The missing Bond scripts

The Telegraph tells the tale of the James Bond movies as we know it, but adds a new wrinkle, the existence of multiple surviving drafts of a Casino Royale script by Ben Hecht. This is catnip for Bond fans. 'To my amazement, I found that Hecht not only contributed to Casino Royale, but produced several complete drafts, and that much of the material survived. It was stored in folders with the rest of his papers in the Newberry Library in Chicago, where it had been sitting since 1979. And, outside of the people involved in trying to make the film, it seemed nobody had read it. Here was a lost chapter, not just in the world of the Bond films, but in cinema history: before the spoof, Ben Hecht adapted Ian Fleming’s first novel as a straight Bond adventure. The folders contain material from five screenplays, four of which are by Hecht.' More...