Дональд Уэстлейк - Forever and a Death

There were elements from Don’s work to date we wanted to retain: the Carpathians (Transylvania), the handover of Hong Kong to China as central to the villain’s plot, and Bond partnering with a female Chinese agent. Don went to work and in October, a few weeks before GoldenEye hit the theaters, he delivered a new outline.

This treatment was substantially shorter — nine pages. Once again it had wonderful moments, but it now hewed so closely to traditional Bonds that it didn’t clothe the expected beats with enough fresh surprises.

As we pondered what to do, GoldenEye opened to immediate success. Barbara, Michael, Pierce, Martin, Bruce Feirstein and the rest of our cast and crew delivered a Bond film that reminded the world why Bond, since the 1960s, has been the most beloved action hero of the western world. The ripple effect expanded far beyond the box office. The entire library of Bond films gained new value. Nintendo launched a tie-in videogame that took the gaming world by storm. Almost overnight, GoldenEye created an entire Bond industry.

Within a month of GoldenEye ’s release, MGM/UA realized that producing the next Bond film as quickly as possible was the top priority.

As Don, Barbara, Michael and I had predicted, MGM/UA demanded that Bond 18 be released in 1997. The fate of the studio was riding on it.

So: what to do.

Don’s treatments had all the wonderful ideas he’d pitched in London, but neither was fully convincing as a Bond movie. I know Don would have found the right balance if he could have written the script and discovered the story’s details as he wrote, but GoldenEye ’s enormous success now imposed on us a full-speed-ahead production time-frame.

If you’re making a movie as complex as a Bond film and you’re rushing toward a release date, then an outline is a necessity. The schedule for Bond 18 necessitated that locations be scouted, stunts planned, actors cast long before a shooting script would ever be completed (as it turned out, the actual shooting script wasn’t completed until three weeks before production ended ). If Don continued, he’d have to change out most of what he’d created, going back to the drawing board yet again, while continuing to do the thing that wasn’t his natural writing method — creating an outline before he wrote the script.

This issue was compounded by a growing concern from the studio over centering the story around the transfer of Hong Kong to China. Nobody knew what would happen when Hong Kong changed hands and some people were predicting violent, bloody outcomes. What if we made the most expensive movie in the history of MGM/UA, the movie that the studio was relying on to keep it in business, and it took a lighthearted approach to something that emerged as the biggest global horror-show of 1997?

It was analogous to what would happen in 1999 with Y2K: there were just enough smart people who predicted disaster that even though disaster appeared unlikely, it was still wise to make sure you had a good emergency kit stashed away for the new year. While MGM/UA knew the odds were in favor of a peaceful handover, was it worth taking a risk on when some experts were predicting carnage?

China also turned out not to be a fan of GoldenEye . The Chinese blocked the film’s release due to the opening credit sequence, which the Chinese deemed anti-communist. China was an emerging film market and if things didn’t go well with the transfer of Hong Kong, MGM/UA didn’t want to be unable to release yet another Bond film there.

Heartbreakingly, all of this meant parting ways with Don. Don was disappointed, but not angry. He’d become attached to his idea of robbing Hong Kong’s banks and then destroying the city. Now that MGM/UA didn’t want Bond anywhere near Hong Kong during 1997, Don saw it as a practical matter — the conceit he’d fallen in love with collided with the studio’s anxieties.

Don, his wife Abby, and I remained friends. Whenever I went to New York the three of us would meet for dinner at the most interesting restaurant of the moment — along with a love of travel, the three of us shared a love of good food. And watching the two of them together was such a pleasure. They delighted in each other and that made them always delightful to be with. Abby’s sense of humor, and her curiosity about the world and about people, fully equaled Don’s. It would not surprise me if when he wrote, it wasn’t to please all of us, it was to please her.

Over the years I learned a vast amount from Don about writing and storytelling. I turned to him for advice while working on The Thomas Crown Affair . A few years later, when I received an urgent a call for help from John McTiernan who was in preproduction on a movie called Basic — John was having difficulty planting subtle but memorable clues in a way that would leave the audience feeling the film had played evenhandedly with them when a surprise twist occurred near the end — I asked Don if he’d help John out. Don agreed, so John and I spent a wonderful afternoon at Don’s house, where Don applied his theories of storytelling to John’s problem (my favorite: if you want the audience to feel a clue was laid in fairly, you need to show it to them in three different ways). All the while, Don and I continued to try and figure out a movie we could make together.

When Don died there was every reason to think I’d read my last Westlake novel. Don’s lifelong narrative push had come to a halt. This was a painful loss for all of Don’s readers and fans, but doubly so for me, because as massive a body of work as Don left behind, it was still missing one entry: the movie we were going to make.

I never imagined Don still had one more trick up his sleeve — that he’d taken the underlying McGuffin in his Bond 18 treatments and fashioned an original thriller around it. In retrospect it makes complete sense — when you’ve come up with something as interesting as using Hong Kong’s unique geography to destroy it, how can you let such a good scheme go to waste? But in all our conversations and meals since 1995, he’d kept it secret.

There’s a history of repurposing storylines in Hollywood which, as far as I know, begins appropriately with James Bond. Ian Fleming, Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham wrote Thunderball as a screenplay for an original Bond movie, but they failed to sell it. So Fleming turned the script into the novel Thunderball . After the novel’s success, it was then transformed back into a screenplay and made into the fourth James Bond film.

I had a brush with plot repurposing on the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair . One of the first writers we discussed the project with, and who then pitched us an approach, was Ron Bass. Ron’s a wonderful writer and his approach was intriguing, but it didn’t deliver what we were looking for so we passed. Ron, not wanting to abandon a clever idea, immediately reworked it into the movie Entrapment . In 1999, two Bonds, Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan, both starred in romantic cat-and-mouse heist movies inspired by the 1968 Thomas Crown Affair .

Charles Ardai told me about Westlake’s clandestine reworking of his Bond 18 premise a few months ago and I was giddy. The pleasure of reading several hundred more pages of Don’s writing, the wonder of seeing the idea I’d watched him come up with made into a fully wrought story... it was even better than making a movie together, it was knowing that an author I’d loved for forty years had written a book I’d played a part in inspiring.

Authors often imagine their readers, and readers imagine conversations with authors, but rarely do they result in a book.

John le Carré sent a one-line telegram to George Roy Hill after seeing a screening of The Little Drummer Girl . It said, “You’ve taken my ox and turned it into a bouillon cube.” Don, however, slyly reversed the process.