The James Bond 007 Dossier

I have been reading Some Kind of Hero, by Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury. I'm pretty well read when it comes to James Bond, but even I am learning new facts from this great book. Here are some things about the film that you may not already know...

1. Dr. No wasn't the filmmakers' first choice. It was selected only because they didn't own the rights to Casino Royale, Thunderball was tied up in a Legal battle between Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory, and Goldfinger would have been considerably more expensive to film. Given their limited budget for the first film, Dr. No seemed the best choice. (Page 55)
2. Dr. No was almost a monkey. Screenwriters Wolf Mankowitz and Richard Maibaum thought Fleming's evil doctor was ludicrus, just Fu Manchu with steel hooks. They rewrote the part as a little marmoset monkey, and thought it was marvelous. Producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman were outraged. (P.56)
3. Connery wore a hair piece, even in this first film at age 32. (P.63)
4. Stuntman Bob Simmons  drives both the convertible Sunbeam and the hearse, in the car chase up the mountain. (P.67)
5. Fleming was so taken with Ursula Andress that he wrote her into his next Bond novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. (P.67-68)
6. Ursula Andress's Bikini is not actually white, it's ivory. "it was a rag. Who wanted it? I was going to throw it away and then a friend of mine said 'Oh keep it!' I had it in a box in Los Angeles for years." In 2001 that bikini was sold at auction for £41,125 - more than twenty-seven times her £1,500 salary for appearing in the film. (p.68)
7. The gun barrel they photographed for the iconic opening was a colt .45, short barrelled British service revolver, and there had to be a British policeman present while they did it because of gun laws in England. (P.72)
8. The man playing Bond in that first gun barrel sequence was not Sean Connery, but his stunt double, Bob Simmons. As Maurice Binder explains, "At that point nobody knew Sean Connery and nobody knew Bob Simmons, so what difference did it make?" (P.72)
9. Monty Norman is credited with composing the James Bond Theme, while John Barry no doubt expanded on it while orchestrating it for the film. This led to decades of litigation, with John Barry implying that he composed it from scratch and Monty Norman claiming it was originally written for a musical he abandoned in 1959, based on the book A House for Mr. Biswas. In 2001, after a 5 day trial, a jury concluded that Monty Norman had, indeed, composed the James Bond Theme. (P.73)
10. Maurice Binder was behind the film's unusual first trailer campaign, for which Connery recorded a voice-over, wittly counterpointing the onscreen action, 'I thought it was polite to knock before shooting'. Binder recalls that the executives at United Artists hated it. (P.74) 

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