Phil: At the moment, Candice and I are wrestling with at that difficult second novel. There’s new plotting and characters and locations to devise. While great fun, it’s also hard work.
On Sunday afternoon, thanks to ITV, I worked out where we are going wrong. Instead of writing a novel, we should write a James Bond film.
The film that inspired me is “The Spy Who Loved Me”. In this, a supervillan captures submarines and their crews from Russia and America in an oil tanker. His plan is to start a war between the superpowers that will leave him to launch a new world order.
Bond, dressed as Roger Moore, boards the tanker and frees the submarine crews who then attack a heavily fortified control room in their efforts to stop the war.
Sound familiar?
It does if you ever saw the film, “You Only Live Twice”. Here Bond, looking like Sean Connery, comes up against a supervillan who is capturing Russian and American spacecraft in order to start a war between the superpowers. He infiltrates the volcano lair with some Ninjas and they attack a heavily fortified control room in their efforts to stop the war.
OK you’re thinking. Similar plots but then this is a Bond film, not high art.
How about a company of supervillans stealing nuclear bombs and then holding the world to ransom with them?
As they say before the adverts on a daytime ITV show, which Bond film featured this plot?
A) Thunderball
B) Never Say Never Again
The correct answer is both.
In passing we might also mention the similarities between the room where Goldfinger reveals his plans for Fort Knox and Max Zorin’s version in “A View To A Kill” and that both see a meeting where someone who didn’t wish to take part in the plans finds themselves a bit dead a few minutes later.
All this makes me wonder if the Bond writers have plots written on Lego blocks. They simply shake the box, pull out half a dozen, clip them together and viola! A new film.
Pretty galling when you’ve spent hours wrestling with Post-It notes to devise something original for a book though.
(Please note: If you are in the market for writers for the next Bond film, you can contact us via the “About the Authors” tab above. Just saying. We’d take part of the fee in cake.)
nolanparker 