Longitude 78 West

(James Bond of the Secret Service)

Produced By: Xanadu Productions

Written by: Ian Fleming, Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham

Written in: 1959 (Never filmed)

Plot

In Nassau, Mafia agent Martelli tells head Mafioso Henrico Largo (to be played by Burl Ives) that NATO observer Joe Petachi is under their control. Largo has Martelli shot and thrown to the sharks. Largo coerces Petacchi to hijack a NATO plane carrying two atomic bombs, and then demands a hundred million pounds in gold bullion for the bombs. Allied Intelligence traces the plane to somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.

M sends James Bond (Richard Burton) to Longitude 78 West, where he meets up with Felix Leiter and an American playgirl named Gaby. She infiltrates Largo's gang, but is discovered with a geiger counter onboard Largo's yacht, The Sorrento, and tied to her bunk. A British gunboat tails the ship, Bond leading a final underwater battle against Largo's men near the Grand Bahama missile base. Largo attempts to escape in a seaplane, but is destroyed by one of the bomb detonators.

Undercover

A spec screenplay. Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory first met in 1958 at a screening of The Boy and The Bridge, which McClory had co-written, directed and produced. At the time they met, Fleming had unsuccessfully tried to get all seven of his Bond novels turned into movies. The closest he had come to success was in 1954 when he sold the rights to Casino Royale to CBS for $1,000.

Fleming reluctantly accepted McClory's offer, partly because, as Fleming said in 1959, "...the trouble with writing something, especially for the screen, is I haven't a single idea in my head."

McClory claimed that he suggested to Fleming that they take James Bond into an underwater world, as well as create a super-villain character. This nemesis would be a diabolical, intelligent, seemingly invincible mastermind with formidable henchmen, who's single handed defeat by James Bond would make James Bond evolve into a cinematic super-hero. Fleming's early treatments featured a British Double Agent named Fatima Blush that assists Bond in the adventure. Her name was later changed to Domino Smith, then to Gaby, but the original name finally resurfaced in Never Say Never Again—only now as a villain.

Fleming and McClory began to work on a script in early 1959 and were later joined by well known and accomplished British screenwriter Jack Whittingham. The script, which included the introduction of SPECTRE and Ernst Stavro Blofeld, was written during a 10-month period in 1959 and 1960.

"In 1959, (Whittingham) had been brought in by the film producer Kevin McClory to work on an original screenplay based on Fleming's famous secret agent. (Fleming had had an earlier bash at writing his own, but forgot to put any action in it.) The problem of how to film Bond had rumbled on for years. What passed for steely cool in the books would come off as charmless froideur on screen. But man-about-town Jack turned out to be the fire to Fleming's ice. In a tobacco-stained study at his Surrey home, the dashing, hard-drinking ladies' man produced a thrilling tale called Thunderball. And he injected Fleming's uptight gentleman spy with quippy humor, arch sexuality and plenty of action. Rather like Jack, in fact. 'I always say that Daddy was an honourable man,' says Whittingham, now 64, in a voice that seems to come courtesy of Diana Rigg. 'Except when it came to women, of course.' She smiles.'But he was a marvellous writer and they'd had real trouble with Fleming's novels. The violent, sadistic, colder, misogynistic Bond of the books didn't work on the big screen. The audience, back then, didn't want it. There was no humour, no charm. Daddy turned Bond into the suave hero they needed.'"¹

The team had trouble enlisting the necessary financing, especially since no major company would invest in the big-budget film with McClory as director or producer despite his qualifications. Since The Boy And The Bridge fell on its face commercially, Fleming and, especially, Bryce, had begun to cool on the project. McClory met with Fleming at Goldeneye and was told that he had three options-back out as director and producer, convince whatever backer they found to hire him as director or producer, or go to court. It was a disheartened McClory who left Jamaica after an hour and a half at Goldeneye. Ernest Cuneo sold his rights to Fleming for one dollar, and the project died.

Fleming was accustomed by this time in his writing career to using discarded scripts as the basis for his novels. He had partially developed a James Bond-style adventure series for NBC which they did not use, called Commander Jamaica. The unused pilot script from this series had become the novel Doctor No. Shortly afterward, CBS had commissioned a series of half-hour episodes for a potential James Bond television series. The series never got off the ground, but several of the episode scripts were ultimately turned into the short story anthology For Your Eyes Only. Therefore it was no big deal in Fleming s eyes when he went to Goldeneye in the spring of 1960 and went to work on this script. He fleshed out the characters, added a wealth of interesting technical detail and inserted an interesting introductory subplot where Bond is sent to a health clinic after an unsatisfactory medical and has a chance encounter with a SPECTRE agent. In this early version of the script, the Mafia is behind the stealing of the nuclear weapons. Fleming then used this plot in the novel Thunderball, but replaced the Mafia badguys with "SPECTRE." Fleming also added a scene at the beginning of the novel in order to intoduce Bond earlier, where he meets a SPECTRE agent at Shrublands.

Unfortunately, Fleming wrote the book without the consent of McClory or Whittingham, and the story spent three years in litigation.

A nine-day trial was held at the High Court in London, England, in November 1963. During the proceedings, Fleming admitted to the court that he had indeed based the Thunderball novel on McClory and Whittingham's scripts, and agreed to publicly acknowledge this fact. On December 3, 1963, the court ordered Fleming to assign and sell the film copyright of the novel Thunderball and all copyrights in the screenplay to McClory. Additionally, under the order of the British court, Fleming gave appropriate authorship acknowledgement in all future editions of Thunderball.

From this would come forty years of threatened litigation, a script by Sean Connery himself (Warhead), Sean Connery's eventual return to the Bond series, and a lot of unproduced screenplays. Here is the entire chronology, up to the late-nineties:

1959—Ten Treatments of first James Bond story (Fleming, McClory, Cuneo, Bryce)
1959—James Bond of the Secret Service (Fleming, McClory, Whittingham)
1959—Longitude 78 West (Fleming, McClory, Whittingham)
1960—Thunderball (Fleming, McClory, Whittingham)
1961—Thunderball (Maibaum)²
1965—Thunderball (Maibaum/Hopkins)²
1976—James Bond of the Secret Service (McClory, Deighton, Connery)
1978—Warhead (McClory, Deighton, Connery)
1982—Never Say Never Again (Semple Jr.)
1990—Warhead 8 (McClory)—this was shopped around with Pierce Brosnan to star (as well as a TV series), before he signed with Eon for Goldeneye.
1997—Warhead 2000, AD (McClory)

SOURCES:
¹—The Sunday Times: His Real Name is Bond—Jack Bond; Interview with Sylvan Whittingham Mason, 29 Jun 2008. Whittingham went on to write episodes of Danger Man in 1964; then in 1967, he wrote a screenplay about Ian Fleming based on John Pearson’s biography for The Sunday Times. In 1983, Never Say Never Again was released by Kevin McClory. The film was based on the original screenplay written by Jack Whittingham, but no credit for this fact was given to Jack by Kevin, only a shared ‘Story’ credit. Jack’s widow & family were not notified that this film was to be made, nor invited to Premiere.

²—EON Productions


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