My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

  George and Elizabeth had a son named Christian who looked exactly like George. Elizabeth used to joke, it's the only child in the world where they wonder who the mother was. One day, Christian had a young friend over. They were maybe five years old. The two boys were swimming in the pool and they had life vests on. Inside the house, Elizabeth and I were arguing about something. All of a sudden, Christian came in and said, “Mommy, Johnny's at the bottom of the pool.” We ran out, and there was Johnny. He had taken his life vest off. We were so selfish arguing we never noticed. Elizabeth was already in the water. She dove down, pulled him out, and did CPR. He threw up, and he was fine. It was the closest in my life I'd ever been to death right in front of me. Elizabeth saved his life. His parents came over to pick him up later, and we thought the only fair thing to do was to tell them what happened. It was our fault. We didn't notice because we were so full of ourselves at the time. Whatever the nattering was about, it wasn't anything that important.

  Man with the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me: Run, Run, Mank

  So Live and Let Die opens. Now here comes Man with the Golden Gun. We all knew that was going to be the next one. I'd already written a lot of the script. In 1973 I got the call to come over to Hong Kong, where Cubby and Guy were. Then Bangkok. There was a famous man named Run Run Shaw who ran the Shaw Studios, where the chop-socky movies were made. He started Bruce Lee. He was the first Asian ever to be knighted. Run Run could get you heroin, bazookas, tanks, or the best suit in Hong Kong. He had three Rolls-Royces, all with the same license plate, Run Run. Nobody knew which one he was in because he never wanted people to know where he was. A member of his family had been kidnapped before we arrived. The police couldn't find him, but they found the kidnappers' bodies hacked to death in the back of Run Run's car. It was fine. He had a brother in Singapore named Runme, and Runme could also help you in Southeast Asia in the same way. I turned them into characters called Hai Fat and Lo Fat.

  We stayed at the beautiful Peninsula in Hong Kong. Cubby had a suite that had four separate bedrooms, a communal dining room, and its own staff of three people that were there twenty-four hours a day. If you got up at three in the morning and you wanted a Jack Daniel's, the guy would get up and make it for you. We also went to the Bottoms Up Club, where you could get a blow job while you were sitting there. Hong Kong was the big R & R place for the American fleet. We went from there to Bangkok.

  Here's an example of Harry starting the movie and Cubby taking over. At one point, I was going to write a series of articles for Playboy, “Being on the Road with Bond.” The title of my first one was going to be “Your Elephant Shoes Are Ready.” We went up to northern Thailand, where the elephants in those days worked the teak forests pulling logs. Harry, with that mind of his, was looking at thirty elephants when he said, “An elephant stampede. We're going to have an elephant stampede in the movie. And Bond will be on the lead elephant.”

  The guy who ran the teak forest said, “Mr. Saltzman, these elephants don't stampede, and if they do, you can't stop them. They'll just destroy everything in their path. They're not trained elephants that way.”

  Harry asked, “What's that on their feet?” They wore leather shoes because there were so many sharp things in the forest and they were working all day. Harry said, “We're going to have elephants, goddamnit. Fifty of them.” He turned to Claude Hudson, who was the production manager, and he said, “Claude, get me fifty sets of elephant shoes.” That's two hundred shoes!

  So Claude said, “Yes sir, Mr. Saltzman.” He ordered two hundred elephant shoes.

  Well, Harry went back to London. Cubby and I found this wonderful place called Phuket down south, and there was nothing there. It's like Miami Beach now, but then, we couldn't find anyplace for anybody to stay, not even the crew. We flew down in helicopters from Bangkok every day that we shot down there. James Bond Island is still there, where Bond and Christopher Lee had their face-off. After the movie came out, because the locale was so staggering in the film and it was a Bond film, somebody thought about building a hotel there. And then, hotels just started sprouting up.

  So we were staying at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. One of the most elegant hotels in the world, on the river near the floating market. Cubby and I were having a drink in the outdoor bar, and somebody came up and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Broccoli, your elephant shoes are here.”

  He asked, “What elephant shoes? There's not an elephant in the movie.”

  I said, “Oh, shit, Harry ordered two hundred elephant shoes.”

  One of the great things about Bond was, as a young guy who was barely in his thirties by now, I was going to Hong Kong, Thailand, Egypt. We stopped in Calcutta, and the poverty was so overwhelming that we decided that was not a Bond kind of city to shoot in. I was seeing the world. Then we got back to London. Guy and I had a couple of disagreements. I was also feeling really tapped out on Bond. This was my third in a row. I wanted to make other pictures.

  I went over to see Cubby. I said, “I think I should get off this. It would be best for the picture. I've done nothing for three and a half years but James Bond.”

  Cubby was just terrific and he understood. He said, “Okay, does this have to do with Guy?”

  I said, “Well, a little bit. We're just not getting on in the same way we were, but we're not disliking each other. I could stay on.”

  So I went home, and Dick Maibaum, whom I had taken over for on Diamonds Are Forever, finished up. We always got along great. When they finished shooting, the first thing Cubby and Guy did was invite me over to dinner at Cubby's house. The Bonds were a club. Cubby made it that way. The same soundmen by and large, a lot of the same cameramen. The same people on the crews. Cubby knew everybody's name, the names of their kids. So you belonged to a big club. Terence Young directed the first two. Then Guy Hamilton. Then Terence. Then Lewis Gilbert, then Guy, Guy, Guy, then Lewis Gilbert. There were a few directors. Ken Adam designed just about all of them. You were part of a fraternity. It was amazing. You would hear stories about the other Bond pictures from the people who were on them.

  A few years later, after I'd done the first three pictures, Cubby asked me to rewrite The Spy Who Loved Me. He said, “Now, here's the deal. This has got to be done away from the Writers Guild because I need a big rewrite. Under the Eady Plan, we already have our three non-British subjects on this picture”—the Eady Plan stipulated that to receive governmental tax credits and financial help on a film produced in the United Kingdom, only three non-Brits could be involved in any capacity—”there's me, somebody else, and Barbara Bach. So you can't get credit because we'll lose our Eady Plan eligibility. And if it goes through the Writers Guild, you're probably going to get a credit because I'm asking for a big rewrite, but you can't have a credit, so I'm going to get into trouble with the Writers Guild. So nobody can know that you're on this picture. I'm going to pay you cash.”

  We made the deal. Nobody knew that I was rewriting that picture. The first thirty pages went off to England, and Roger Moore called Cubby and asked, “When did Mankiewicz get on this picture?”

  Cubby said, “He's not on the picture, Roger.”

  He said, “Of course he is. He's on every fucking page. Tell him he's doing a good job.”

  Catherine Deneuve wanted to be in a James Bond movie. She had won every award in the world, but she was getting older, and she wanted to be in a worldwide hit. Her price was $400,000 then. I was at Cubby's house every day rewriting The Spy Who Loved Me. The pages were flying. He got a call from her agent saying she wanted to do it and her price was $400,000 but she'd do it for $250,000. She'd love to have a lark and do it. Cubby said to the agent, “First of all, please tell her I am so flattered that she wants to do it, but I've never paid more than eighty thousand dollars for a James Bond girl in my life. None of the girls, with the possible exception of Ursula Andress, ever went on to be a star or have a career. I'd rather take the extra hundred seventy thousand and put it up on the screen somewhere. I'm ver
y flattered that she wants to do it, but I can't pay a Bond girl two hundred fifty.”

  Of Human Bondage

  Obviously, the best actress in a Bond film was Diana Rigg. She was in the Lazenby one. Peter Hunt directed it, and he had been the editor of the Bond movies. Cubby always regretted letting him direct On Her Majesty's Secret Service. He said, “It was very well directed, but by giving him that job, I lost the best editor I ever had, because once you make them a director, you can't ask them to edit anymore.” Diana Rigg hated Lazenby. The last shot of the picture, Rigg's last shot, she said, “This is my last take?”

  They said, “Yes, it's the last take on the picture.”

  She did it, turned around and spit at George Lazenby, and walked off the set. That was the good-bye.

  Fleming did write wonderful character names like Pussy Galore and Goldfinger and Plenty O'Toole, who was in Diamonds Are Forever. So there were an awful lot of funny names that we, the writers, just picked up on. Sex and violence in the Bond films was very interesting, especially in the seventies. In Diamonds Are Forever, the very first scene, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd get a package of diamonds in the middle of the desert from a dentist. In my script, Mr. Wint said, “Oh, doctor, could you take a look? I have something wrong with my tooth.” The dentist said, “Say ahh,” and he said, “Ahh,” and they popped a scorpion down his throat. Now, the British said that cannot be in a PG. They were very strong on violence. We couldn't put it in. In the movie, they drop it down the back of his neck. But with Americans, any violence was just fine for a PG. They had no problem. But if you had a sexually suggestive sentence, they'd cut it out. With England, it was just fine. Anything sexual. Lana Wood plays Plenty O'Toole in Diamonds Are Forever. For one and a half seconds, you can actually see her breast as she's being thrown out a window. Censors went crazy in the United States about that, but it was the only coverage we had, and they let us keep it.

  My favorite lines in Bond that I ever wrote were cut out of The Spy Who Loved Me, and they were Roger Moore's favorite lines as well. At a bar, he runs into Barbara Bach, who plays a Russian colonel. The two of them know who the other one is, but they've never officially met. Bond says, “For the lady, a Stolichnaya.” She says, “And for the gentleman, a vodka martini, shaken not stirred.” He turns to her and says, “I must say, you're much more beautiful than the pictures we have of you, Colonel,” and she says, “I'm afraid the only picture we have of you, Mr. Bond, was taken in bed with one of our agents, a Miss Tatiana Romanova,” who was the girl in From Russia with Love. Bond says, “And was she smiling?” And the colonel says, “As I recall, her mouth was not immediately visible in the photograph.” Bond says, “Ah, then I was smiling.” They wouldn't let us do it. They said, “You've got to cut that out.” Censorship was so silly. I would say, “God, if anybody understands that, we're not protecting them from anything. A twelve-year-old won't know what the hell we're talking about.” Sometimes what you did, and everybody did it on purpose, you would write twenty things you knew would never pass to try to negotiate and get the four you really wanted in. It was like that then. So they would say, “The following twelve lines are completely unacceptable.” And after Cubby would yell and scream, they would say, “Okay, these four but not the other eight.” If you were lucky, they were the eight that you never wanted anyway.

  Cubby and Harry could do outside films. Cubby did films like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. More family entertainment. Harry was a Canadian, and he wanted to be knighted. So he made The Battle of Britain with every known actor in the English language. Each actor had about two lines. This was Harry's bid at knighthood. Some critic said, “Never have so many done so little.” Harry got into more and more business troubles, and he started getting loans from people and putting up his stock in Danjaq as collateral. That was illegal according to the bylaws of Danjaq. Cubby knew about it and just let Harry keep digging his hole. At one time, Harry was a man with at least tens of millions of dollars. But he had cross-collateralized himself into a real hole. The reason the Broccoli family controls the Bonds today—starting with Pierce Brosnan—is Harry had to sell out. Cubby had him by the short and curlies, and would always say, “Harry keeps forgetting I'm from Sicily.”

  Cubby got United Artists to buy Harry's half. Cubby said, “In the old days, I could vote yes. Harry voted no. And United Artists had the deciding vote. Now, under this deal, I vote yes, United Artists votes no, and then I vote yes again.” Now, you can't make a Bond film unless you go through the Broccolis. Michael Wilson, who is Dana Broccoli's son by a former marriage, and Barbara Broccoli, the youngest daughter, produce the films. They call all the shots. It was very sad for Harry. Jackie Saltzman got cancer. They went all over the world trying to find cures. Harry finally wound up living in Florida. But as partners, they were amazing. In the days when I went to work for them on Diamonds Are Forever, they had the world by the tail. Bond was the only real movie event. There was no Raiders yet, no Superman, no Lethal Weapons, no Star Wars, no anything. The world waited for the Bond movie to come out every eighteen months or so. This is how important they were: Cubby had a Rolls-Royce and his license plate was CUB1. Suddenly, during Diamonds Are Forever or Live and Let Die, the British government now recognized Cuba. The Cuban ambassador was entitled to the license plate CUB1. The British government told Cubby that he couldn't have that license plate anymore. He got crazy. He said, “We'll find out who's more fucking important in England, me or the Cuban ambassador.” And son of a bitch, I don't know how he did it, but CUB1 stayed on Cubby's Rolls-Royce. Maybe the Cuban ambassador had CUB2. It was a big deal. On the other hand, the Bond pictures were made in England. Hundreds of people were employed. Millions were spent. It was great for the economy.

  When Casino Royale came out with Daniel Craig, his first Bond, I was driving down Sunset Boulevard and a car was right on my ass. A big black SUV. I pulled over to let it go by, but it stayed right behind me. I took a right, it took a right. I took a left, it took a left. I pulled over. And the car pulled over behind me. It was Barbara Broccoli. She had seen MANK2 on the license plate. She jumped out and we hugged. She said, “So, what do you think of the movie?”

  I said, “The title song sucks. You've got to do better.”

  She said, “I agree.”

  “And the movie's twenty minutes too long, but every movie's twenty minutes too long today as far as I'm concerned. Daniel Craig, you should keep him and lock him in a cellar and don't let anybody else have him. He should do fifty of these.”

  It was a wonderful movie. I didn't like Quantum of Solace because I couldn't follow it. I didn't know who was fighting who and what was going on. One critic said it correctly: Bond should introduce himself with “My name is Bourne, Jason Bourne.” This is The Bourne Identity, and that's not Bond. The idiosyncratic wit that's in Bond. The car that swims underwater. Those things are missing. And the audience misses them. You miss Q and the preposterous, the bizarre that's in Bond. The thing that differentiated Bond from Lethal Weapon, from Bourne, was its sense of humor. It's bizarreness. You could just stop the movie dead with a huge belly laugh at a remark of Bond's. I thought the writers were so smart in Casino Royale to make it all about Bond, because this guy's in here for the long haul. He's a wonderful actor. Daniel Craig can play anything. Now if they can just get some of that fun back. Guy Hamilton was a great instructor for me in terms of getting the bizarreness. He said, “Never forget, Tom, in a Bond movie, if you want to start a fire, first you call the fire department. Everything works backward.”

  Sean remains, to me, the best Bond because he was Bond when the audience broke in with him. But also, he had that glimmer of violence in his eyes. When Sean is in physical fights onscreen, you'll notice he's smiling a lot. It's not a big smile, but it's like he's enjoying it. He looks like a bastard. If you were a woman, you would never want to marry Sean Connery, but boy, would you like to spend a weekend with him in Brazil. Sean had that violence and excitement in him. Roger was Fleming's Bond, and did
a great job. Pierce Brosnan was neither great nor terrible. He was just Bond. He was fine.

  The best actor they ever had playing Bond was Timothy Dalton. Cubby asked me at the time, “What do you think of Tim Dalton for James Bond?”

  I said, “How about Tim Dalton for a James Bond villain?” There was something slightly androgynous about him, and evil. A wonderful actor. He only did two. A very good friend of Cubby's. An interesting guy who would go to the Arctic Circle and help wildlife, and he had a long affair with Vanessa Redgrave.

  Daniel Craig is just terrific. He was a shot in the arm when Bond really needed it, because it's an amazing series. It's been going fifty years. Dr. No was 1962. I saw it when I was in college. I saw From Russia with Love when I was in college, and Goldfinger the year after I got out of college. There have been twenty-two of these. Nothing like that's ever happened in the history of film. Bond went great with the times. Sean was the guy for the sixties. The seventies got Love, Love, Love and marijuana. It was a bit more freewheeling, and what I brought to the Bonds was a lot of humor. I think I was right for the seventies. Then all of a sudden, it got too much. By the time Moonraker was made, they became silly pictures.

  And Away I Go

  I was now a hot writer. But I was really tapped out on Bond. You can only write so much of the same thing for so many years. Jackie Gleason, who had been in vaudeville, was a giant when I was growing up. The Jackie Gleason Show from Miami Beach—”A little traveling music, Ray”—and Reggie Van Gleason. He was fabulous. The hottest producers on television were Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, who had All in the Family, Maude, and Sanford and Son. I got a phone call from Norman Lear one day in 1974. He said, “Listen, you'd be the ideal guy for this. I'm going to do a series with Jackie Gleason; he's coming back. And he's going to play a conman. I mentioned you to Jackie, and he loves the idea.”