CommanderBond.net

Tomorrow's Troubles Today
A look back at reports of Bond 18's "troubled" production

Kinda puts Casino Royale in a whole new light. Nice write up

Wow, I never would of thought there were that many troubles.

Really nice work on this article and collecting the info for it Zencat. I really, really like Tomorrow Never Dies as a film and it's nice to finally have one big collection of information on it to put forth on the constant "troubles of TND" topics.

That it does, and I think it might be a good thing for us to reference back to this article over the coming year. Can you image what we would have said about TND if any of these stories were on CBn's main page? Fans would be screaming of the death of the series and of "boycott." But as it turned out, the movie came out as promised and was just fine and another rolled around on schedule.

The troubles TND had were probably not anymore than most big Hollywood movies have, but how the press presents it really shapes the perception. Some years and some films just get on the press's bad side and I have an instinct CR might be one of those films. The press has already been very negative, and if the new Bond does charm the press he will have big trouble. (I believe Dalton was doomed the second asked the press to "please allow my private life to remain private" at the TLD press conference.) As fans, I think we should be careful to not jump to conclusions when we read one of these types of articles about CR, because something tells me we will.

"They'll print anything these days."

Pierce Brosnan didn't have an "Eddie Munster" hair style! LOL!

That was great!
Anyway, excellent article. Makes me wish the CR problems were down to keeping the 2 year deadline!!!

A very sound observation there. Good point.

I quite liked the final product - not the best Bond film ever, though. My hunch is that there might have been some lack of direction with Cubby gone - Mickey and Babs were probably used to having someone to make the big decisions etc.

I'm one of those that thinks this is Brosnan's best outing. I'm also one who thinks that pressure can aide creativity and inspiration.

When you compare this film with TWINE, which was said to have had a very fluffy, friendly and cosy set, it is very apparent that fluffiness can lead to bloatedness.

I think Spottiswode did a cracking job, time constraints and all.

Yes, great stuff there, zencat. Qwerty, I, too, like TOMORROW NEVER DIES, but not nearly as much as you do. I find it a very "frustrating" film, since I feel it has some extremely interesting ideas, and that there's a really terrific Bond flick in there somewhere, trying to get out but thwarted at most turns by too much daftness in the script, too much dullness, the insufferable Jack Wade, etc. TND has a bit of a stodgy feel, and I guess I'm in the tiny minority of fans much preferring the second half to the first.

The film has its moments, but ultimately it's just too full of flaws to rank among the Eon greats - but I do think it "coulda been a contender" - chalk its failure up to that notoriously troubled production, I guess (even though zen points out, as intelligently as always, that it may not have been quite as troubled as it was made out to be).

Some of the TND legends still seem a bit fishy. Not sure if this is debunked in the main page article, but I find it hard to believe that we really owe the title to a typist's error.

A typist who, as far as I'm aware, has to this day failed to give an interview to the "fan community" to tell the story of how s/he came up with the title of a Bond blockbuster, or to sue the filmmakers (wouldn't coming up with the title of a Bond blockbuster, even inadvertently, be good for a tidy sum? If a studio used something you could claim as your own title for a major hit film, wouldn't you look into legal action? Not saying this typist would have had a watertight case, but surely lawsuits have been launched over much less?).

And if this was just a typist's mistake, why on earth didn't they rectify it? If someone at Lucasfilm had mistakenly rendered the title of the first STAR WARS prequel as STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM'S MENACE, would Lucas have gone along with it?

No, I suspect that it may have been a conscious decision by "marketing" to replace "lies" with "dies", on the grounds that, hey, we gotta sell it as an action movie, after all, and TOMORROW NEVER LIES might just as easily be taken for a Merchant Ivory thing.

Also this business of Vietnam supposedly bowing to Chinese requests in refusing the use of Vietnamese locations: now, I'm not an expert on this, but I didn't think relations between Vietnam and China were all that warm (granted, I believe they've improved in recent years, but, still, I'm not sure that they're particularly good). "The Chinese put pressure on the Vietnamese to kick them out," claims one source who believes Beijing got wind of the new Bond storyline. It deals with corrupt Chinese generals who do the bidding of a Rupert Murdoch-like media tycoon. Okay, there's General Chang (I think his name is), but he's onscreen for, like, a second.

I've always thought TND very flattering towards China - I've written about this at some length before on CBn, so I won't go over the same ground again here, but wasn't TND the first Bond film permitted a cinema release in the People's Republic? Don't have the facts to hand, but I believe it was.

Now this strikes me as a lot more likely than conspiracies between commie powers:

Bond spokesman Gordon Arnell insisted the Vietnamese had no problem with the 007 script, but hadn't bargained on the crew and equipment needed for the movie's pyrotechnics. "They just found us a bit too ambitious for what's still a rather sketchy infrastructure," said Arnell.

I've visited Vietnam, and found that even in central Saigon the roads seemed to be in a pretty darn poor state of repair (with totally chaotic traffic). Elsewhere, it seemed to be mostly dirt tracks. Heck, they could have just stood filming regular motorists in Saigon and then spliced the footage together with closeup shots of Brosnan and Yeoh riding the bike - you'd pretty much have had a manic James Bond demolition derby chase sequence. If you harbour serious Mad Max fantasies, go to Vietnam.

But I guess it may have been more face-saving for an official with the Vietnamese culture ministry to say that permission was denied for "many complicated reasons" than to fess up to a sub-par infrastructure.

You obviously didn't surf the bbs boards that existed at the time zencat. Many fans were worried that Tomorrow Never Dies would be a subpar Bond film. At that time the only real place to get bond and Tomorrow Never Dies news was on the bbs boards and Kimberly Last's 007 site.

Anyone else remember the revolving "Bond 18" logo on the official site?