Agent of Chaos
In 1975, Anthony Burgess wrote perhaps the strangest treatment for a James Bond film ever penned. Jeremy Duns uncovers the story
It’s now over two years since Daniel Craig took his final bow as James Bond in No Time to Die, and there’s still no sign of what the future holds for the film series. In November, 007 producer Barbara Broccoli revealed to The Guardian that she and her team hadn’t even begun to think about how to reinvent the franchise for the next chapter, noting that the films have always reflected the times they are in. And in times as confusing and anarchic as today, what could that look like?
Perhaps the answer lies in the past, specifically in one of the wildest pieces of Bond literature ever written. In early 1975, Anthony Burgess was in New York on a lecture tour when he was approached outside his hotel by producer Cubby Broccoli (Barbara’s father) and Guy Hamilton, who had directed four Bond films, the most recent being The Man with the Golden Gun. They handed Burgess ‘a wad of paper and a portable typewriter’ and asked him to write a ‘totally original script’ for the next film in the series, The Spy Who Loved Me. The emphasis on originality was because Ian Fleming had stipulated that only the title could be used from his novel of the same name, a low-key gangster story set in a motel in upstate New York that had received a critical drubbing on publication.
The author of A Clockwork Orange and The Malayan Trilogy might not have seemed an obvious choice for this task, but Burgess was a huge admirer of Fleming’s work, and in 1966 had written Tremor of Intent, a spy thriller with elements of Bond pastiche. The script he wrote for The Spy Who Loved Me has become a minor myth among Bond cognoscenti, as details about it are both scant and outlandish: a terrorist plot to blow up the Queen at Sydney Opera House, the Pope forced to whitewash the Sistine Chapel, miniature nuclear devices implanted in people. Burgess gave a potted synopsis of it in You’ve Had Your Time, the second volume of his memoirs, but the screenplay itself has never surfaced. In 1976, Burgess’ flat in Monaco was flooded, partially destroying his collection of 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 of the material he wrote for the film has survived, and has been sitting ignored for decades in the library of the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Texas. Undated and marked as ‘first draft’, this is a 44-page outline for the whole film, which contains everything Burgess claimed was in it – and a whole lot more besides.
‘Man must be regenerated,’ Fleming tells Bond. ‘Man has become an abomination, a foul stinking beast’
It’s a fascinating read. Burgess’ approach was not so much ultra-violence as ultra-absurdity, although there are also echoes of the frightening nihilism of A Clockwork Orange. Instead of SMERSH or SPECTRE, Burgess created a new villainous group, 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 announces that their dividends will unfortunately be lower this year due to inflation and recession, takes a sip from a glass of milk, and dies. His poisoner, Feratu, immediately takes over as the new head of CHAOS, saying he has removed the ‘smell of defeatism’ and that dividends will not be reduced. 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 very recent predecessors. As Elaine burns five million dollars in notes in the conference room’s fireplace, he explains that money is irrelevant and that under his leadership the group will return to its initial aims and finally bring to fruition the ‘Global Takeover’. 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 already delivered a Bond idea like no other before, but the outline becomes more outrageous by the scene. CHAOS blackmails the Pope into whitewashing Michelangelo’s frescoes from the Sistine chapel (a British ambassador’s daughter will be murdered if he doesn’t), extorts several world leaders, forces Henry Kissinger to carry out what is implied to be a sexual act, and blows up a plane with 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 is rather traditionally portrayed: he wears 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 also an indication that he might not have been in mind for this. In a scene in which M congratulates Bond for carrying out his 50th successful mission, he rejects a cigarette case made from the bullets of his enemies that Q has made: ‘I smoke cigars now, gentlemen. You’re confusing 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’ 1966 novel Tremor of Intent, is very much in the classic Bond villain stamp. Working out of a tanker in the Pacific Ocean, he has instructed his agents in a clinic in Bavaria to secretly insert miniature nuclear devices into their patients during operations, with the idea that this ‘living arsenal’ can then be remotely activated. They also find recruits among those contemplating suicide. Leading this work is Fleming, a thin, ascetic Scottish doctor. Having a character named after Bond’s creator as a prudish villain is a rather delicious touch.
To justify the film’s 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. They even plan to marry. It turns out she was spurned in an affair with another British agent, Tony Graham, 005, and that experience psychosomatically disfigured her.
A rival love interest is beautiful opera singer Jean Northumberland, who helps Bond when he is ambushed by CHAOS agents in a hotel room in Rome by using the power of her piercing high notes to shatter a light-bulb in the ceiling. However, she doesn’t know that CHAOS has already implanted a nuclear weapon inside her, and plans to use her to assassinate the Queen when she is presented to her at an upcoming performance of Salome at Sydney Opera House.
Bond swiftly operates on Jean’s stomach with acupuncture needles and a pocket knife, removing the miniature nuclear bomb. But in a TV crew van watching the opera nearby, Dr Fleming reveals that he has placed several of the nuclear devices inside Theodorescu during a routine gall-bladder operation, 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 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 being the first Bond film to feature an operatic title song, and even 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 also written a musical treatment himself (Burgess was a prolific composer).
Former British prime minister Harold Wilson, left, chats to Barbara Bach and Roger Moore on the set of The Spy Who Loved Me at Pinewood Studios, 5 December 1976. (Popperfoto via Getty Images)
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 as closely as he could, ‘I knew from the start that it would not work, but a horrid fascination drove me on’. Most of his ideas were too outrageous, subversive or plain rude 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 several writers, including 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 film – from a screenplay credited to Christopher Wood and Richard Maibaum – weren’t a million miles from Burgess’ outline. The villain, Stromberg, also operates out of a massive tanker. Like Theodorescu, he wants to destroy civilisation with nuclear weapons because he feels humanity is beyond saving, and start again with himself in charge. 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 later films in the series also 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. CHAOS’s implanting of miniaturised weapons inside people to blow up passenger jets anticipates both the use of suicide bombers by Al-Qaeda and No Time to Die’s programmable nanobot weapons.
Burgess’ outline is a strange slice of cinematic history but it’s also a compelling read, and even within its cursory confines becomes both tense and oddly poignant. Even at 44 pages it does feel like the plot of a full Bond film, with plenty of real ideas to chew on amongst the wild satire. The idea of taking the world down for the thrill of it is a chilling one, and could have created a genuine sense of terror if played straight. 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 central 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?
First published in The Daily Telegraph, 2 February 2024. All quotes from The Spy Who Loved Me draft outline by Anthony Burgess are courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas.
