GoldenEye

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Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a shot in the arm of a long-in-the-tooth franchise.

As always, I'm Chris Winterbauer, and I am joined by my fearless co-host, We're Weekly.

She's back from maternity leave, Lizzie Bassett.

Lizzie, how are you doing this fine evening?

I'm doing great.

My baby is shrieking in the background because she loves GoldenEye so much.

Yes, she does.

And tell them her name, Zenya Anatop.

Yes, absolutely.

Yep, that's what she went with.

It's on the birth certificate.

That's right.

Now, Lizzie, we're discussing GoldenEye, as you mentioned.

We did have a comment on Patreon today.

Someone said that they miss Lizzie being present to stick her thumb in the eye of the boys' films because we covered a couple of boys films while you were gone.

Predator, Johnny Darkness.

I don't know if they're going to get that with this because I got to tell you, Chris, I liked it.

Okay, there we go.

That's what I was getting at.

So we just need to go back.

A little more misogyny.

A little more sexism.

Yeah.

When it's Pierce Brosnan joking about workplace harassment, it works great.

It does.

It works.

It works very well.

All right.

We are talking about GoldenEye, the 17th official Bond film in the Bond series, which introduced the world to the very handsome Pierce Brosnan, as you mentioned, Lizzie.

Now, had you seen Goldeneye before?

And aside from your swooning, what were your thoughts upon re-watching it?

So, no, I had not.

Even though Pierce Brosnan, I knew, was the Bond of our childhood, I have actually never seen a Pierce Brosnan Bond film.

How is that possible?

I don't know.

I think because most of the movies I watched growing up were ones that my mom liked.

And I think she just doesn't care about the Bond franchise or didn't particularly care about this iteration of it.

So I never grew up watching it.

And I had no idea what to expect.

If I may, did you watch any Bond films growing up?

I had seen some of the like really old ones, like the Connery ones or the Roger Moore ones.

The Roger Moore ones.

Yeah.

And I'd certainly seen Austin Powers, but didn't get many of the jokes because I was missing, I think, a Bond experience.

And obviously, I have seen all the Daniel Craig ones and I really love those.

I think Casino Royale is excellent.

Yeah, I wasn't expecting this to be quite so goofy and fun.

It's great.

I loved it.

As soon as Sean Bean shows up, that's a bit of a spoiler because you know he's going to be evil immediately.

Yep.

Can't have a not evil Sean Bean, especially in the 90s.

Nope.

Can't have a not-terrorist Sean Bean.

There it is.

Yes.

I don't think.

Yeah.

Can't have a Sean Bean who was not betrayed by England and has then become a terrorist in the 90s.

That's true.

That's true.

He really had a type.

No, I really enjoyed this.

I love Alan Cumming.

I think he's fun in this.

I actually think the Bond girl in this is great.

She is extraordinarily useful, not just by Bond Girl standards, but I think by most movie character standards.

Xenia on a top, as you mentioned, is ridiculous and fun.

Famka Janssen turning in a really crazy scenery chewing heel turn that I really enjoyed, particularly her death scene.

But yeah, I liked this.

This is fun.

It is fun.

Now, guys, we did release a little primer on the origins of Bond and Ian Fleming, the novelist and creator of the character, as well as the film franchise that drops on Fridays.

That is available on our feed right next to this episode.

If you would like to know a little bit more about where the character came from and how he made it to the silver screen before listening to this episode, check it out.

It's about 20 minutes long.

It's fun, dense.

For our purposes, we're going to to stick with GoldenEye as much as possible.

I also, I grew up with this movie.

This was very much a Were You Eight or Was It Great sort of film for me.

And I remember I thought this was one of the best movies ever made as a kid, like nine or 10.

I really, no, I really thought, I mean, they go all the way to Russia.

It's got Sean Bean,

Zenya, as you mentioned, on the top.

That's crazy.

I just, I'd never seen anything like it.

It felt so cosmopolitan and international and sophisticated.

And then I remember I I did not re-watch it until I was probably 19 or 20.

And I thought, this is so ridiculous.

It's campy and terrible.

And now re-watching it, it's campy and fantastic and very fun.

And it's a really nice transition away from the cornier, more bonds or even the darker Dalton Bonds that we'll talk about.

There are a couple of notes I'd like to share.

As you mentioned, Bond being instructed by his boss not to have sex with the person he's investigating, who is a Russian asset, important workplace.

I love Bond being surprised by the Anatop name.

That's like a very Bond moment, being surprised by the forwardness of the names of the female characters in the series.

Feels more like an 80s movie than a 90s movie to me in some ways.

But then I think it hits its stride in the back half and becomes more 90s.

Yeah.

I wrote Zenya Murdergasm as an alternate name.

I have some questions about her murder skills.

Is she choking men with her thighs by squeezing them too hard?

And not their necks, by the way.

No, just squeezing their general middles too hard.

That's right.

Okay.

Yep.

Five stars for Fom Ki Jonsen's fighter pilot outfit.

Enjoyed that one.

Alan Cummings Boris is the Russian Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park.

His 1 million bucks hard currency.

I did the math.

If that's in rubles, it would be around $250 in Russia in 1995.

I miss the days when we all agree that, you know, the KGB and the Russian government was the bad guys.

I don't really know what's going on.

I also miss the days when they did not make them speak Russian.

Like as soon as they show up to the, you know, the evil Russian base, they're all just going like, it's unrealistic.

And I am making jokes.

My password is but

why would that be your password?

Knockers.

Yeah, it's it's great.

Why would you speak in English slang?

But sure.

Probably the weirdest mini driver role of all time.

Yes.

We'll get to that.

What the hell?

I don't have a lot of info, but she's very briefly in this movie.

She shows up for maybe 30 seconds in the background of a scene with Hagrid from Harry Potter.

Robbie Coltrane.

Yep, who is running some sort of escort service slash strip club, and she is singing an incredibly...

really beautifully out of tune stand by your man with a very thick russian accent she's very funny oh i loved it i wanted more of it love Love the CIA operative at the end, Jack Wade, suggesting.

That's great.

Maybe you'd like to finish having sex at the most heinous prison in the United States.

I wrote that down.

Just a romantic getaway to Guantanamo Bay is the very end of this.

It is.

And they're like, yes, I would.

Yeah.

And if you guys stick around, I will reveal who should direct the next Bond.

I have a very strong opinion that I, it's, and it's genuine.

Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, some kind of Hero, The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films by Matthew Field and A.J.

Chowdhury, Pierce Brosden, The Biography by York Membry, License to Thrill, A Cultural History of the James Bond Films by James Chapman, James Bond, The Legacy by John Cork and Bruce Sivali, The Making of GoldenEye by Garth Pierce, Goldeneye, The Secret Files, The Making of Documentary, along with James Bond Radio, the podcast for 007 fans, an interview with John Altman, and the autobiography of Cubby Broccoli, the man who brought James Bond 007 to the screen.

All right, so Lizzie Gold and I came out in 1995.

We were six or so at the time.

It was a moment of turmoil for both Bond and for the world.

So the iron curtain had fallen, and it seems like maybe it was a curtain call for Bond.

Was there any room for him in this new globalized world?

That was the big question.

And tasked with proving that indeed he was, would be a Nepo baby or two, a television actor, and a Kiwi director coming off a mid-budget flop.

But first, the details.

GoldenEye is a 1995 spy film, the 17th in the official James Bond series.

It was directed by Martin Campbell from a screenplay by Jeffrey Kane and Bruce Feierstein, with a story by Michael France, more on that later, based on the character created by novelist Ian Fleming.

It was produced by Barbara Broccoli, Michael G.

Wilson, and presented by Albert R.

Broccoli.

It stars Judy Dench as M, Sean Bean as 006, Desmond Llewellyn as Q, with Famke Janssen as Zenya Anatop, Alan Cumming as Boris Grishenko with the thickest slathered Russian accent of all time, Isabella Skorupko as natalia and of course pierce broznin

as the man with the license to kill james bond 007.

it was released in november of 1995 and the imdb logline reads when a powerful secret defense system is stolen james bond is assigned to stop a russian crime syndicate from using it can i also just say the weapon not that scary The EMP, GoldenEye.

The weapon that's just going to turn off all their lamps and landlines.

I don't think they do a great job of expressing the chaos that this will cause.

They don't, because at the end, Sean Bean's just like, get ready to plunge Great Britain into the stone age.

And I'm like, well, or I don't know.

1900.

It's not that bad.

I feel like they could reroute some extension cords from France across the channel and they'd be okay.

Yeah.

You know, they do get to more and more powerful satellites with Pierce Brosnan, but I think they had to start somewhere with this movie.

Okay, as I mentioned, if you haven't listened yet, check out our James Bond primer.

If you're already an expert, disregard.

Now, at the Malta summit in December of 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of Soviet Union and U.S.

President George H.W.

Bush, declared the end of the Cold War roughly a year earlier while on the set of License to Kill, the 16th Bond film, Timothy Dalton had told a reporter, quote, My feeling is this will be the last one.

I don't mean my last one.

I mean the end of the whole lot.

Wow.

I don't speak with any real authority, but it's sort of a feeling I have, which is just what you want your lead actor to say a year before the movie comes out.

But Dalton was on to something.

Between the character's Silver Screen debut in 1962 with Dr.

No, and that was obviously Sean Connery debuting as James Bond, and 1989, a Bond film had been released every one to three years.

In fact, there'd even been a year that featured two James Bond films, 1983, with Octopussy, starring Roger Moore, the official film, believe it or not, that's not the parody one, and Never Say Never Again, featuring a returning Sean Connery, which was the unofficial James Bond film of that year.

Bond had been played by four actors, Sean Connery, Australian George Lazenby, Roger Moore, and Timothy Dalton, and the series was perhaps starting to struggle to keep up with the competition.

So, Lizzie, can you think of any other action films released in the late 1980s, early 1990s?

We've covered a few.

Die Hard, any of the Tom Clancy

films with Harrison Ford?

Yep, Die Hard, Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, Predator, the Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall, right?

You've got a kind of new era of action filmmaking.

License to Kill was released opposite these other blockbusters in the summer of 1989.

And it was, for my money, the most human Bond had ever seen.

I actually re-watched it for the podcast.

Dalton is like a much more grounded, darker Bond compared to the

charismatic.

He's maybe the...

most classically trained, I believe, of all of the actors that portrayed Bond up until and through Brosnan.

He was a Shakespearean actor.

And he really pushed for like a darker, grittier Bond that was closer to the earlier books and the portrayal of Bond as this darker, more haunted man who was a little more killer, a little less wisecracker.

Which we get to again with Daniel Craig.

Absolutely.

Now, License to Kill, although it's beloved by many fans, was deemed a failure.

It's not completely accurate, at least not financially.

It did gross $156 million against its $32 million budget.

So this was a very profitable movie.

Yeah.

But that was an 18% dip from Dalton's first Bond film, The Living Daylights, from two years prior.

And the box office dip in the United States was 32%.

And this was more concerning because Bond had always thrived in the American market.

And I think the producers were looking at the American market as this is the canary in the coal mine for the Bond franchise.

That's interesting because one thing I definitely felt while watching this Bond is that it felt very geared towards Americans.

I think it does intentionally.

If you listen to our primer, too, you'll hear how Fleming really tried to introduce Bond into the United States.

And it wasn't until JFK of all people, President John F.

Kennedy, listed Fleming's novels as some of his favorites, because of course they were, because he wanted to be James Bond, that it really took off in the United States.

And that's what really allowed for the movies to eventually become so successful.

So.

On the one hand, you've got Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, like you mentioned, Lizzie, Jack Ryan, films that featured more everyman heroes than James Bond.

These are corn-fed Americans.

They're small-town cops.

They just want to get home to their families.

They're not really the suave martini-drinking Lithario type that is James Bond.

And then you have stuff like, you know, Point Break, which I think was outdoing Bond with its stunts to a certain extent.

at this point in time too.

And things like Predator, the Abyss, Terminator 2, which were using special effects to a level and degree that Bond couldn't keep up with because Bond didn't have the budgets that some of these bigger movies did.

I think in addition to the action franchises, you also have the sort of like

somewhat more grounded, but also ridiculous, like sexy thrillers of the late 80s and early 90s that are really starting to change what people are consuming.

Even Fatal Attraction, I think, feeds into this a little bit.

You had Jagged Edge, you had Basic Instinct.

Yeah, Basic Instinct for sure.

There was the erotic thriller run of the late 80s, early 90s.

Absolutely.

Yeah, it doesn't quite match up with, I think, what you were getting prior to this.

It doesn't really match up with this either.

Well, I think this kind of touches on my theory on Bond films and how I felt growing up, which was Bond films to me always felt like because they tried to do so many things, romance, action.

Aviation, submarines, diving, space, they never do any individual or never did any individual subgenre as well as the entries that did just that subgenre.

Yes.

And so they always felt like this jack of all trades, master of none franchise that it's like, yeah, you're going to get all these different things, but none of them are going to be as good as Star Wars or Basic Instinct or Die Hard in any individual category.

So Eon, Everything or Nothing, the production company created by the late Harry Saltzman and Albert R.

Broccoli, the producers behind most, I mean, Albert, yes, all and Saltzman, most of the Bond films to date, are going to produce a new Bond film and they think we need to adapt.

To be clear, Saltzman was no longer a part of Eon at this point.

He had lost his stake in Eon in the 1970s, so I am referring to Albert Broccoli, his stepson, Michael G.

Wilson, and his daughter, Barbara Broccoli.

Now, according to one 1995 Entertainment Weekly profile on the franchise, which take this with a grain of salt, they were considering a lot of options.

Quote, they toyed with the idea of making 007 a woman, of making him black, of making a period piece set in the 60s, and they allegedly even considered Sean Connery's idea of pursuing Quintin Tarantino to direct.

Who knows, maybe.

One person they knew they weren't going to have direct, John Glenn, who had directed the last five Bond films, every Bond film released in the 80s.

For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View to Kill, The Living Daylights, and License to Kill.

John Glenn, like a lot of people that worked on James Bond, had come up on James Bond.

He'd been an editor on Her Majesty's Secret Service and The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker.

So he was steeped in James Bond, and he was out.

Also out, writer Richard Maybaum.

He had penned 13 of the 16 official Bond films to date, starting with Dr.

No, ending with License to Kill.

He was also 80 plus years old at this point in time.

So I think they felt felt it was time to move on.

And I think they felt that they needed to find younger voices to connect to a new generation that may not have the same relationship with James Bond as the generations prior.

So connecting with Gen X and millennials.

So sometime in 89 or 90, Ion hires television writer Alphonse M.

Ruggiero Jr., an American writer and producer with credits tangentially related to Bond, Wise Guy, Private Eye, and a couple episodes of Miami Vice.

Okay.

So he comes on to rewrite a script that Michael G.

Wilson, who's Albert Broccoli's stepson, he's a lawyer.

He had come in and helped Broccoli with some legal tangles in the 70s, and then he had eventually just started helping My Bomb write.

So he kind of joined the family business.

He comes on to rewrite a script that Wilson's written himself.

The resulting treatment is called Bond 17, and it features the most sophisticated animatronic robots ever used on film.

And there were rumors that Disney's Imagineering would work on the robots, which I just love a Disney Bond collaboration.

What a treat.

It's coming.

You know it is.

Well,

the Bond Marvel universe crossover will make us all vomit.

I wonder if they were inspired by things like the Terminator, Robocop.

There was a lot of good animatronics work at the time.

So Ion then brings in a pair of Brits, William Osborne and William Davies, who I'm going to call the Billies, fresh off of Ivan Reitman's surprise smash hit Twins,

which made a boatload of money starring Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger in which they play twins.

Twins.

Yeah, can't go wrong.

We're going to get to another Reitman-Schwarzenegger collaboration in a moment.

They had a weird run.

So their job, turned the Bond 17 treatment into a screenplay.

As Osborne tells it, they were instructed to bring it into the real world as it existed in 1991.

And that real world meant the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, and the idea that Bond was doubting himself for the first time.

Now, from the way they describe it, it seems like maybe they were going a little bit more for something like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, kind of a winking, I'm getting too old for this shit sort of vibe, which would make sense.

Sure.

They met with Dalton, though, who was still the Bond of record, and Dalton wanted, quote, a bit more weight to it.

And Dalton's Bond had always been viewed as more brooding than previous installments.

So, Osborne and Davies can't crack it.

Michael Wilson's never satisfied with their attempts to work Bond into the post-Cold War landscape.

They do a year's work, two or three drafts, they're off the project.

According to Dalton, the movie actually pushed into pre-production.

As he put it in an interview with The Week in 2016, we had the script, they were interviewing directors, we were really rolling forward, ready to start.

It was actually quite a good story, I thought.

Enter the ultimate Bond villain, legal problems.

The rights ownership structure for Bond is very complicated.

We go into it in the primer.

Basically, in October of 1990, Dan Jack, the parent company of Eon, sued MGM United Artists, its distributor, for Bond,

because of a really weird corporate hostile takeover attempt that had just happened.

So I'm going to paraphrase from James Chapman's License to Thrill.

Giancarlo Paretti, an Italian media tycoon, acquired the Canon Group and renamed it Pathé Communications because his plan was to take over the French studio Pathé.

He then borrowed $1.2 billion from a French bank to buy MGM from owner Kirk Kerkorian and merged the two into MGM Pathé Communications.

He then defaulted on the bank loan and tried to sell MGM UA's back catalog, including the Bond films, to Time Warner.

Broccoli felt the sale undervalued the Bond films, so he sued.

The French bank took over control of MGM, and Alan Ladd Jr.

became the new CEO.

So prep on Bond 17 comes to a halt.

Two years pass, and Eon has now gone longer without releasing a Bond film than they ever have before.

So the suit was settled out of court in December of 1992.

Mid-May 93, Variety reports, MGM confirms Bond 17 is back on track, and they got a new writer.

A writer we just talked about in Hulk.

Yep.

Michael France.

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Michael France had just written, or at least was credited for the story, for Cliffhanger, another amazingly fun over-the-top movie.

Producers were in discussions with Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones, who'd just done Memphis Belle, an underrated World War II fillic.

It's got Billy Zane.

Okay.

You'd like it?

Sure.

Yeah.

And not Sean Bean, Sean Aston.

Love him.

Rudy.

Little Sean Aston Martin.

And a budget of at least $40 million was set, which...

In 90s money, that's a lot.

Well, it was a lot for a Bond film.

It really wasn't when you think about something like Terminator 2, which was, you know, close to 100.

Or Titanic, yeah.

Well, anything James Cameron's doing.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, the 007 part was not officially confirmed, but Anthony Hopkins was allegedly interested in a villain role, which would have been very fun.

For a second, I thought you were going to say Anthony Hopkins.

And I was like, that's a very different direction, but it is.

Okay.

That's right.

Now, MGM's newly appointed Alan Ladd Jr.

said, if the script in 12 weeks is good, we'll go with it.

Sorry, how has Anthony Hopkins not been a Bond villain yet?

I don't know.

That feels like a major mistake.

Has Jeremy Irons?

No.

I don't think he has either.

He was the diehard villain, obviously, in Die Hard 3.

Wow.

There are many that we are missing.

Yeah.

Michael France traveled to Moscow and St.

Petersburg.

He interviewed KGB soldiers.

He photographed its headquarters.

He was an enormous James Bond fan.

He even had his own fanzine, Mr.

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, which sounds like a different kind of magazine, but you know, each their own.

Now,

two weeks after that May of 93 announcement, a Danjack spokesman told Variety that they had also hired writers Richard Smith and John Cork to write for, quote, future bonds down the line, assuming Bond 17 is a success.

So it seems like they're trying to put together a Bible of sorts of what's the new bond going to look like.

And at the very end of this article, the spokesman dodges the question of who's going to play Bond by quickly saying, Dalton is the Bond of record.

Like France, Cork was a massive fan of Bond.

He had served as the editor of the Ian Fleming Foundation Bond theme magazine, which was called Goldeneye.

Oh.

And Goldeneye was the name of the vacation home in Jamaica where Ian Fleming wrote the first and many of the Bond novels, and which was named after a mission that he had participated in while he was part of the NID, the British Naval Intelligence Division.

Oh, okay.

That's where that comes from.

Now, Cork went on to pitch 20 or 30 alternate Bond story ideas, researching characters.

None of them, quote, went anywhere, according to him.

But basically, he had this Bible at the end, and it seems like they handed it to every writer that came involved in the project and at least gave them a sense of what not to do because they never used any of these ideas.

So this Bible, James Bond in the 90s, begged the question, was there room for James Bond in the 90s?

Now, in August of 1993, John Calley took over as president of United Artists.

So there's a lot of churn around this property.

Still is.

Yeah.

But yeah.

Well, let's talk about that actually.

So like regime change tends to spell doom for any project that's in development, right?

Yes.

Incoming regime does not want the stink of any of the outgoing regime's development slate.

So they wipe it clean and they say, we have all the great ideas.

They bring them in.

And if they fail, they blame the last people that were in there anyway.

Sure.

But the word around town was actually the opposite.

People assumed that Callie would fast track Bond 17 because Bond always made money.

So even when it was declining with Dalton in the late 80s, as we saw, it made four or five times its budget at the box office.

They were relatively affordable films to make, and they had a huge name recognition internationally.

But new market research revealed that might not be the case anymore.

As United Artists Production VP Jeff Kleeman recalled, most teenage boys did not know who James Bond was.

Or if they did, they knew him as that guy my father likes.

The thing that every marketer wants to hear.

The new approach, take a hit at the box office, but recoup the budget on home video, packaged up with other Bond movies, like GoldenEye, plus The Living Daylights, plus License to Kill, but you know, sell the 25th anniversary package and roll them all up.

And to do that, they'd need to keep the budget as low as possible, which is one big reason why they went with New Zealand director Martin Campbell.

Now, Martin Campbell has gone on to direct some incredible movies, including Casino Royale.

Oh, I did not realize that.

Yeah.

And The Legend of Zorro and The Mask of Zorro.

Amazing.

Mask of Zorro, one of my favorite.

Mask of Zorro is fantastic.

And also, Catherine Zeta Jones and The Mask of Zorro is the best anyone has ever looked on film.

Period.

I will die on that hill.

Now, he had a good deal of success in television.

He had won a British Academy Television Award for directing Edge of Darkness, a BBC television production about a widowed policeman investigating the murder of his daughter.

So, darker, but tangentially genre-related.

And there were a lot of Bondian elements to that story: shadowy government entities, nuclear espionage, threats to life on Earth, London going back to the Stone Age.

Right around this time, Campbell's biggest film yet, No Escape, produced by Gail Ann Hurd, Lizzie, one of our favorites, and Ray Liotta flopped.

It was made for about 20 million, and I think it made about 20 million at the box office.

But that didn't deter United Artists.

As Kleeman said, we knew he had never had a breakout successful movie, but we believed he was a genuinely talented director who knew how to work within a budget.

who we knew was capable of putting all that money on the screen.

And man, if someone said that about me, I would be freaking thrilled.

Yeah, how does that never happen?

You have one movie because it's sorry, that was his first feature.

Is that right?

No, he actually started directing, I believe, British sex comedies back in the 70s and then transitioned into criminal law, I believe it's called, with Kevin Bacon and Gary Oldman.

And then in 91,

Defenseless with Barbara Hershey and Sam Shepard.

And both of these films were, I think, you know, modestly commercially successful.

They were very low budget, relatively speaking.

So this was obviously a massive opportunity for Campbell, but he wasn't sure it was one that he wanted.

Quote, I thought, I can't do the Kiwi accent.

Oh, you have to now.

It's so bad.

I can't wait.

I thought long and hard about it.

I felt Bond was getting very tired.

I thought that the franchise had slightly passed its sell-by date and that the 17th film would need a shot in the arm.

I questioned whether Bond was part of the 90s or or an anachronism.

It was a question of deciding whether or not he was relevant, whether he could still be as entertaining and successful as he has been in the past.

So sorry to everyone in New Zealand for that.

Well, the thing that listeners can't see was how your face changed and just see.

And I looked like I was from New Zealand as I was speaking.

Well, you looked like you maybe had, I don't know, lockjaw or something that was happening very tense.

Or the accent comes

people don't know that.

Now, the siren song of 007 was too hard to resist.

Campbell was in.

And screenwriter Michael France was out.

As he would learn, would become the rhythm of being a screenwriter in Hollywood.

He reportedly turned in his first draft of GoldenEye in early 1994.

And then English writer Jeffrey Kane, who would go on to write The Constant Gardner, was brought in to reportedly do a page one rewrite of France's past to bring more structure to the story.

By the summer of 94, the release date pushed from the summer of 95 to November of 95 to allow time for more rewrites because the more writers you see in the credits, the better the movie's going to be.

I might just be loopy, but I feel like you're approaching real jazz

some of these more rewrites.

More rewrites.

Now, two sources also claimed that it was the release of True Lies.

Aha, that makes sense.

That made the producers realize they needed a sharper script and better effects sequences to compete at the box office.

Also funny.

It's very funny.

True Lies is a fantastic action film, if you guys haven't seen it.

It's also a little bit of the anti-James Bond because at the end of the day, it's like James Bond wife guy, right?

Yeah.

It's a marriage story more than anything else.

James Bond wife guy.

A franchise that would continue for years.

Yes.

It is Jamie Lee Curtis, allow me to sexually awaken all millennial boys in one strip tease in True Lies.

It's an incredible film.

Now, next up on the script, American playwright and screenwriter Kevin Wade.

Lizzie, we said Ivan Reitman and Schwarzenegger would come back, and they did.

Kevin Wade had just written Junior.

Great.

The male pregnancy movie from 1994.

I just love that Schwarzenegger does twins and junior back-to-back with Reitman.

He also does kindergarten cops somewhere very close to that, which is also a fantastic movie.

I think it was like two years prior.

It's a great movie, but like, come on, do you see The Rock making bold decisions like those?

I don't.

Good for you, Arnold.

Going for it.

Wade says he worked closely with Martin Campbell, who was actively storyboarding the movie at this point.

Wade got his shot.

Then he was out.

They brought in American writer, Bruce Feystein.

He was, up until this point, an unproduced screenwriter, best known for his satirical book, Real Men Don't Eat Quiche.

It's very funny.

I read a few excerpts, and my sister pulled one for me to read.

It references Bond on its first page.

I'll read you the quote.

Real men don't play blackjack, craps, or slot machines.

They play Baccarat.

Real men, you see, idolize James Bond.

Their ultimate fantasy is to be sitting in Monte Carlo with Ursula Andres and a million dollars in chips.

They long to stare Goldfinger in the eye and say, Bonko, or pass me the shoe, despite having no idea what these phrases mean.

The important thing is that they understand no James Bond movie would be complete without them.

And I looked up the rules to this game.

and learned that Baccarat is so stupid and it's basically a counting game and it's like go fish or war.

It is not.

Yeah, but it's cool, though.

I thought it was going to be so sophisticated and math-based.

Not really.

You guys can tell me if I'm getting it wrong, but it really seems cool.

Oh, good.

Maybe I could play it.

It really seems less cool when I looked into it.

It's unclear whether or not he's the one that added that Monte Carlo scene with Bond and Anatop, but I like to think that he was the one behind it.

And he would implement a few important changes, the largest of which was actually Campbell's idea.

M, Bond's boss, would be for the first time in franchise history played by a woman.

And she comes in with a bang.

She's great.

It should also be noted that Stella Remington was the head of MI5 at the time.

And heading up Bond from a producerial perspective was Miss Barbara Broccoli, who

had been working on Bond as long as anyone involved in the production outside her father.

And because of her father's health issues, was going to, along with her stepbrother Michael G.

Wilson, take over the reins on Bond as he entered the end of the 20th century.

Now, Barbara Dana Broccoli, Babs, as Lizzie and I call her, we're close friends, was born into an unusual family business, one that led her to believe that James Bond was a real person until she was six or seven.

She got her start as an intern at the Hollywood Reporter.

Her first Bond assignment was capturing stills for the publicity department of the spy who loved me at the age of 17.

Now, we mentioned her half-brother, Michael G.

Wilson.

He was 18 years her senior.

He was a lawyer.

And by the mid to late 70s, he was already helping his father, stepfather Albert on legal matters.

And as I mentioned, Bond was involved in a whole bunch of legal matters.

And in the 70s, the big one was Harry Saltzman, Broccoli's partner, attempting to take over Technicolor, as a result, losing his stake in Eon, the Bond production company.

You can listen to that in our primer.

Soon enough, Michael G.

Wilson was pulled into writing with Richard Meibaum, and as discussed, he penned the original draft of Bond 17.

Now, Barbara, in the the meantime, went to LMU.

She took an assistant job on Octopussy, a third assistant director job on A View to a Kill, then moved up to associate producer on The Living Daylights, and she even oversaw the climactic tanker truck sequence in 1989's License to Kill.

When Albert Broccoli decided to hand over control of Eon in 1995, it would be easy to assume that it would have been Michael, who was the older and technically more experienced of the two, to run the show.

But as the last 30 years have shown us, this was always Barbara's ship to run.

As Michael told the New York Times in 2015, Barbara scares the hell out of people.

I mean it.

They all know I'm a big pushover, so they don't care about me.

And Barbara came in with some strong opinions about Bond.

Bruce Feierstein, screenwriter, has said that the, quote, sexist, misogynist dinosaur line that M uses to describe Bond was pulled from Barbara Broccoli, who used to comment that Bond was, quote, sexist and a dinosaur.

And now it was up to Broccoli, a self-described feminist inheriting a franchise with female characters named Holly Goodhead, Molly Warmflash, Plenty O'Toole, and of course, my favorite, Pussy Galore, to figure out how to bring this dinosaur into a post-Cold War world.

Some of them, they're not even clever.

Like, Pussy Galore isn't even a play on words.

No, it's just words, and it's great.

It's just words.

What's your name, Pussy?

It's so ridiculous.

What's your name?

It'd be like, I'm lots of dicks.

I'm bag of penises.

I'm lots of lots of dicks.

All right.

Barbara's first task: figuring out who was going to play James Bond.

Now, in April of 1994, it was officially announced that Timothy Dalton was out.

Timothy Dalton was out.

Had he quit?

Had he been fired?

Turns out it was kind of both, and it was kind of twice.

In a 2015 interview, Dalton explained that when Prep shut down on Bond 17 due to the MGM suit, his contractual obligation to the franchise either lapsed or was terminated.

It's a little vague.

Broccoli asked if he intended to continue with the character after the lawsuit.

And again, Dalton's words, it seems like he kind of bowed out at this point in time.

But a couple years later, suit settled.

Dalton has a change of heart.

He says, I played the character twice.

It would be really nice to finish it off with a really great third film and I can kind of round it out.

But Broccoli said, according again to Dalton, look, Tim, you can't do one.

There's no way after a five-year gap between movies that you can come back and just do one.

You'd have to plan on four or five.

Oh God, tired.

And I thought, oh no, that would be the rest of my life.

Too much, too long.

So I respectfully declined.

However, Kleeman and Alan Laude Jr.

over at United Artists have stated that they fired Dalton and he was effectively given the opportunity to frame this as retirement.

So as Kleeman put it, quote, the Dalton Bonds had not performed significantly at the box office.

We were trying to grapple with the fact that the Dalton movies were not the most beloved of Bond films.

We were trying to introduce Bond to a new audience.

It seemed counterintuitive to what we were trying to accomplish to continue with Timothy at that point.

So basically, the Broccolis stood by Dalton pushing for him, but MGM UA had the final say.

And on April 12th, 1994, Dalton issued a statement saying, even though he's had all this support, he's made the decision not to return to the franchise.

I would go with the Kleeman, you know, lad explanation personally.

It makes more sense to me that they would say, we need someone new.

So the hunts afoot.

Casting director Debbie McWilliams said they specifically considered, quote, 10 actors, all British.

I was not able to find all 10, but there are a few we can confirm.

Rafe finds.

Oh, yeah.

That makes sense.

Yeah, Campbell confirms, and I believe Rafe did as well, that they met at Broccoli's house.

It seems like it was very informal and did not go very far.

Liam Neeson.

Interesting.

He has a particular set of skills.

He does.

He's like a little too large for a Bond.

I don't know if that he'd be a gigantic Bond.

That's cool.

Or a great Bond villain.

He's a better Bond villain.

What I mean by that is Bond, I feel like, has always appeared very sort of lithe.

I mean, Daniel Craig is big, but Liam Neeson is like huge.

Yeah.

And Connery was, Connery was a big guy.

That's true.

But I agree.

An Irish Bond, please, Chris.

I mean, Brosnan's Irish.

He is?

Yeah.

Oh, God.

Okay, great.

Let him in there.

Where's Liam Neeson?

Bring him in.

I'm going to get murdered for this.

Well, Neeson has said he was never offered the role.

Now, there are a lot of articles online that will say Neeson turned down the role.

Neeson turned down the role.

There's no way Liam Neeson turned down James Bond.

Here's his quote.

I was not offered James Bond.

I knew the Broccolis.

I knew the Broccolis.

Long story short, they looked at a lot of actors.

They said, would you be interested?

His wife said, don't do this.

If you play James Bond, we're not going to get married.

And he said that he would tease her by going behind her back and singing the theme song,

and then like shooting her in the back.

And then he never played Bond.

Presumably he got married.

Other sources claim Mel Gibson was courted, but actually not for GoldenEye.

It was for The Living Daylights 10 years prior, the first Dalton film.

That makes more sense.

Gibson says he got a call from Albert Broccoli.

We want you to be James Bond, but he thought, I'm 26.

I don't want to be this character for the rest of my life.

I'm Australian.

Yeah.

Am I?

He's Austro-American.

Broccoli in his autobiography said the only reason Gibson was approached was because there was a UA CEO and chairman, Jerry Weintraub, who basically said, you have to go to Mel Gibson, and he never wanted to anyway.

All right.

I bring up the Living Daylights, and that's because there's another actor who nearly nabbed the part the first time around, and that's Irishman, Lizzie, and television star Pierce Brosnan.

And I would like to play a clip of him telling the story of his involvement in the living daylights or almost involvement.

And I'll let you listen.

I was supposed to do Bond in 1986.

Right, and this is the network that screwed you about this.

This is the peacock.

Yeah,

the peacock peed on me.

Really?

Well, double star, you were.

But it's okay.

I dried off since then.

No, no, no.

Now, you were doing Remington Steel, but it was canceled, right?

I was doing Remington.

Thank you.

It was a great show.

It was in its fourth season, and they put a line to it.

They cancelled it.

I got offered James Bond.

I said yes to the part.

But in the contract, there was a 60-day close in which NBC or MTM, who owned the show, they had 60 days in which to resell it back.

And in those 60 days, I went ahead with all the negotiations, the wardrobe fittings, my stunt double had started, the pre-title sequence in Gibraltar, et cetera, et cetera.

Kirby and I had done all the photographs, you know, dun-dun-dun-dun-da-dun.

And then, you know, the negotiations went on over those 60 days, and it was getting down to the wire.

Kirby said, look, you can have them for six episodes, but no more than six.

And they said, well, think about it.

On the 60th day, they came back and they said, we'd like the option of 22.

Kobe said, no way.

And that was it.

And then you were out.

Wow.

That sucks.

Yeah.

So he was prevented from doing bond because of his contractual obligation to Remington Steele.

And effectively, the conflict that they thought they were going to have never actually happened.

And Brosnan was not Bond, and he was burned.

Now, at some point, the dust had settled, and he even went so far as to say, I would never play Bond now.

Not even if Dalton quit, Broccoli got down on bended knee.

I've dipped my toes in that water once and could never go through it all again.

Can I ask a question?

Please.

How big was Remington Steel?

So I pulled some Nielsen data on Remington Steel because I was curious about this too.

It looks like across its run, it was kind of a fringely popular show.

It was successful enough that NBC wanted to keep it on the air, but it was never a big hit.

So it was a little bit outside the top 30, according to Nielsen ratings.

With the exception of 1984-85, that year it was a top 25 television show.

And it's interesting because the storyline is not dissimilar from something like Moonlighting, which was the more successful show.

And both Pierce Brosnan and Bruce Willis would go on to become huge action stars off of these private eye-based television series.

And even though Broznin said he would never go near the Bond character again, he quickly did in a series of Diet Coke commercials that he starred in from 1987 to 1988 after Remington Steel was canceled.

Let's take a look at one because they're just a lot of fun.

Can't wait.

That's why Diet Coke is so depressing.

Great taste.

It's just one calorie.

It's a perfect sausage

for an imperfect world.

One calorie.

Just want the taste of this Diet Coke.

Wait, that song.

Wait a minute.

When did Diet Coke go from its entire jingle hinging on it having one calorie?

They changed that.

That's sad.

Bring it back.

What was in that one calorie?

I love how British it is, and then it just goes with this great American quartet at the end about one calorie.

One calorie.

He's obviously playing James Bond.

And there were actually rumors that he had been offered a million pounds to play Bond in another unofficial Bond film produced by rogue Bond producer Kevin McClory, the Irish producer who'd been dogging Fleming and Broccoli for decades and who'd been responsible for the 1983 Sean Connery Never Say Never Again, the one unofficial bond we discussed earlier.

It was going to have a budget of 10 million pounds, which was nothing.

And it was going to be called Warhead 8 based on a a script that McClory had apparently written with Fleming back in the day.

But whether or not the meeting happened, nothing came of this.

So between the botched Living Daylights negotiations and GoldenEye, Brosnan would go on to star in director John McTiernan's debut, Nomads, playing a French anthropologist.

Lizzie, I know I'm just doing a bunch of clips in a row, but I just gotta give you this experience of Pierce Brosnan's accent playing.

Is it really good?

It is

really Italian.

Oh, great.

Here we go.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Nothing so dramatic.

My work is cultural.

Yes, that is a clip from Nomads, which you guys can watch for free on YouTube.

It is a fantastic film from 1986.

You don't need to do that to him.

He's one of the most handsome men in the world.

He is.

And as soon as he starts talking on the corner,

it is cultural.

That's cultural appropriation right there.

Now, it's flagrant racism.

I would argue that despite some memorable roles like in Mrs.

Doubtfire, he spent the decade or so ahead of GoldenEye treading water professionally, and he had some tragedy in his personal life.

He lost his first wife to ovarian cancer in this period of time.

So when the role came in in June of 1994, Brosnan stated, quote, I didn't think twice.

It was unfinished business.

But it seems like he did kind of think twice, as did Eon and MGM.

And this may not have been the most exciting union at first.

So despite having had his name on a shortlist for basically a decade, his hiring was considered a very highly calculated risk.

So before the official offer went out, there was research to confirm that he was popular with female audiences.

I'm guessing it checked out.

Certainly is.

There were a series of meetings with Barbara, Albert, and Wilson, as well as at least one meeting with John Callie, the head of United Artists.

But Brosnan offered a key advantage.

United Artists didn't want to spend the $100 million that something like True Lies had cost.

And Brosnan was...

Lizzie, any guesses?

Affordable?

Very.

He was paid a reported $1.2 million for this movie, which is four less than Bruce Willis on Die Hard.

And he was a TV actor going into an action film.

And that was seven years earlier.

And that budget was like half of James Bond.

So,

yeah, I mean, Brosnan made up for it in the following films.

Good.

For his part, he had told his agent he didn't want to be dicked around again, and he wasn't.

On June 8th, 1994, Pierce Brosnan arrived at the Regent Hotel in London.

He was making a one-day stop on his way from Los Angeles to Papua New Guinea.

He was on his way to shoot Robinson Crusoe, a film that he'd committed to before James Bond.

He was nervous.

Also nervous?

34-year-old producer Barbara Broccoli.

Standing beside him as she prepared to make the first big announcement of her tenure as the steward of the Bond franchise, the next generation has arrived.

They're greeted by 350 journalists from 40 countries, 25 television crews.

Bond was back.

And it seems like audiences were kind of excited.

Entertainment Weekly ran a poll in 1994, and we know they're polling.

It's like as good as 538.

And they said, do you think Pierce Brosnan is a good choice to play Bond?

And 65% of respondents said yes.

10% said no.

And 43% said Remington who?

Uh-oh.

I don't know if those results are great.

I think they're pretty good.

Anything above 50 is fine.

Now, some said he was too handsome.

It was just a pretty face.

Others decried the movie as a step away from the harder-edged Dalton Bond films.

But it seems like the consensus was Brosnan was a safe choice for the franchise.

And I think I'm guessing it had been leaked that Brosnan had been courted before.

So this is something that audiences had a long time to process, unlike springing a blonde Bond on us overnight with Daniel Craig.

Never forget.

Coming off of Remington Steele, though, he is a pretty obvious choice.

I think it's more surprising that there's the gap between Remington Steele and when he takes it.

And there was not a lot to show in the interim.

Now, the big gender change for the movie is obviously M, portrayed first by Bernard Lee and then Robert Brown following Lee's death.

M had seen less turnover than Bond.

So only two actors had played M versus four for Bond.

Callie, head of United Artists, told Campbell, if you're going to get a female M, get a star, get Judy Dench.

Damn right.

That's right.

The dame.

Apparently, other actors were tested.

I could not determine who, but in the end, Campbell did what he was told, and he wrote Dench personally to offer her the role.

It was three days' work, but it was an enormous film and would obviously become a very big role across multiple films and multiple bonds.

Of course, her husband, her grandson, and his friends helped convince her to take the role and come to her senses.

Quote, my husband said, you have to go do it because I long to live with a Bond woman, which is is a good

quote.

Now, despite the volume of Russian characters in the film, I believe there are more Russian-speaking, or should I say, English-speaking, Russian-accented-speaking roles than British.

There are, I believe, no actual Russian actors in any of the main parts.

I'm shocked.

No, I'm not.

Yeah.

The closest, arguably, is, as you mentioned, Isabella Skorupko as Natalia Simonova, computer hacker/slash secret secret hottie.

Kind of

so secretly hot.

Hidden under a really weird wig for a little bit and a sweater.

Now, born in Poland, raised in Sweden, she did have a Russian nanny, which is why I say she's the closest to Russian.

Well, Poland and Sweden are close.

Physically closed.

Physically close to Russian.

Yeah.

She'd broken through in Sweden at 18 with the film.

I translated it, No One Can Love Like Us.

I believe that's the translation.

Swedish listeners, correct me if I'm wrong.

According to her, they had combed Russia and Yugoslavia to find Natalia and ended up in desperation at a Swedish casting director's office.

She was apparently filming a medieval drama in which she was dressed as a man.

I'm guessing it was the Swedish Shakespeare in love.

And reportedly, it was footage from these scenes that were shown to Debbie McWilliams, which is just a backhanded compliment.

Like, you got to see these scenes where she's a man.

She could be a blonde girl.

Still, hot.

Yeah, exactly.

She wasn't the only one cast off of in-progress footage.

Famke Janssen was shooting a different UA project.

Also not Russian, Dutch.

Lord of Illusions, a Clive Barker helmed project starring Scott Bakula that I've added to my watch list.

Wow.

The 5'11 model-turned actress was brought in to read the casino scene with Brosnan for several producers.

She sounds like she had so much fun with this character.

She looks like it.

Yeah.

She's fantastic.

She chooses

all the men and all the scenery.

She said their approval was written all over their faces and that she thought that the character was sick and perverted, which was great because that's precisely what they wanted to make her.

One sick bitch.

She does.

Also, whatever word she is supposed to be screeching out in like frustration half the time just sounds like she's screaming bitch over and over again in this movie.

Now, Sean Bean landed the role of 006.

Alec Trevelyan, having portrayed his villainous chops in 1992's Patriot Games.

I think he would have made a great Bond and Martin Campbell agrees, as he later said.

The thinking was that Alec had to be someone who was believable as a potential 00, and Sean had actually been talked about for Bond at various times.

My only issue with this casting is that you know from the second that Sean Bean's face pops up that he is A, not dead when they kill him.

He's too famous.

Too famous, far too famous, which bothers me a little bit because I do feel like if you're going to do that and have it be a plot twist that the villain is going to come back, don't cast somebody that you know is not going to be dead and also that you know is going to be evil.

He's always evil.

Well, speaking of always evil, or maybe not evil, but always fun,

Alan Cumming landed the role of Boris Grishenko or Dennis Nedry, as I said earlier.

I think Alan Cumming actually would have been a great, very funny, different James Bond.

Robbie Coltrane, as we mentioned, Valentin Zukovsky, Samantha Bond as Moneypenny.

Desmond Llewellyn reprised his role as Q, one of the few cast members from earlier films to return to the franchise.

And Joe Don Baker joined as Jack Wade, even though he played the villainous Brad Whitaker in the living daylights and been killed.

So he has two Bond performances as different characters, which is unique.

I really enjoyed him in this.

He's great.

You did mention Mini Driver, Lizzie, and I got some information in the interim.

Mini Driver was totally broke, apparently.

She had $10 to her name.

She got a call at the post office from her agent.

She hadn't worked in a year.

And they said, do you want to come in and do this Bond movie?

They're paying like five grand.

And I was like, fuck yeah, sure.

And that's why she did it.

It's great.

Exactly.

Notable names that didn't return to the franchise.

Caroline Bliss as Miss Moneypenny.

Writer Richard Maybaum, Maybaum, who had passed away in the interim.

Title designer Maury Spinder.

He'd done all of the titles for all 16 Bond films to date.

Ooh, can I say titles and theme song for this one?

Not good.

I like the titles.

I don't love the theme song.

We'll get to it.

Harry Saltzman, who had produced the first nine Bond films, he'd passed away.

And a couple of United Artists executives, Mike Beck and Arthur Krim.

So this was a very new Bond with a new cast and almost new crew at every level.

And Lizzie, it was going to be expensive.

Despite earlier assertions that the goal was to keep the budget down, extended set pieces, the introduction of some CGI, and the globe trotting plot demanded $60 million, but they figured out a way to offset the costs.

Did you notice any product placement in this movie, Lizzie?

No.

Oh, well, brand specialist Karen Sortito would have been very disappointed because they included a number of products like the Omega watch that Bond wears and you get multiple close-ups of.

Okay.

Harrier, which falls off the truck.

Okay, I did see that.

And perhaps most importantly, BMW.

Well, yes, there is a prominently featured BMW.

As seen in the film, Bond, for the first time, drives a non-British car, the BMW Z3 Roadster.

A German car.

Yes, one of my friends' dads got around this time, and I learned what a midlife crisis was.

Now, my dad has one.

Chip.

Love you, Chip.

He still has it.

He loves it.

All right, good.

He would end up barely driving the car if you watch the movie.

Yeah.

He does most of his wheelwork in an Aston Martin early in the film.

I think that they both got this BMW deal relatively late in production and wanted to make sure they weren't upsetting the fans too much, although people were very upset that he was not driving a British car in this film.

I mean, it's a very not James Bond color, too.

It is a midlife crisis mobile.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's like a wrap.

I didn't love it.

But there was another more obvious piece of product placement, and that is, of course, IBM computer.

Yes.

You may have noticed a part when he just starts fiddling with a laptop while Q is talking to him.

And that was basically just an opportunity to show the IBM ThinkPad in that scene.

And it's very clear: Pierce Brosen has never used a computer before when he is fidgeting with that.

Doesn't need one.

The Globetrotting production began in January of 1995.

Locations included puerto rico with the arecibo telescope france switzerland russia england monaco now the original plan is they're going to do interiors at the 007 stage at pinewood but it was already booked up by sean connery in first night oddly enough yeah you haven't seen it it's a king arthur story with richard keer too i i enjoyed it golden eye became the first film to shoot in an empty rolls-royce factory and abandoned aerodrome that would come to be known as leavesden studios but for this production, it would be affectionately known as Cubbywood.

Cubby is Albert Broccoli's nickname.

And despite the name, Albert Broccoli was not on set for the first time in decades.

He was having a lot of health problems.

He had had an eye surgery that led to the discovery of a heart problem, which led to a risky eight-hour surgery, which led to a minor stroke.

So Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson were on set on their own, and they were navigating a brave new world that included the once closed-off Soviet Union or Russia, and they wanted to drive a tank through it.

And United Artists was nervous because they were terrified, what if our lead actor is detained in Russia, thrown in the gulag, or worse?

Plus, Russian authorities said they couldn't drive the tanks faster than 30 kilometers per hour.

which is 18.6 miles per hour, which wouldn't make for a super exciting chase.

And there were concerns about how the Russian streets and sewers would hold up under the tank treads.

So, production designer Peter Lamont, who had done True Lies, I believe before this, said that they should build a St.

Petersburg set at Leveson Studios, which they did.

It took six weeks and a million pounds to build, but they still needed second-unit photography to get the wide shots in Russia.

And as Barbara Broccoli explained to Entertainment Weekly, one day they arrived on set to find Russian troops surrounding the area, threatening to open fire if they started filming.

Oh my god.

Because they had a few outstanding permits to sell them for $3 million,

which, if it's 3 million rubles, is is again $750.

They tried to gouge us, Barbara says.

We had to meet with a minister in the middle of the night, but we got around it.

Now, she wasn't the only one that would have an inauspicious start.

Pierce Brosnan injured his hand a few weeks before production when he tried to use a towel bar to lift himself up in the bathroom.

It snapped off and it severed the tendon in his hand that connects to his pinky finger.

I'm not going to play the quote because it gets a little too long, but the first scene that he's shooting is with Valentin, played by Robbie Coltrane, and he's supposed to hold a gun to the back of his head.

Lizzie, I'm sure you remember the scene.

Valentine says, you know, there's three men in the world that have that gun, the PPK, and I've killed two.

And he says, oh, lucky me.

He would point the gun at Coltrane's head, and because the tendon wasn't fully healed, his pinky would pop off the handle of the gun as if he was holding a teacup.

So he couldn't hold the gun properly.

He wasn't the only one that was very nervous and couldn't hold things properly because Judy Dench

was so anxious to play M that she could not light her cigarette for her introduction scene.

She was supposed to smoke and Martin Campbell finally just came up and said, it's fine.

You don't smoke anymore.

Your character doesn't smoke anymore.

They just moved on.

Then came a scene in which M was supposed to drink a cup of tea, but Dench insisted that she drink scotch because she worried that her shaking hands would rattle the cup and saucer and she wouldn't be able to keep it still.

Wow.

Now, Lizzie, I cannot imagine anyone more nervous on this movie than stuntman Wayne Michaels.

Can you guess what stunt he's doing?

There's a lot in this that I don't want to a lot of headfirst down narrow staircases, a lot of jumping onto helicopters dangling from them.

What about the very beginning of the movie?

Yes, of course.

Of course.

The opening shot of what I can only assume is the Hoover Dam.

It is the Contra Dam in Switzerland.

Yes.

Oh.

It is a 720-foot tall dam.

No, thanks.

The shot would open the film and be a bold pronouncement.

Welcome to the new era of Bond.

They all felt that they they needed to get this shot and sequence right.

This is what was going to sell audiences on the new Bond.

It's pretty crazy.

Watching this immediately, we were like, this feels like it could go awry pretty fast.

Oh, it definitely could.

It took two weeks to prepare, and the crew enlisted the help of the University of Oxford bungee jump team.

Fun fact.

You might not associate Oxford with extreme sports, but in the 70s, a group of mostly Oxford students formed the Dangerous Sports Club, which was basically a UK version of Jackass.

It was led by David Kirk.

They pioneered hang gliding, invented modern bungee jumping, and skateboarded with the bulls at Pamplona.

Okay.

The big issue they faced on Bond was the concave shape of the dam.

It created a wind vortex, two words you don't want to hear together when you're jumping 720 feet through the air, that threatened to blow Wayne Michaels into the concrete, not away from it.

And honestly, what came next sounds like that episode of The Office where Michael is deciding to pretend to jump off the roof to express the dangers of office life to his office mates and they're throwing the watermelons off the roof and he's like, should we test another watermelon?

And Michael's like, the tests are going really badly.

Let's just do it.

So before Michaels jumps, the team was supposed to test a stunt dummy.

The dummy didn't arrive.

So instead, they rigged a tree trunk.

The rope snapped and the tree trunk just smashed into the side of the town.

Oh my God.

Michaels decides to jump anyway.

He gets up there and the next thing he sees is the forklift driver, who's this little Italian man who just looks at him and then does the sign of the cross across his torso right before he jumps.

And Michaels jumps anyway.

Now, he didn't just need to jump, Lizzie.

At the very end of the shot, he has a specific bit of action.

He pulls out the grappling gun.

And shoots it down.

Now, he had to get the grappling gun out before he passed out.

That was the goal.

As he later said, people asked me what I was thinking as I took off from that dam, and the vision I had was Martin screaming at me if I hadn't gotten this gun out.

My mind was made up, I didn't care, whatever happened, I was going to get this damn gun out, and he did.

According to Campbell, it only took one take, and according to Barbara Broccoli, Wayne Michaels passed out at the very end of that stunt.

Yeah, no kidding, but he got the gun out just before he did.

Now, full disclosure: in one of our other sources, the book, Some Kind of Hero, it's claimed that they did the stunt twice.

So, once, twice, they pulled it off, and it was an incredible shot.

Yeah, it is.

Wayne Michaels set the Guinness World Record for the highest bungee jump with this jump in Bond.

And the stunt coordinator from this film, one of the stunt coordinators, actually set the longest jet-to-jet transfer record in Cliffhanger.

So people were just doing crazy stuff on Michael France movies in the 90s.

He was just writing set pieces for record breaking.

Now, that sequence ends with another anti-up on top of that, which is, of course, driving a Russian motorcycle off of a cliff, skydiving into a plane and piloting off into the distance.

Yes.

Insane.

So they build a ramp in the fall in Switzerland.

They wait for it to snow.

It then snows.

And by the way, the mountains you see in the distance as the plane is taking off are actually matte paintings on big panels of glass in the distance.

They look great.

Stunt man Jacques Malnuy would for each take ride a motorcycle with just enough gas in it to pull off the jump, ditch the bike in midair, and open his parachute after.

That's almost exactly the stunt they keep showing Tom Cruise doing.

It is.

It's the same stunt that he does.

And what's funny is they would put in just enough gas because he would have to ditch the bike and so it would fall to the valley below and they didn't want it to explode or spill gasoline everywhere.

And then they had to wait for the snow to thaw and go collect all the parts the following spring.

Now it was a 6,000 foot drop.

They actually considered doing it for real.

That particular model of plane, a Pilates, I believe it's called, could be slowed enough that the stunt diver could theoretically catch up to it in mid-air.

No.

It just needed to have what's called a reverse thrust engine.

If it didn't, the plane would be flying too quickly.

Now, according to some kind of hero, this stunt was practiced in the United States by stunt diver BJ Wirth.

But when they got to Switzerland, the production had purchased the wrong version of the plane without the reverse thrust engine.

It was flying too fast.

They couldn't complete the stunt as planned.

So you get what you see pierce on wires in front of a green screen.

It's not like the greatest shot to end a really great sequence, but I think it's very fun and hokey and bondy in the end.

It's fine.

It also previously was clearly not Pierce Brosnan during the shot on the dam.

And at that point, you're just like, ah, whatever.

I don't care.

It's fine.

There were a number of car crashes.

Pierce Brosnan was apparently not the best driver.

He drove the Aston Martin repeatedly over one evening and was like, why does this smell like burning rubber?

And he had had the handbrake on the entire time.

A Russian tank ran over one of the cameras.

One of the stunt drivers crashed the Aston Martin into a camera.

But there was one part of production that went really well, Lizzie, that I want to highlight because it's something that probably doesn't come to the attention of a lot of people.

And that's the use of miniatures on this production.

So did you notice any miniatures while you were watching it?

I didn't really.

I mean, I'm assuming some of the satellites would be.

Well, that's great.

I'm glad because in an era that was transitioning to CGI, how to do the explosion of buildings, for example, is always a big question.

And miniature effects effects artist Derek Mettings was brought onto the project to provide the scale building, satellites, and the like that would be blown up at higher frame rates during Bond's daring escapes.

It seems like Campbell, the director, was skeptical that this footage would work because it's what they'd done in older Bond movies.

Mettings had done 1981's For Your Eyes Only, and I think that was kind of working against him because Campbell was like, We can't be doing it the old way, we got to do it the new way.

But as cinematographer Phil Mayhew said, Derek knew exactly how he wanted to do everything he did, so he would tell us how to do it.

When you think there's hardly any CGI in this film, almost everything was done in camera.

When Boris comes out to get a cigarette and the helicopter lands in front of him, the dish and everything behind him is forced perspective.

It looks like it's a quarter mile away, but it's 12 feet behind him.

Oh, wow.

So I just want to shout out really fantastic work by Derek Mettings.

He also died of a heart attack during post-production.

He did not live to see the finished film and the film is dedicated to him.

And some of the miniature work include the Soviet facility that opens the film, the Severnaya satellite base, the replica of the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, etc.

Now, production wrapped in June of 95, and even though he was never on set, we do know how Albert Cubby Brockley felt about the film.

He wrote on his 86th birthday in April of 95, I saw the rushes on GoldenEye every day, and I liked what I saw.

End quote.

So, Babs, good work so far.

Probably high praise, yeah.

Now, he may have liked everything he was seeing, but folks were not about to like everything they were hearing.

Composer John Berry was first offered the film.

Monty Norman had written the James Bond theme, but John Berry had arranged and helped perform it.

He then scored 12 Bond films between 63 and 87, along with Dances Dances with Wolves, Out of Africa, The Cotton Club.

He was a five-time Oscar winner, and he was tired.

He was busy.

Yeah, he needs a nap.

He had a newborn son, so he turned down the film.

And Martin Campbell suggests a young French composer, Eric Sarah, in an effort to, quote, update this Bond musically.

Sarah's most recent credit, Luc Beson's Leon the Professional with Jean Renaud and Natalie Portman.

The Bond team were big fans.

They attempt GoldenEye with some of his cues from that movie, but Sarah also passed on the project.

Undeterred, they went back to him with a sweetener.

They said, You can do whatever you want for the end title song.

You can't do the front title song, the Tina Turner one in the end, but you can't let him do that one.

Things quickly broke down after Sarah accepted the job.

In a situation that sounds not dissimilar to what went down between Mike White, creator of The White Lotus, and Cristóbal Tabia de Vir, the Chilean composer responsible for

communication was not a strong point between director and composer.

Sarah claims that he just wanted feedback, but that Martin Campbell and the editing team were all just focused on picture, so they would just say, it's great.

And then he just kept working in a vacuum.

But composer John Altman, who was working as Sarah's conductor and orchestrator, had a different take.

He later explained how basically everybody from the Bond team thought they wanted the professional, but that's a very different movie than GoldenEye.

Yeah.

The professional is very serious.

It is not campy.

Very grounded.

Further, Sarah was used to having all of his music just put into the film more or less as he wrote it.

He and Luc Baison were childhood friends, and they'd worked together for a long time.

So, as Altman put it, basically, as soon as he started working on James Bond, he had to deal with producers, directors, editors, sound editors, and everybody had their own input.

And, quote, being A, French, B, quite young, and C, inexperienced, Eric reacted as one might expect.

He just told them all to take a running jump, basically, and they stopped talking to him after a while.

They talked to me instead.

I wound up as a sort of go-between.

It's also a franchise in a way that I assume he had never worked on something.

Like, you're a hired gun.

The professional is so different.

You're a hired gun.

Yeah, you have a legacy you have to be honoring in addition to what you're able to offer.

That's exactly right.

Now, the theme song, Lizzie, there was a different version that almost existed.

Do you remember the song The Juvenile by Ace of Bass?

No.

The juvenile has the key to the end.

The juvenile in the end.

Yeah, I like it.

Right?

That's definitely better.

I like it.

I also feel like it's more modern.

It feels more 90s to me than Tina Turner and Bono do.

Yeah, the end result is a real mishmash of trash.

Poor Tina.

Yeah, Tina's great.

She deserved way better than that.

Tina's always great.

I like you too.

But yeah, this didn't quite.

I don't love it.

Now, that song that's in GoldenEye that ends up being used was not controversial.

What was, was a very specific cue that they could not get right with Eric Sarah.

And that is, they had the tank chase sequence.

You remember it, Lizzie, in the film?

It's very fun.

Bond driving a tank, chasing.

It is ridiculous.

He's not that good at anything, which I kind of like.

It's fun.

It's super fun.

He's driving through St.

Petersburg in a tank.

And as editor Terry Rawlings told Barbara Broccoli, Michael Wilson, and Martin Campbell, we cannot mix the music he has given us because it doesn't work for this sequence.

Now, the problem, the cue that Sarah had provided, a riff on the James Bond theme, was synced exactly to picture.

Sarah thought this was great.

You could have taken all of the foley, you could have taken all of the foley and sound effects out, and the music would have punctuated the action.

But that was exactly the problem.

The tank's rumble, the sound effects, and the score all existed in the same tonal range.

And you couldn't hear anything.

It was just one big, muddy mess.

So they asked him to rescore it, and he said, no.

No.

A week before the film's release, on a Friday, John Altman got a call, the orchestrator.

They needed him to re-score the sequence.

They were like, can you come in?

And he's like, is it the tank, Chase?

And I said, yep.

And he said, I got to ask Eric if I, you know, for his blessing.

And Martin Campbell said, look, somebody's going to do it.

It can either be you who's familiar with the film or we'll get somebody else.

And he said, fuck you, Eric.

And he came in and did it.

And he said it was fantastic.

He got to do this like classic James Bond theme.

He had six trumpets, six horns.

He had percussionists.

And it really seems like it was this fantastic opportunity.

And he has this funny quote where he said, when he got done, the producers had said to him, We'd have given you the whole film to rescore if we'd known you were that quick.

And you saved our movie.

Unfortunately, those are the kiss of death.

You know, you'll never work with them again.

So, like, he'd proven to be too accommodating, basically.

Yeah.

Now, Altman composed the score on a Saturday.

He orchestrated Sunday.

He gave it to the copyist Monday, recorded it on Tuesday.

The film released on Friday.

Oh, my God.

As a result, he and Eric did not speak for quite some time.

They never worked together again.

And that was the last time he worked as a conductor orchestrator for someone else.

I will say, as of 2016, it seems like they did patch things up.

Good.

So it only took 20 years.

Now, Sarah wasn't the only one who was feeling a little burned by Bond.

As we mentioned, screenwriter Michael France found himself in what would not be the last credit dispute of his career.

The producers had proposed that he would receive a written by credit on GoldenEye, but when it went into WGA arbitration, for whatever reason, they ended up assigning screenplay to Bruce Feierstein and Jeffrey Kane, and Michael France got stuck with Story Buy, which he really, really, really felt he didn't deserve.

He thought he deserved some screenplay credit.

And the reason I kind of buy France's assertion here is that he was on set during production, according to the book, Some Kind of Hero.

Oh, wow.

And I don't think he would be on set if they had totally trashed his draft.

But no, it doesn't make sense.

Who knows?

Regardless of who got credit for the screenplay, we do know who did credit for the promotional blitz that launched the film.

Teaser trailers took off in the summer of 1995, and then came that product placement pizzazz.

So Lizzie, that fall, That's probably when Chip bought his Z3.

BMW kicked off a $10 million campaign tying it to James Bond.

U.S.

and UK TV networks aired hour-long specials on the character.

Saks Fifth Avenue at their flagship store in Manhattan features clothes from Goldeneye in all of their store windows.

All in all, cross-promotional spend was in excess of $55 million on a $60 million film.

Wow.

And it worked.

Goldeneye premiered on November 13th, 1995 at Radio City Music Hall in New York.

The audience loved it.

The premiere coincided with a James Bond convention and the launch of the Z3 in Central Park.

It then premiered in London on November 21st, 1995 at Leicester, Spelled the Fancy Way Square, again to cheering crowds and a huge party.

Critically, it was modestly received.

Basically, there were those who thought it had successfully rebooted the franchise while still being recognizable as a Bond film, and there were those who thought it was too slow and formulaic to compete with the fast-paced action films of the 90s.

So, New York Times acknowledged that Bond had been brought into the 90s, but they also criticized it for, quote, bearing no stamp of Ian Fleming beyond its name.

They said Brosnan was nice to look at, but a one-note actor who struggled with the action scenes.

Oh, disagree.

They did bring up the tank.

When Bond rides a tank through St.

Petersburg during a scenery-crunching chase scene, Michael Dukakis comes to mind.

Very, very period-appropriate burn.

The Hollywood Reporter was more complimentary after, and you're going to hate this, after the hot opening credits sequence featuring Tina Turner's title track, the first few action set pieces are terrific.

A number of outlets were highly critical of Eric Sarah's score, basically saying it was too vibey and much more suited for an elevator ride than a roller coaster, which I agree with because it lent itself so well to the pause screen in 1997's Nintendo 64 GoldenEye video game, where you can just sit there and vibe as an eight-year-old listening to doom, dido doom, doom, doom, doom, doom.

It was fantastic.

Judy Dench was praised for her gender-reversed portrayal of M, along with Famke Janssen, who was given a lot of credit for her just insane sexual serial killer portrayal.

She's bonkers in a way that I don't think we have seen before or since, and I really enjoy that.

Fully committed.

I think she and Dench got the most praise of the cast.

Brazanen got more or less mixed reviews, as most people who are in their first Bond film do.

Sure.

I think there are a lot of people clinging to older versions, but audiences loved it.

GoldenEye opened wide on November 17th, 1995.

It grossed $26 million its first weekend.

It went on to pull in $352 million worldwide.

Damn.

30% of that was in the U.S., 70% international.

It was more than Dalton's last two Bond films combined.

Wow.

It was the most successful Bond film inflation adjusted since 1979's Moonraker.

Barbara Broccoli and Michael G.

Wilson had passed their first test as stewards of the Bond brand, and they had successfully convinced the public and United Artists that there was a place for this sexist dinosaur in a post-Cold War world.

As Barbara Broccoli said upon the premiere, quote, we kept getting letters from people asking us to give them back Bond.

So we tried to distill it.

We tried to get back to the essence of Bond.

Now, the movie did inspire an incredible 1997 Nintendo 64 video game.

I hope we can cover it at some point because it was an unexpected success, which further cemented the staying power of Brosnan's Bond, who stuck around for three more films.

Lizzie, you got to watch all of them.

I will watch all of them after this.

I really enjoyed it.

They just keep getting worse, and they're

super fun.

Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough, and Die Another Day.

The budgets with each of these films climbed precipitously, as did Brosnan's fees, I'm sure.

But the box office receipts did not, hovering between 300 and 450 or so million.

So they were successful, successful, but ultimately stagnant.

And I think what Barbara Broccoli did so well over the last 30 years is she very slowly changed the character.

Yes.

And then when she'd made a billion dollars off of Brosnan, played her hand and got the bond that I think she'd wanted since the early 90s with Daniel Craig.

Yeah, it is interesting.

Pierce Brosnan feels very much like a transitional bond now that I'm watching it.

I mean, he's wonderful.

He's very fun.

But going from Timothy Dalton to Daniel Craig, he is kind of like the little piece that you need to get you there.

I don't think you could jump straight from one to the other.

I think people would have said it was too dour.

Because he brings the levity.

Exactly.

I think Brosnan allowed them to modernize the filmmaking while giving you the feel of a classic Bond.

Yes.

And then they were allowed to, you know, kind of sneak in the medicine of Daniel Craig after that.

Right.

Now, Bond is obviously in the hands of one of the largest corporations in the world going forward.

Christopher Nolan has reportedly expressed interest in helming a Bond film.

I read reports that Barbara Broccoli had shut this down because he wanted Final Cut and she wouldn't give it to him.

Broccoli and Wilson have Final Cut.

Does she still?

No.

Well, now going forward, maybe Amazon would offer him what Barbara wouldn't.

But that brings me to, before we do what went right, I would like to announce who the next director of Bond should be.

I have an idea too, but you go ahead.

No, please, you go first.

No, you go.

Okay, I will.

You, Chris, go.

Edgar Wright.

Oh, very fine.

I think it would be so fun.

I think that the Daniel Craig versions are fantastic, but they got as bleak as they could, obviously, with the death of Bond at the end.

And I think Wright would just give you a bullet of a movie that is so fun.

He's already worked with Timothy Dalton.

He's proven he can do action with Hot Fuzz.

He's proven he can do driving with Baby Driver.

He's proven he can do very thin female characters with Scott Pilgrim versus the World.

I'm just kidding.

But I think he would do a fantastic job and he would be my choice, Amazon, for the next Bond film.

All right, Lizzie, who's yours?

I'm just going to throw out one additional name.

I think that's a great idea.

I support it.

One other one, which I think given a recent movie release does make sense as well, is Ryan Kugler.

He would be great.

I mean, Jordan Peele, too, if you want to just throw out like a tour filmmakers, he would be really good also.

Jordan Peel might even be better because there's a sense of humor humor there that I feel like, yeah.

You'd be fantastic.

All right.

So, any of those, guys, you have three choices.

Go figure it out, Amazon.

Jordan Peel, Ryan Koogler, or Edgar Wright.

That's it.

All right, Lizzie.

That's it for Goldeneye.

Great.

What went right?

You know, because I'm working on a movie that we are going to cover, I believe, next, which is Wonder Woman.

I'm going to give it to, I'm going to give it to old Babs, old Babs Broccoli, Barbara, because of something Patty Jenkins said, actually, that we were going to get into next week.

But to be the CEO of a franchise like this requires just an enormous amount of skill.

Yeah.

And the ability to pull this off as really her first time in charge, and because this is not just making a movie, it's essentially rebooting the franchise.

You talked about the marketing campaign.

That takes just precision to know how to not make yourself a laughingstock.

And she did it.

And she has continued to hold the franchise in her cold, not dead hands, but for quite a long time until she obviously just did release it for better or for worse.

We'll see.

But yeah, I'll give it to Barbara Broccoli.

I think that this is a really impressive debut in the franchise.

And I think you're right that she was always playing the long game.

Yeah, I agree.

I think she absolutely had a vision for this franchise.

And I think when they eventually do stray away from that with some of the more ridiculous later Bond entries, she uses it as an opportunity to head in a different direction.

It's very smart.

And everything I've read about her just says she's a really, really savvy operator.

And she also, I mean, she doesn't do anything else.

I believe she produced a Broadway show once, I believe, but otherwise, it's just Bond.

No, this is it.

She lives and breathes Bond, and she is not to be messed with.

Not at all.

She is the ultimate Bond woman in this world.

She's, I mean, she's M.

She is the Judy Dent, you know, version of M now.

And I agree.

I think it's, I think it's really cool that she inherited this.

I think it's really cool.

I know people get frustrated with the whole Nepo baby thing, but I actually find family business stuff really interesting when it's done successfully.

And she's financially more successful than her father was with the franchise, which is pretty amazing to think about.

She didn't produce as many films as him, but on a per-film basis, I believe they made more money.

So I think that's a great one.

I'm going to give mine to Martin Campbell because to come in to this movie and you've done a $20 million movie that, you know, kind of of didn't really go anywhere.

And now you are shepherding in the Bond franchise at the next level.

Sweet Jesus, that must have been stressful.

And

he does it with a plum.

I really think the tone of the movie is very well managed.

It's very silly.

It's very winking, but he does give us what we want with the action and the fun villains and set pieces.

So I'm going to give mine to director Martin Campbell, who's just directed some fantastic big blockbuster popcorn popcorn movies as well.

So, shout out to you, Mr.

Martin Campbell.

You went right.

Beautiful.

All right, guys.

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in a Russian accent like Lizzie's about to do now.

Okay, not a problem.

Cameron Smith, Ben Schindelman, Casey Boogie Simmons, Scary Carey, The Provost Family.

The O's sound like O's.

Zach Everton.

Galen.

David Friscolanti.

Adam Moffat.

Film it yourself.

Chris Zacha.

I am invincible.

Kate Elrington.

M.

Exodia.

Sea Grace B.

Jen Mastramenino.

That one was really bad.

Christopher Elner.

You slugheads.

Blaise Ambrose.

Jerome Wilkinson.

Lauren F.

Lance Stater.

Lance?

Lance?

How do you say it?

You don't have a Russian accent with a southern accent.

Nate the Knife.

Lena.

Ramon Villenueva Jr.

Half Greyhound.

Will Dunn, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Richard Sanchez.

I don't know what a Russian accent is, is what I'm learning.

Jake Keelan, Andrew McFagelbeg,

Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter,

Ellen Singleton,

JJ Rapido.

I just can only see that one in Spanish.

Jushri Samant

Sadie.

just Sadie

Since you previously butchered the Kiwi accent, I'm gonna pivot Scott Gerwin, Brian Donahue, Adrian Ping Correa, Chris Leal, Kathleen Olson, Brooke Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Don Scheibel, George Kaye, Rosemary Southwood, Tom Kristen, Jason Frenkel, Simon Chinani, Michael McGreg, Lan Ralid, Lydia Hyles.

Files brought to you by Count Dracula and his New Zealand cousin.

Thank you guys for sitting through that.

We will be back in one week.

That's right.

One week with another franchise film.

Lizzie, can you tell them what we're talking about next?

Wonder Woman.

Speaking of crazy accents.

That's right.

Can't wait.

We are going to be covering Wonder Woman, where everyone modeled their accent after calcs foreign narrative consistency we're very excited i really like the movie it's super fun i do too and we can't wait to cover it and i can't wait to learn what went wrong a whole bunch all right but a whole bunch went right we'll see you next week bye bye

go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing and music by David Bowman.

Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer with additional editing from Karen Krebsaw.

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

What a performance by Team California.

The power is ours.