Wednesday, 15 October 1997

SECRET AGENT WEDNESDAY

The stories that Sony was in pursuit of the Bond franchise started last February. After a week or two of evasion, newly seated Sony Chief John Calley finally spoke to me about the situation and categorically denied that Sony was pursuing the Bond franchise. From all the tap dancing, it seemed that Calley had indeed been trying to leverage his relationship with Bond producer Barbara Broccoli (daughter of Cubby), with whom he had restarted the Bond engine at MGM/UA, the company he exited that is the long standing Bond rights holder. But the connection between Bond and UA was apparently too strong, legally or otherwise, to break. Story over.

But Calley was as smooth as Bond, stirred but not shaken, pursuing the back door entrance into Bondland, with producer Kevin McClory as the source of rights. McClory claims rights to the character based on his involvement in 1965's Thunderball, which he produced and co-storied. In 1983, he delivered Bond to Warner Bros. with Never Say Never Again, which remade the Thunderball story and was the start (along with Time Bandits) of Sean Connery's career resurrection. Guess who was head of production at WB when that happened. Calley!

The brewing legal bloodbath, centered around McClory's rights claim to the James Bond character, as opposed to his previous remaking of the one Bond property he had a hand in, should make December's Bond release, Tommorrow Never Dies, look G-rated in comparison. MGM/UA is, as it has been for years, in serious financial straits and Bond is the one plum in their pudding. In the meantime, call Calley Little Jack Horner, sitting in his corner with Men In Black winning last summer's box office race, Godzilla likely to win the summer of 1998 and an Astin Martin warming up in the garage.

And in the category of "more evasive, less important," Disney-based Interscope Communications will bankroll twin brothers Josh and Jonas Pate's third film, Earl Watt, to the tune of $50 million-plus. What's it about? The secret agent brothers won't say. Coyness from the twins whose first film was the direct-to-cable The Grave, described by TNT's very own Joe Bob Briggs as "Eleven dead bodies. No breasts. Bloody rabbit's foot. Pill poppin'. Embalming-table surgery. Aardvarking. Up-chucking. Baseball bat to the head. The old chained-to-the-floor-of-the-swamp-at-low-tide torture. Massive marijuana use. Multiple gravedigging. One brawl, with pitchfork. Finger rolls. Gratuitous Eric Roberts. Electric-chair fu." I'll tell you what, guys. Match the Coen brothers' first film (Blood Simple) or The Wachowski brothers' cherry-breaking Bound and you can be as mysterious as you want. In the meantime, you're just pissing me off.

If I have the same effect on you, email me. And you were all right. I am 67 percent possessed.