Moonraker (film)

Ian Fleming had originally intended the novel, published in 1955, to be made into a film even before he began writing it. A part of the novel was thus based on an original idea for a screenplay which had been on his mind for years.[8] In 1955, American actor John Payne offered $1,000 for a nine-month option to Moonraker, plus $10,000 if production eventually took off. The negotiations broke up the following year due to disagreements regarding Payne's ownership of the other Bond novels. Fleming eventually settled with Rank Organisation, a British company who owned Pinewood Studios. Rank wound up not developing the film, even after Fleming contributed his own script trying to push production forward,[9] and Fleming purchased the rights back in 1959.[10] Moonraker ended up being the last James Bond novel to receive a screen adaptation.[11]

However, as with several previous Bond films, the story from Fleming's novel is almost entirely dispensed with, and little more than the idea of Hugo Drax as an industrialist who makes rockets was used in the film. Drax has a plan for a master race in the film, but in the novel actually had been a Nazi (unbeknownst to the English). The dramatic scene of Bond and his female companion being trapped in an exhaust duct under a rocket where they are nearly burned to death also appears in the film. Otherwise the film is more in keeping with contemporary trends in science fiction. The 2002 Bond film Die Another Day makes further use of some ideas and character names from the novel. Tom Mankiewicz wrote a short outline for Moonraker that was mostly discarded. According to Mankiewicz, footage shot at Drax's lairs was considerably more detailed than the edited result in the final version.[12] Some scenes from Mankiewicz's script were used in subsequent films, including the Acrostar Jet sequence, used in the pre-credit sequence for Octopussy, and the Eiffel Tower scene in A View to a Kill.[6]

In 1978 Steven Spielberg offered to direct the film after the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but Albert R. Broccoli turned him down.[13]

In March 2004 rumours surfaced about a lost 1956 version of Moonraker by Orson Welles, and a James Bond web site repeated it on April Fool's Day in 2004 as a hoax. Supposedly, this recently discovered lost film consisted of 40 minutes of raw footage with Dirk Bogarde as Bond, Welles as Drax, and Peter Lorre as Drax's henchman.[14]

The screenplay of Moonraker differed so much from Ian Fleming's novel that Eon Productions authorised the film's screenwriter Christopher Wood to write a novelisation, his second (after James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me). It was named James Bond and Moonraker to avoid confusion with Fleming's original novel Moonraker. It was published in 1979, with the film's release.[15]

The height difference between the giant Jaws and his diminutive girlfriend Dolly

Initially, the chief villain, Hugo Drax, was to be played by British actor James Mason, but once the decision was made that the film would be an Anglo-French co-production under the 1965–1979 film treaty, French actor Michael Lonsdale was cast as Drax and Corinne Cléry was chosen for the part of Corinne Dufour, to comply with qualifying criteria of the agreement.[16] Stewart Granger and Louis Jourdan were considered also for the role of Drax.[17][18] Jourdan later portrayed prince Kamal Khan, chief villain of Octopussy. American actress Lois Chiles had originally been offered the role of Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), but had turned down the part when she decided to take temporary retirement. Chiles was cast as Holly Goodhead by chance, when she was given the seat next to Lewis Gilbert on a flight and he believed she would be ideal for the role as the CIA scientist.[6] Jaclyn Smith was originally offered the role of Holly Goodhead but had to turn it down due to scheduling conflicts with Charlie's Angels. Drax's henchman Chang was played by Japanese aikido instructor Toshiro Suga; he was recommended for the role by executive producer Michael G. Wilson, who was one of his pupils.[6] Wilson, continuing a tradition he started in the film Goldfinger, has a small cameo role in Moonraker: he appears twice, first as a tourist outside the Venini Glass shop and museum in Venice, then at the end of the film as a technician in the US Navy control room.

The Jaws character, played by Richard Kiel, makes a return, although in Moonraker the role is played more for comedic effect than in The Spy Who Loved Me. Jaws was intended to be a villain against Bond to the bitter end, but director Lewis Gilbert stated on the DVD documentary that he received so much fan mail from small children saying "Why can't Jaws be a goodie not a baddie", that as a result he was persuaded to gradually transform Jaws into Bond's ally by the end of the film.[6]

Diminutive French actress Blanche Ravalec, who had recently begun her career with minor roles in French films such as Michel Lang's Holiday Hotel (1978) and Claude Sautet's A Simple Story (1978), was cast as the bespectacled Dolly, the girlfriend of Jaws. Originally, the producers were dubious about whether the audience would accept the height difference between them, and only made their decision once they were informed by Richard Kiel that his real-life wife was of the same height.[19] Lois Maxwell's 22-year-old daughter, Melinda Maxwell, was also cast as one of the "perfect" human specimens from Drax's master race.[8]

Production began on 14 August 1978. The main shooting was switched from the usual 007 Stage at the Pinewood Studios to France, due to high taxation in England at the time. Only the cable car interiors and space battle exteriors were filmed at Pinewood. The massive sets designed by Ken Adam were the largest ever constructed in France and required more than 222,000 man-hours to construct (roughly 1,000 hours by each of the crew on average).[6]

The Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte was used for Drax's chateau in the film. An extensive aerial view of the site was witnessed by helicopter in the early stages of the film by Bond and Dufour arriving.

Drax's mansion, set in California, was actually filmed at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, about 55 kilometres (34 mi) southeast of Paris, for the exteriors and Grand Salon. The remaining interiors, including some of the scenes with Corinne Defour and the drawing room, were filmed at the Château de Guermantes.[6]

Much of the film was shot in the cities of London, Paris, Venice, Palmdale, California, Port St. Lucie, Florida, and Rio de Janeiro. The production team had considered India and Nepal as locations, but after scouting trips these were rejected as impractical to work into the script, particularly considering the time constraints.[6] They decided on Rio de Janeiro relatively early on, a city that producer Albert R. Broccoli had visited on holiday, and a team was sent there in early 1978 to capture initial footage from the Carnival, which featured in the film.[6]

Stuntman Richard Graydon slipped and narrowly avoided falling to his death during the filming of the cable car sequence at Sugarloaf Mountain.

At the Rio de Janeiro location, many months later, Roger Moore arrived several days later than scheduled for shooting due to recurrent health problems and an attack of kidney stones that he had suffered while in France.[6] Upon arrival, Moore was immediately whisked off the plane for hair and make-up work before reboarding the plane to film the sequence with him arriving as James Bond in the film. Sugarloaf Mountain was a prominent location in the film, and during filming of the midair cable car sequence in which Bond and Goodhead are attacked by Jaws, stuntman Richard Graydon slipped and narrowly avoided falling to his death.[6] For the scene in which Jaws bites into the steel tramway cable with his teeth, the cable was actually made of liquorice, although Kiel was still required to use his steel dentures.[8]

Iguazu Falls, in the south of Brazil, was used in the film, although as Q notes, the falls were supposedly somewhere in the upper basin of the Amazon River. The second unit had originally planned on sending an actual boat over the falls.[6] However, on attempting to release it, the boat became firmly embedded on rocks near the edge. Despite a dangerous attempt by helicopter and rope ladder to retrieve it, the plan had to be abandoned, forcing the second unit to use a miniature at Pinewood instead.[6] The exterior of Drax's pyramid headquarters in the Amazon rain forest near the falls was actually filmed at the Tikal Mayan ruins in Guatemala.[8] The interior of the pyramid, however, was designed by Ken Adam at a French studio, in which he purposefully used a shiny coating to make the walls look plastic and false.[6] All of the space centre scenes were shot at the Vehicle Assembly Building of the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, although some of the earlier scenes of the Moonraker assembly plant had been filmed on location at the Rockwell International manufacturing plant in Palmdale, California.[20]

The climax of the film with the laser battle on Drax's space station. Moonraker holds the world record for the largest number of zero gravity wires in one scene.

The early scene in which Jaws pushes Bond out of the aircraft without a parachute took weeks of planning and preparation. The skydiving sequence was coordinated by Don Calvedt under the supervision of second unit director John Glen and was shot above Lake Berryessa in northern California. As Calvedt and skydiving champion B.J. Worth developed the equipment for the scene, which included a 1-inch-thick (25 mm) parachute pack that could be concealed beneath the suit to give the impression of the missing parachute, and equipment to prevent the freefalling cameraman from suffering whiplash while opening his parachute, they brought in stuntman Jake Lombard to test it all. Lombard eventually played Bond in the scene, with Worth as the pilot from whom Bond takes a parachute, and Ron Luginbill as Jaws. Both Lombard and Worth became regular members of the stunt team for aerial sequences in later Bond films.[6][21][22] When the stuntmen opened their parachutes at the end of every shoot, custom-sewn velcro costume seams separated to allow the hidden parachutes to open.[8] The skydiver cinematographer used a lightweight Panavision experimental plastic anamorphic lens, bought from an old pawn shop in Paris, which he had adapted, and attached to his helmet to shoot the entire sequence. The scene took a total of 88 skydives by the stuntmen to be completed.[6] The only scenes shot in studio were close-ups of Roger Moore and Richard Kiel.[21]

Since NASA's Space Shuttle program had not been launched, Derek Meddings and his miniatures team had to create the rocket launch footage without any reference. Shuttle models attached to bottle rockets and signal flares were used for take-off, and the smoke trail was created with salt that fell from the models. The space scenes were done by rewinding the camera after an element was shot, enabling other elements to be superimposed in the film stock, with the space battle needing up to forty rewinds to incorporate everything. The climactic scenes of the space station disintegrating were created by Meddings and other members of the special effects team shooting the miniature model with shotguns.[6][23]

As James Bond is arriving at the scene of the pheasant shoot, a trumpet is sounded playing the first three brass notes from Also sprach Zarathustra, referencing the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Moonraker was the third of three Bond films for which the theme song was performed by Shirley Bassey (following Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever). Frank Sinatra was originally considered for the vocals, and Kate Bush was asked, but she declined.[24] Johnny Mathis was approached and offered the opportunity. However, Mathis—despite having started recording with Barry—was unable to complete the project, leaving producers to offer the song to Bassey just weeks before the premiere date in England.[25] Bassey made the recordings with very short notice and as a result, she never regarded the song 'as her own' as she had never had the chance to perform it in full or promote it first.[25] The film uses two versions of the title theme song, a ballad version heard over the main titles, and a disco version over the closing titles. The song made little impact on the charts, reaching #159, partly attributed to Bassey's failure to promote the single, given the last-minute decision to quickly record it to meet the schedule.[26]

In 2005, Bassey sang the song for the first time outside James Bond on stage as part of a medley of her three Bond title songs.[25] An instrumental strings version of the title theme was used in 2007 tourism commercials for the Dominican Republic.

The soundtrack of Moonraker was composed by John Barry and recorded in Paris, again, as with production, marking a turning point away from the prior studio, CTS Studios in London. The score also marked a turning point in John Barry's output, abandoning the Kentonesque brass of his earlier Bond scores in favor of slow, rich string passages – a trend which Barry would continue in the 1980s with scores such as Out of Africa and Somewhere in Time.[27] For Moonraker, for the first time since Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Barry used a piece of music called "007" (on track 7), and "Bond smells a rat", the secondary Bond theme composed by Barry and introduced in From Russia with Love during Bond's escape with the Lektor; some classical music pieces were also included in the film. For the scene where Bond visits Drax in his chateau, Drax plays Frédéric Chopin's Prelude no. 15 in D-flat major (op. 28), "Raindrop", on his grand piano (although he plays in the key of D major).[28] Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka by Johann Strauss II was used during the hovercraft scene on the Piazza San Marco in Venice,[28] and Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet Overture" plays when Jaws meets Dolly following his accident.[28] Other passages pay homage to earlier films, including Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra (op. 30),[28] associated with 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the hunting horn playing its distinctive first three notes, Elmer Bernstein's theme from The Magnificent Seven when Bond appears on horseback in gaucho clothing at MI6 headquarters in Brazil, and the alien-contacting theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as the key-code for a security door as mentioned previously.[28] The Italian aria "Vesti la giubba" from Ruggero Leoncavallo's opera I Pagliacci, was sung in Venice before one of the henchmen falls to his death from a building, landing inside a piano.

Derek Meddings, Paul Wilson and John Evans were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects,[51] and the film was nominated for three Saturn Awards, Best Science Fiction Film, Best Special Effects, and Best Supporting Actor (Richard Kiel).[52]