure they have a lot though. But yeah, I think it’s a combination of all those things.
I can see why the actors wouldn't want them released. That being said I just saw a whole lot of Luke screen tests for Star Wars. The Office released screen tests for Dwight and Jim (US version).
I think mtm may be correct that, if the footage is out there, the contracts at the time of the tests meant that the actor(s) had final say whether it could be released. Maybe Neill's agreement for his screentest didn't include this verbiage.
I think the productions during the DVD era and beyond have probably included contracts that largely allow the studios to release the footage. One thing's for sure, we've been able to see a bunch of auditions for Bond that took place in the mid 2000s before Craig was chosen. I don't know the source of those or if those came out on a DVD somewhere.
From what I understand they were released on YouTube by someone who’d found or acquired the VHS tape with those 2005 auditions on them. I don’t know how they got it (I think the guy who posted them may have worked in the film industry in some form? It wasn’t released on any documentary or special feature at any rate).
I remember at the time of CR there was a group of fans on CommanderBond.net who had seen the auditions, so I think it's been floating around on the quiet since then.
I dont know - maybe they asked him and he was happy for it to be seen.
Oh wow, surprised those auditions stayed under for that long if that's the case! They're a cool find though, and obviously it's nice they've been released after Craig's run. An interesting bit of Bond history.
I think it came out on the Octopussy Blu Ray release. Brolin even did an interview specifically for it. If he was fine with that and agreed I guess they thought it interesting to include. It was so long I guess it's a piece of history really, and Brolin probably doesn't care. Frankly it all makes him look quite good.
Yeah I do wonder why Craig wasn't in there. I remember he said he flew over from the US to do the screentest so maybe he didn't do one of those line readings? Or is there a reason his was left out? It would have been fascinating to see him do the GoldenEye scene as it's not really how his Bond was written (maybe by the casino scene in Skyfall he's more at that point). In a way it's kind of a questionable choice of scene to test out actors for Casino Royale as the character maybe wasn't quite like that in the film.
Those line readings would be early ones designed to narrow down actors. I suspect they did more of those, possibly with actors none of us would not recognise today (they supposedly had about 200 potentials at one point and obviously you can’t spend money doing proper screentests for all of them, especially if many were young, untested, and little known). Using an old script is easy and gives them an idea of what they would naturally bring to Bond. Broccoli and co obviously had their eye on Craig prior, and he was a more established actor than the ones in the tape were at the time. They probably even noted Craig’s performances in Layer Cake and Tomb Raider which were pretty Bondian. Basically there wouldn’t be any reason to narrow him down in the same way, and I’m sure some other actors would have been in the same boat. So he went straight to screentests from what I understand.
I can definitely imagine Craig doing well with that reading though.