Dark end for Archbishop in Burgess’s deranged Spy Who Loved Me
Film treatment discovered in US archive reveals Clockwork Orange author’s outrageous take on 007
The Spy Who Loved Me boasts thrilling scenes from Union flag parachutes to a fight among Egyptian ruins – and Roger Moore’s quip about “keeping the British end up” – but it could have been very different, and darker.
Villains were set to blow up the Archbishop of Canterbury in an unused script written by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange.
Burgess’s treatment of The Spy Who Loved Me was ultimately never used and was believed to have been lost, but his outline for an outlandish spy thriller has been rediscovered in the US.
The author was asked to write a “totally original script” for Bond in 1975, when he was on a lecture tour and approached by producer Cubby Broccoli and Guy Hamilton, who had directed four Bond films, the most recent being
The Man with the Golden Gun.
The emphasis on originality was because Ian Fleming had stipulated only the title could be used from his novel of the same name, a gangster story set in a motel in upstate New York that had received a critical drubbing on publication.
Burgess was an admirer of Fleming’s work, and in 1966 had written Tremor of Intent, a spy thriller with elements of Bond pastiche. The outline he created for
The Spy Who Loved Me has become a myth among Bond cognoscenti: as well as the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, there is a terrorist plot to blow up the Queen at Sydney Opera House, the Pope being forced to whitewash the Sistine Chapel, a Henry Kissinger cameo, miniature nuclear devices implanted in people. Burgess gave a synopsis of it in You’ve Had Your Time, the second volume of his memoirs, but the outline itself had never surfaced. In 1988, Burgess’s flat in Monaco was flooded, partially destroying his manuscripts, and among those he listed on his insurance claim as “ruined by water” was a 150-page film script for The Spy Who Loved Me.
But, surprisingly, some material he wrote for the film has survived, and since the 1990s has been in the library of the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Texas along with 138 boxes of manuscripts, correspondence and other items. Undated and marked as “first draft”, a 44-page outline contains everything Burgess claimed was in it and a whole lot more besides.
Burgess’s approach was not so much ultra-violence as ultra-absurdity, although there are echoes of the nihilism of A Clockwork Orange. Instead of SMERSH or SPECTRE, Burgess created the Consortium for Hastening the Annihilation of Organised Society, or CHAOS. The outline opens with the head of the organisation, Schnitzler, welcoming participants to the group’s eighth annual plenary conference.
He declares that their dividends will be lower this year owing to inflation and recession, takes a sip from a glass of milk, and dies. His poisoner, Feratu, takes over as the new head of CHAOS, saying he has removed the “smell of defeatism”. The doors are flung open and a newcomer enters: Theodorescu, “gross, formidable” and in a wheelchair, long thought dead by the others. He is accompanied by his beautiful daughter Elaine, the left side of whose face is covered in a red stain. She shoots Feratu between the eyes, and her father takes over as the third head of CHAOS. This is all on the first page of the outline.
Theodorescu has a different attitude to his predecessors. As Elaine burns five million dollars in notes in the conference room’s fireplace, he explains that money is irrelevant and his plan is to destroy civilisation for the sheer thrill of it: motiveless terror on a grand scale. The camera lingers on a design above the fireplace: “an image of a shattered world, with the title CHAOS”.
Just a couple of pages in and Burgess had delivered a Bond idea like none before, but the outline becomes more outrageous by the scene. CHAOS blackmails the Pope into whitewashing Michelangelo’s frescoes from the Sistine chapel, extorts several world leaders, forces Henry Kissinger to carry out what is implied to be a sexual act, and blows up a plane carrying the Archbishop of Canterbury moments after he has put on his earphones to watch the in-flight film – which is The Spy Who Loved Me.
The world has been thrown into panic, and only one man can stop the threat. James Bond himself wears a black tie, fires a bow and arrow in a fight scene in Singapore, and makes cool quips about food and wine under pressure. However, while some scenes seem tailor-made for Roger Moore, there’s a hint he might not have been in mind. In a scene in which M congratulates Bond for carrying out his 50th mission, he rejects a cigarette case fashioned by Q from the bullets of his enemies: “I smoke cigars now, gentlemen. You’re confus- ing me with my predecessor, who carried the same number. Still – I’m grateful.” This isn’t so far from the idea in No Time To Die in which a new agent takes on the 007 mantle from Bond.
Theodorescu, who was also a character in Burgess’s 1966 novel Tremor of Intent, is very much in the Bond villain stamp. Working out of a tanker in the Pacific Ocean, he has told his agents in a clinic in Bavaria to insert miniature nuclear devices into their patients during operations, with the idea this “living arsenal” can be remotely activated. Leading this work is Fleming, a thin, ascetic Scottish doctor. Having a character named after Bond’s creator as a prudish villain is a delicious touch.
To justify the title, Burgess has Elaine Theodorescu try to kill Bond by trapping him above a furnace in a Bavarian dungeon, only for him to escape and the two to fall in love. It turns out she was spurned in an affair with another British agent, Tony Graham, 005, and that psychosomatically disfigured her.
A rival love interest is opera singer Jean Northumberland, who helps Bond when he is ambushed by CHAOS agents in a hotel in Rome by using the power of her piercing high notes to shatter a light-bulb in the ceiling. However, she doesn’t know CHAOS has implanted a nuclear weapon inside her, and plan to use her to assassinate the Queen when she is presented to her at a performance of Salome at Sydney Opera House.
Bond operates on Jean’s stomach with acupuncture needles and a pocket knife, removing the nuclear bomb. But in a TV crew van watching the opera nearby, Dr Fleming reveals he has placed nuclear devices in Theodorescu, making him the back-up weapon to kill the Queen. Bond commandeers a motorbike from a bystander and chases Fleming and the others through the streets of Sydney. As he catches up with them, Theodorescu shoots his way through the doors of the van and his wheelchair transforms into a hovercraft. However, the bomb inside him is activated and he explodes over Sydney harbour.
Surviving the shootout, Fleming tracks down Bond and Elaine and reveals he plans to reform CHAOS under the name the New Association of Saints, The Inauguration of an Era of Sexlessness and Sinlessness. Bond points out that this all adds up to N.A.S.T.I.N.E.S.S. (although it seems to be missing a letter). “Man must be regenerated,” Fleming tells Bond. “Man has become an abomination, a foul stinking beast.” Bond responds by setting a boxing kangaroo on him.
The outline ends with the Bavarian clinic going up in a mushroom cloud thanks to Jean’s voice activating the correct
‘Burgess’s approach was not so much ultraviolence as ultraabsurdity’
frequency, and Elaine’s facial scar disappearing. Both women agree that they can’t restrain Bond’s life, so he flies off into the sunset. Burgess envisaged this as the first Bond film with an operatic title song, and gave a snippet of lyrics for it: “In he flew/off he has flown/ The spy who loved me/me me, alone”. A note in the text indicates he had written a musical treatment himself.
Unsurprisingly, the material was rejected by the Bond producers. Burgess wrote in You’ve Had Your Time that although he followed the formal pattern of the Bond films, “I knew from the start that it would not work, but a horrid fascination drove me on.” Most of his ideas were too lurid to have worked on screen (there’s a scene in which Bond performs acupuncture on Miss Moneypenny with accompanying double entendres and M tells him “this is no time for fornication”).
The film’s development involved novelist Ronald Hardy, The Twilight Zone’s Sterling Silliphant and eventual
The Blues Brothers director John Landis. However, the tone and plot of the finished product – from a screenplay credited to Christopher Wood and Richard Maibaum – weren’t a million miles from Burgess’s outline. The villain, Stromberg, also operates out of a tanker. Like Theodorescu, he wants to destroy civilisation with nuclear weapons because he feels humanity is beyond saving. A beautiful enemy agent seeks vengeance after the death of her secret agent lover and ends up falling in love with Bond.
Wheelchairs don’t transform into hovercrafts, but a car turns into a submarine. Several films in the series contained ideas nearly as outlandish as the ones in this outline, such as Bond visiting outer space, and a few seem to contain echoes of it: For Your Eyes Only opens with a sequence in which a wheelchair-bound Blofeld figure tries to crash Bond’s helicopter by remote control, only to be killed, while in Moonraker a gondola becomes a hovercraft.
Burgess’s outline is a strange slice of cinematic history but it’s also a compelling read, and within its confines becomes both tense and oddly poignant. At 44 pages it does feel like the plot of a full Bond film, with plenty of ideas to chew on amongst the wild satire. The notion of taking the world down for the thrill of it is a chilling one. The Bond producers could do worse than picking through this material for ideas for where to head next, be it in its characters, situations or the idea of a terror group causing destruction for kicks. Barbara Broccoli, if you’re reading, perhaps the future of Bond is, dare I say… CHAOTIC?