THE Lowly Peon

Casino Royale: Discovering the Lost Script

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10 March 2011, 1:05am

An article about both how Bond evolved and also how one of the original screenplays for Casino Royale was only recently found in a library in Chicago. The article fizzles toward the end, but is worth a read. Makes me want to start another Bond marathon. Anyone interested?

In response to the growing popularity of Bond, Feldman turned to Ben Hecht to write a script for Casino Royale. Known as "the Shakespeare of Hollywood", Hecht was a novelist, poet and playwright who had written or co-written several classic scripts, including The Front Page, based on a play he had co-written; Underworld, for which he won the first best screenplay Oscar in 1927; the original Scarface; and Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Notorious. Hecht also worked uncredited on dozens of other screenplays, including Gone With The Wind, Foreign Correspondent and a few other Hitchcock films.

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.