The story goes that sometime in the early ’60s, James Bond creator Ian Fleming wanted to adapt his famed spy character to the big screen, and he worked on a script with a producer named Kevin McClory and a scriptwriter named Jack Whittingham. The three of them came up with an excellent plot for a James Bond movie, but the project was abandoned because it was too expensive. Later, however, Fleming allegedly used the ideas he brainstormed with McClory and Whittingham to write his novel “Thunderball.” The other authors were not credited. McClory took Fleming to court and the case was settled in 1963.
In the mid-’70s, McClory started production on his own version of “Thunderball,” seeing as he had the legal rights to that one story. Connery and Len Deighton (author of “The Ipcress File”) came in to write a new James Bond story, and Hollywood was abuzz. Indeed, Paramount purchased the mysterious “Thunderball” redux in 1978. Sadly, it was not made.
Connery recalled his script, and it sounded amazing. The actor said:
“We had all sorts of exotic events. You know those airplanes that were disappearing over the Bermuda Triangle? We had SPECTRE doing that. There was this fantastic fleet of planes under the sea, a whole world of stuff had been brought down. They were going to attack the financial nerve center of the United States by going in through the sewers of New York — which you can do — right into Wall Street. They’d have mechanical sharks in the bay and take over the Statue of Liberty, which is quite easy, and have the main line of troops on Ellis Island. That sort of thing.”
Connery’s film was to be called “Warhead.”
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