When Joseph Heller Wrote James Bond
If you listened to my recent interview with The 00 Files podcast, you might have wondered about the James Bond-related research project I was somewhat cagey about revealing. Well, wonder no longer.
Several books mention that one of the writers who worked on the 1967 version of Casino Royale was Catch-22 author Joseph Heller. It’s a rather obscure piece of information, and I’d always assumed his contribution was probably minimal. I did so for a few reasons: so many writers were said to have had a hand in it, he wasn’t credited on the film, and if someone of his stature and fame had done a lot surely we would know about it by now. But never assume! Heller, working with a friend, the novelist George Mandel, in fact wrote over 100 pages of material for the film, and it was a significant contribution.
How was this not known? As often happens, things get lost in the mix, and this film was especially messy and difficult to trace. It turns out all of Heller’s material has been sitting in the Charles K Feldman Collection of the Louis B Mayer Library, part of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. I knew of this collection because in 2011, when I was researching Ben Hecht’s work on this film, I contacted them to ask about correspondence between Hecht and Feldman. Unfortunately, the archivist at the time informed me that the Feldman collection was closed to the public, and would likely remain so until at least 2012. The inability to access the collection’s archive material had even warranted a furious academic article. 2012 came and went, but in 2017 a new archivist, Emily Wittenberg, finally prepared a finding aid for the collection, which by its url looks to have been placed online in August 2019.
I came across this a few weeks ago when I was researching an article about well-known writers who have written for Bond films. I was amazed to see it, and especially excited that, in Box 121, were four folders containing material by Joseph Heller. On contacting the library, Ms Wittenberg told me that nobody other than her had looked at any of this material since it was deposited there by Feldman’s family in 1969, and that even she hadn’t read it when compiling the catalogue. The collection opened to the public a couple of years ago, but is currently closed again due to Covid-19.
My article on Heller’s material is published in today’s issue of The Times. If you live in the UK and would like to read it, you can pick up a copy in newsagents and supermarkets. If you’re a subscriber, you can read it online (which is a slightly longer version than in print by a few sentences). If neither of those are options, you can try the subscription for a month for free.
I hope you enjoy the article, and it provides some interest and entertainment in these crazy times. I’ve tried to get as much I could into it, but there is plenty more to examine here. Hopefully, that work can be done someday soon.