The typed screenplay, still in its Rank folder, remained forgotten decades after Fleming had submitted it. It is a very Bondian scenario – a megalomaniac who wants to see the downfall of Britain.”īut the Rank Organisation, at the time the biggest film company in the UK, failed to see its potential. It is his only attempt at a film script, so it’s hugely important. Jon Gilbert, an expert in Fleming literature, told the Observer: “This is the very first screenplay written by Fleming imagining Bond for the big screen. M’s flirtatious secretary, Miss Moneypenny, is conspicuous by her absence.Ī Cockney card sharp called Tosh – a special branch officer working undercover – is one of a new cast of characters who take on the villain Hugo Drax. The head of the British secret intelligence service is not called “M”, and more closely resembles an affable 1950s city gent than the gruff character of the novels and films.
Just as in the novel, Bond is portrayed as a cold-hearted assassin, but Fleming makes some changes. In 1956, a year after the Moonraker novel was published, Fleming wrote his own 150-page film treatment with a plot that is as serious as the 1979 film is lightweight, despite Roger Moore’s charm as the fictional spy. And it could not be more different to the author’s own version of the film, according to a previously unpublished script. It is one of numerous outlandish scenes in the film that Ian Fleming never wrote in his original 007 novel. In the action-packed film Moonraker, James Bond escapes from Jaws, the metal-toothed villain, on a hang-glider that ejects from a speedboat just as he drives over the precipice of a waterfall. A lost screenplay for Moonraker has been discovered that gives an insight into Ian Fleming’s cinematic vision for the character of James Bond.
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