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At least, that's what "King of the World" James Cameron recently told his peers at the National Association of Broadcasters' Digital Cinema Summit. The gist of his argument is essentially a reiteration of what movie executives and theater owners said the first time 3-D movie technology rolled in: 3-D can give moviegoers a unique experience that's only possible in a movie theater, thus stemming the exodus to other viewing platforms. Back in the early 1950s, all moviemakers had to worry about was TV. Today it's video iPods, VOD, streaming video and more, but the fear is the same: "I'm not going to make movies for people to watch on their cell phones," Cameron said. "I don't want that grand, visionary, transporting movie experience made for the big screen to become a thing of the past."

Well, I'm sort of with him — I've spent some of the happiest moments of my life watching movies and a lot of my formative movie experiences happened in theaters. But I'm also sort of not with him — I know the standard party line is that moviegoing is a communal experience, but I'd much rather go to the movies alone.

Not just because I don't want to have to feel responsible for someone else's enjoyment (though it's pretty awful to persuade someone you like to see something and have them hate it, and worse when the movie is a favorite of yours), but because, frankly, for me the optimal movie experience is about me and the movie. Not the crying baby in the back row, not the chatty kids on a date, not the guy who dropped his drink or the family making dinner out of what's available at the concession stand (nacho chips with processed cheese food and greasy hot dogs — nutritious and delicious!) whose collective mastication can be heard from one end of the room to the other. Just me and the movie. And the best way to get that experience is at home.

Ironically, that puts my thinking in line with that of the chatty kids, who'd also rather watch movies at home (albeit with their friends) so they can talk without people like me shushing them. And to tell you god's honest truth, I don't really need to have my eyeballs rattled by the state-of-the-art effects.

Further, Cameron's suggestion that studios should start using 3-D for their tent-pole films — those are the prefab "blockbusters" that are supposed to be the financial underpinning of the year's entire production/release slate — only reminds me of everything I think is wrong with the way American studios make movies. They gamble tens of millions of dollars on giant, market-researched-up-the-yin-yang sequels, remakes, adaptations of TV shows and comic books, and other so-called pre-sold material. Instead they should spread the money around.

Here's how I see the numbers. If 90% of everything is junk, then you're better off making 10 movies, because one of them is statistically bound to be good. If you spend all your money on one movie, it might be great and it might be crap that drops off 60% in the second weekend because the word is out. That was the genius of the old Hollywood system — sheer volume. And frankly, producing better movies overall is what's going to save Hollywood. Not aggressive antipiracy measures or a megabucks ad campaign to persuade people that going to the movies is fun, because all too often it isn't, and everyone knows it.

I was 20 minutes into The Notorious Bettie Page before I realized that it wasn't a color movie with a black-and-white prologue: It's a black-and-white movie with a few color sequences. And a gorgeous black-and-white movie it is, which got me to wondering why so many people seem to hate black and white.

Needless to say, this isn't the first time I've thought about the subject — everyone I knew was talking about it back in the '80s when new computer technologies allowed TV and video distributors (DVD wasn't even a gleam in the industry's eye) to "colorize" old movies. The results of the colorization process ranged from OK to flat-out awful, a sickly palate of neither-here-nor-there colors that added nothing and subtracted the glistening beauty of really handsome monochromatic cinematography. I don't see a whole lot of movie colorization going on today, perhaps because studios have realized that any consumer who'd buy an older movie in the first place usually wants it the way it was originally made. But I see a lot of it in TV on DVD — apparently the PTB aren't sure what people who buy classic TV shows on DVD want. Witness the simultaneous appearance of the third season of Bewitched in both the original black and white and in retrofitted color.

As Jay correctly points out below, the third season of Bewitched was made and broadcast in color -- I should have addressed my remarks to seasons 1 & 2.

So what's the deal? I love beautifully used color and I love the glistening range of artful black and white. Why will people go to Sin City but disdain the noir thrillers of the '40s and '50s that defined Frank Miller's aesthetic, both on the page and on screen?

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Edited by Maitland McDonagh at 04/26/2006 8:40 AM

How creepy is it that The Towering Inferno wrapped production on Sept. 11, 1974? I was just watching the special features on the upcoming double-disc special edition — it's one of the high-water marks of the '70s disaster-movie cycle that began with 1972's The Poseidon Adventure (yes, I'm psyched for the theatrical remake — if Das Boot director Wolfgang Petersen can't make a white-knuckle thriller out of that material, no one can), and it holds up well, though the spectacle of people trapped above an uncontrollable fire in the "world's tallest building" has a very different resonance today. But that wrap date is just weird.

So what made BOCOG, the organizing committee for the 2008 Beijing Olympics festivities, think Steven Spielberg might be just the man to help homegrown filmmaker Zhang Yimou design the opening and closing ceremonies? Munich? I mean, really: He's an internationally renowned filmmaker with zero experience staging live spectacles — at least Zhang directed the ballet version of his own Raise the Red Lantern. And Olympic spectacles are notoriously tough nuts to crack — look at the human playing cards and that gigantic brutalist-architecture-meets-the-Burning-Man prop that turned up at the Torino Winter Games closer. Yikes! I know the Olympics powers-that-be want the show to look terrific on TV, and I hate to stomp their buzz, but unless you have a 20-foot movie screen in your house, those things always look like crap on television — you either stage for the small screen or you stage for the crowd who paid their simoleons to watch live. On the other hand, the morbid-curiosity factor will get me to watch anyway.

Question: What truth is there to the stories about the actors who might have played Bond? I've read that Roger Moore was considered to originate the role but was unavailable because he was committed to The Saint (or was too strongly identified with that role), so Timothy Dalton got the part because Pierce Brosnan was obligated to Remington Steele. On a slightly unrelated thread, do you have any feelings about how strongly certain characters are identified with certain portrayers? Sean Connery's likeness is associated with Bond long after his departure from the series — his is the face you see in comics and video games. Douglas

FlickChick: Second question first: Sean Connery is the classic example of an actor whose face is indelibly connected with a fictional character, just as Basil Rathbone is the face of Sherlock Holmes. Rathbone, to be sure, looks rather like Sidney Paget's illustrations for Strand magazine, in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared, but Doyle himself apparently complained that when he saw the great detective in his mind's eye, he didn't see the handsome fellow Paget drew. And frankly, Sean Connery looks less like the 007 Ian Fleming described in his books than does Pierce Brosnan, starting with the "longish nose" and the "carelessly brushed," side-parted hair falling over Bond's eyebrow — Connery's hair was already thinning in Dr. No (1962), when he was all of 31 years old. But the fact is, these things are details. What matters is that Connery embodied the essence of Bond-ness, just as Rathbone was Holmesian to the nth degree, and illustrators go back to their features when they're looking to depict these familiar and hugely popular characters.

Now, to the men who might have been James Bond, had the planets aligned themselves differently and the gods been in a more playful mood. Let's start with Roger Moore: Although there's a good deal of controversy about when Moore's name was first bruited about in Bond circles, longtime producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli claimed in his autobiography that Moore was Fleming's own first choice for the role — this despite the fact that Moore was a pretty boy of the first order. But Fleming also said he envisioned the suave David Niven in the role, and Moore was definitely a younger variation on the refined, elegant Niven persona; Fleming is also said to have liked James Mason, Cary Grant and Edward Underdown, a little-known stage-trained actor who'd been making movies since the 1930s. All these actors make sense when you remember that Fleming was a rakish, well-born, athletic, witty connoisseur of the good life from a wealthy family; he'd even worked in intelligence during World War II. Bond was therefore his own boyish fantasy version of himself. It also goes a long way to explaining why Fleming was so unimpressed by Connery, whom he called "unrefined," which I take to mean common as dirt. There was talk about Moore taking over in 1967 when Connery announced that he'd had enough of the role and Moore had been playing sleuthing playboy Simon Templar in The Saint for the better part of seven years. Interestingly, the 23-year-old Timothy Dalton's name apparently came up at the same time, even though he was a raw newcomer with no feature-film credits; he apparently turned down the part. One-timer George Lazenby was cast in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), and Connery came back for Diamonds Are Forever (1971), so Moore didn't get to step in until Live and Let Die (1973).

I vividly remember the Brosnan flap: I don't spend a lot of time feeling sorry for successful actors, but I felt bad for him. Once again, Dalton was apparently offered the role of Bond but couldn't take it because he was committed to Brenda Starr (1989) (ouch!). Brosnan as a con man who assumes the role of a suave detective-agency head on TV's Remington Steele put him in the running, especially since the series had just been canceled and he was at liberty. But the wave of publicity that followed his invitation to play Bond persuaded NBC executives to revive Steele; Brosnan's contract required him to stay and Dalton's schedule was freed up, so Dalton became Bond for The Living Daylights (1987) and License to Kill (1989). The somewhat disappointing U.S. box office of those, combined with internal issues pertaining to ownership of the Bond franchise rights, resulted in a six-year Bond-movie drought. Dalton resigned from the series, and Brosnan, by then free of the Remington Steele yoke, was able to step in for Goldeneye (1995). Although Brosnan was a great Bond, the way things played out was, to my mind, doubly unfortunate. First, I think Dalton was underrated and that if he'd had the chance to make another film, he might have settled into the role in the eyes of fans. Second, if Brosnan had been able to start making Bond films a decade earlier, he wouldn't have aged out of the series so quickly: The difference between beginning to play an action-oriented role when you're in your early forties and when you're in your early fifties is significant.

Beyond those two, who did eventually become Bond after hurdling some significant obstacles, there are all kinds of tantalizing might-have-beens in this saga.
Terence Young, who directed Dr. No, liked RADA-trained actor Richard Johnson before Connery became the front-runner; Johnson went on to play U.K. pulp-novel detective Bulldog Drummand in the thrillers Deadlier Than the Male (1966) and Some Girls Do (1969), both widely perceived as Bond knockoffs. Patrick McGoohan, star of the cult U.K. TV series Danger Man (broadcast in the U.S. as Secret Agent), was offered the role of James Bond after Danger Man was canceled at the end of its 1961 season (it was subsequently revived); he passed. There are innumerable stories as to why, including that he found the character reprehensible — John Drake, his Danger Man/Secret Agent character wasn't a womanizer and used violence only as a last resort. In a 1995 interview with the Bond site Her Majesty's Secret Service, McGoohan said it was nothing more than that he wasn't wild for the script and that someone he didn't want to work with had already been hired. One of the most unlikely sounding early possibilities was comedian Sid James, best known for the bawdy, lowbrow Carry On... films. I always assumed it was just a rumor that he'd screen-tested for Bond, but the test turned up on the DVD box set of the U.K. comedy series Bless This House (1971-1976). So there you go.

Irish-born, New Zealand-raised Sam Neill tested during the Brosnan/Dalton mess; he later got his opportunity to shine in the espionage realm with the starring role in the series Reilly: The Ace of Spies (1983). Both English actor Julian Glover and rugged American actor John Gavin — Janet Leigh's boyfriend in Psycho (1960) — went out for the role after Lazenby; Gavin apparently signed a contract with EON in 1970, but Connery came back for his last hurrah. Ten years later, Glover got a consolation prize in the form of playing For Your Eyes Only (1981) bad guy Ari Kristatos, and shortly after, Cubby Broccoli apparently handed James Brolin (now Mr. Barbra Streisand) a contract to play Bond while Moore was in negotiations to return for Octopussy (1983). Brolin did a screen test opposite Maud Adams while Moore was in negotiations, but Moore re-upped and that was the end of that. Yet another of my favorite "wow, that would have been something different" involves the late David Warbeck, a New Zealand-born, RADA-trained actor who made a bunch of Euro-exploitation movies in the '70s. In the book David Warbeck: The Man and His Movies, Warbeck, who died in 1997, swore he was under contract to EON throughout that entire period as a sort of understudy who could be thrown in to a new Bond film at a moment's notice if Moore walked. An unlikely candidate to outside eyes but, frankly, no more unlikely than Lazenby.

Question: In a recent column you answered a question about the classic Michael Caine/Laurence Olivier movie Sleuth, and it reminded me that I heard some time ago that they were remaking it with Caine in the Olivier role and a younger actor in Caine's old part. Is this true? — Jeff

FlickChick: There's been talk for the better part of five years that Stephen Frears was going to direct a remake of Sleuth, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter (based faithfully on Anthony Shaffer's original play) and Michael Caine in the role of the aging novelist who tricks his wife's much-younger lover, a celebrity hairdresser, into visiting him and then enmeshes him in a cruel cat-and-mouse game. Back in 1972 it was, of course, Caine who played the brash young lothario and Sir Laurence Olivier who played the cuckolded husband with more than a few nasty tricks up his sleeve. Jude Law — who was born the same year Sleuth opened and who recently put his own spin on the role that made Caine famous in the 2004 remake of Alfie (1966) — will reportedly play the younger man. It's been more than a year since Caine told Variety columnist Army Archerd that the new Sleuth would start shooting in 2005, so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen. But it doesn't look to be dead in the water just yet.

Question: Here's a tough one for you. I saw a movie a while ago in which a woman takes her date to a concert hall where music is being played with typewriters. I don't remember anything else about it. Maybe you can help. — Alexander

FlickChick: This is a tough one: I know I've never seen the movie you're describing, but something tells me it might be the Jerry Lewis comedy Who's Minding the Store? (1963), which contains a famous scene involving a concert piece called "The Typewriter," for orchestra and, well, typewriter. The actual piece was composed by Leroy Anderson (1908-1975), whose niche was light classical novelty pieces, which sounds tackier than some of the works actually are — there are Anderson sound clips everywhere, and "The Syncopated Clock," "Sleigh Ride," and, for that matter, "The Typewriter" are all witty and genuinely enjoyable. That said, the scene people usually remember from Who's Minding the Store? is the one in which Lewis, playing his usual bumbling-moron character, is working at a department store demonstrating a new vacuum cleaner and manages to suck the clothes off a sexy young woman in the process. I'd love to hear from any reader who can think of another movie that might match Alexander's memory.

Question: I'm curious about the origin of the line "My evil twin, Skippy." I've heard a couple of people use it, but I'm not sure where it's from — is it a quote from a movie, and, if so, do you know which one? Thanks for anything you can do to satisfy my curiosity! — Theresa

FlickChick: The phrase "My evil twin, Skippy" is not from a movie, though I venture to say it was inspired by the good twin/bad twin clichι much loved by B-movie screenwriters and the pulp writers from whom they lift ideas. But the term actually originated in a series of Iran-Contra-era Doonesbury cartoons involving the first President Bush and his evil twin, Scooter…. Sorry, Skippy. How prescient Gary Trudeau was.

Question: Years and years ago I saw a movie about an aristocratic family who get stranded on a desert island with their servants and at some point the blue bloods have to acknowledge that the butler and other servants are more inventive, ingenious, resourceful and street-smart than they are. So the servants take charge, until — if my memory serves me correctly — they're rescued, brought back to England and everybody goes back to his or her original position in the pecking order. I saw it as a kid — I'm 43 now — and think it was an older movie already. But every time I think about this adventure/psychological drama, it seems to me that it would be a nice story to remake. — Tony

FlickChick: The story is definitely The Admirable Crichton (1957), which started life as a play by James M. Barrie — yes, the man who wrote Peter Pan. It's been filmed three times already, first by Cecil B. DeMille as the silent Male and Female (1919); Gloria Swanson plays the spoiled, wellborn heiress who's shipwrecked with her family and servants and falls in love with the family butler, Crichton, when she's able to see him for the man he is rather than as her social inferior. The most recent version is The Admirable Crichton (1957), shot in color and starring Kenneth More as Crichton. The concensus is that the version in between the two, Norman Taurog's We're Not Dressing (1934), is by far the best, though it recasts the story as a jazz-age fable about reckless, rich youth and salt-of-the-earth working folk: Carole Lombard is the rich girl who's shipwrecked with her useless society friends and Bing Crosby is the lowly deckhand who proves a better man than any billionaire's son. I have a terrible feeling that a modern-day remake would look more like Madonna's 2002 Swept Away (itself a remake of Lina Wertmόller's 1974 Swept Away... By an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August), one of many movies that, though not directly based on Barrie's play, do appropriate its basic setup and its ideas about the idle rich and the so-called lower classes on whom they they look unless they need someone to actually do something.

Question: I know that many people — my own sister included — refer to Dr. Frankenstein's monster by the name of his creator. Is this laziness on their part, or is there some basis in any of the Frankenstein movies for calling the creature "Frankenstein"? I read your column every week and know that if anybody would know, it would be you. — Jay

FlickChick: Thank you, Jay, for your vote of confidence and for mentioning my bete noire (all right, one of my betes noires — I'm easily peeved). While I'm sure that somewhere there's a movie in which some character screams, "Hey look, there's Frankenstein," as the monster comes round the corner in full flail, all the canonical movies, from the very first adaptation by the Edison company — Frankenstein (1910) — to the Universal and Hammer multifilm series, distinguish clearly between the monster and the monster maker, calling only the latter "Frankenstein." If only Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had given her monster a name, confusion between the two might have been avoided altogether (though of course it was precisely her point that Frankenstein's creature wasn't even afforded the decency of a name by his callous creator); it's awkward to have to call so major a character "Frankenstein's Monster," rather than something catchy like Godzilla or King Kong. As far back as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Bud Abbott and Lou Costello actually meet Frankenstein's monster (Glenn Strange), but while credits correctly list "The Monster," I can easily see a kid coming away from that movie believing that the monster's name must have been Frankenstein because that's who Abbott and Costello met. Movies like I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1958) compounded the problem — there is a Dr. Frankenstein, played by the incomparable Whit Bissell, but the titular teenager is the poor, misshapen monster he creates. Again, the credits list "Teenage Monster," not "Teenage Frankenstein," but who hangs around for credits except geeks like me? So feel free to tell your sister (and anyone else you feel like correcting) that they really should be saying "Frankenstein's monster," but prepare to be called pedantic — and worse.

Question: I recently watched Flashdance and have to ask: Was Jennifer Beals really doing the dance at the end? If not, did she do any of the dancing in the movie? — Brandi

FlickChick: Jennifer Beals, currently featured on Showtime's racy The L Word, was doubled extensively for Flashdance (1983), though there are sequences in which she's clearly executing basic moves: The rule of thumb with dancing in movies is that the minute you no longer see the actor's face and legs in the same shot, you should wonder whether the face and legs belong to someone else. Ditto goes for shots in which the actor's face is obscured by angle or by distance. The first question you might well ask is, if someone is making a movie that requires a lot of dancing, why not hire a dancer? And a good question it is: But the fact is that dancers who can really, seriously act are as rare as actors who can really, seriously dance. Very well, you may say, but Jennifer Beals wasn't exactly Vanessa Redgrave, so maybe they would have done better to audition dancers until they found someone who was cute and charismatic — it's not as though the role of welder-by-day, aspiring-ballerina-by-night Alex Owens really required world-class acting skills. And by any logical standard, you'd be absolutely right. But the producers of Flashdance had a very specific — and sufficiently vulgar that I'm not going to spell it out — standard that the actress they eventually cast as Alex had to meet, and Beals met it. In any event, most of Beals' dancing was doubled by a French actress/dancer named Marine Jahan, whose most notable other credit was as a strip-club dancer in Streets of Fire (1984). In addition, I've read that a woman named Sharon Shapiro, a much-lauded winning member of UCLA's women's gymnastics team in the early '80s, was used for some of the leaps in Flashdance's audition sequence, and that pioneering break dancer Richard "Crazy Legs" Colon, a member of the Rock Steady crew and only 17 at the time, did the breaking in that same sequence. In any event, Beals took a lot of largely undeserved flak for not doing all her own dancing: I mean, do most people really believe that the average action-movie star really does all his own stunts? Jumping off buildings, running through fire, crashing cars, all that dangerous and potentially career-ending stuff? I don't think so.

Question: I watched Stepmom for the 2,000th time this weekend and then read up on the Internet about where it was filmed. I love the house they live in and found that the real house and land are in upstate New York, but that the filmmakers only used it for exterior shots. For everything inside, they built this huge, elaborate soundstage. My question is, why spend all that time and money to make a soundstage that looks like a house when you could just use the inside of the house? Do they just love spending money? And why are scenes shot out of sequence? — Nancy

FlickChick: First question first: It may seem as though, having found an attractive house whose exterior says what you want it to say about the lives of the people who live in it, that it would be cheaper and easier to use the real interiors as locations, rather than building a soundstage. But on a big-budget Hollywood movie, it generally isn't, for one of two reasons or a combination of both. First, you may adore the outside of the house and the way it fits into the landscape, but the inside may not be at all what you want. Maybe the ceilings are low, and while in real life they feel cozy and warm, on film the rooms look cramped and oppressive. Maybe the living room with the fantastic fireplace overlooks the front yard when, for the purposes of drama, it would be better if it overlooked the dramatic ocean view out back. Building a soundstage lets you fit the rooms to the needs of the story. In real life, switching, say, the relative positions of the living room and the eat-in kitchen is a major undertaking, especially if the production company doesn't own the house, which they usually don't. Location scouts go out looking for houses that can be leased for specific scenes, and the agreements with the owners (who are generally relocated to a hotel for the duration of filming) generally specify that when they come back, their homes will look the way they did when they left.

And those are just the aesthetics — the other issue is practical. If you want to do a smooth pan from one room to another that follows characters laterally (rather than tracking them from behind, which imparts a very stalkerish feel to the shot), then you need a cutaway wall. Not practical in a real house, but if you build the rooms on a soundstage, you can put up partial walls wherever you need them. Many soundstage rooms don't have ceilings, because that’s where cinematographers like to put the lights for an even, natural-seeming look. It's much easier to hang lights from a series of rods suspended over four walls than to figure out a way to bolt them to someone's real ceiling and not trash the place in the process. Homeowners also usually prefer that you not bolt tracks for a camera trolley to their hardwood floors, enlarge their windows, rip out their bathroom fixtures, or strip the wall paper from the hallways and replace it with contemporary textured concrete. And this is where the big-budget part comes in: If you're an indie filmmaker with limited funds, you work around the issues that come with real locations. If you've got a Hollywood budget, you don't have to. That may sound as though it's the same as "loving to spend money," but it isn't necessarily — if you've spent millions of dollars to hire Julia Roberts because you think she's the exact right person for the role, why cheap out on the other aspects of the film when you have the funds available? If you build a set, it gives you control: You won't lose power because your lights overloaded the circuits, your sound takes aren't ruined by banging pipes, you don't lose two days' shooting because it's February and the boiler blew, and even if you could get the high-priced talent to work in a house with no heat, you'd see their breath in every shot. So now you're paying a huge union cast and crew to sit in their hotel rooms and watch TV until the boiler's fixed. Money buys you control, control keeps you on schedule, and ultimately staying on schedule keeps you within your initial budget.

As to the second question, that's all about money, too. Let's say your movie includes two sequences set in Morocco. One takes place near the beginning of the story and the other near the end, after the characters have gone through hell and high water. It would be easier on the actors if you shot in sequence, rather than shooting their happy, lighthearted courtship and their resigned, older but wiser reconciliation back to back. But from a financial perspective, you only want to pay to take the cast and crew to a location once, so you shoot all the scenes on that location together and then pick up and go to the next place. If you're renting a house, you do all the scenes that take place there, and then you leave. If you're building an elaborate set, you shoot everything that happens on it in one go. When you see a credit for "second unit director," you're also seeing the result of a financial decision: Say your story involves a farm and it's important to see the passing of the seasons through the growth of the crops. Do you keep the principal cast and crew on the farm just so you can catch the cornfields at different stages of growth? No. You shoot the scenes in which the cast and the crops appear together (faking the background if you have to), then you send a smaller, less pricey second unit to pick up footage of ripening corn and waving fields of golden wheat. It's always about the money, and when it isn't, it becomes a notorious cautionary tale, like the behind-the-scenes sagas of Apocalypse Now (1979) or Cleopatra (1963) or Heaven's Gate (1980).

Oh, and Nancy — after 2,000 viewings of Stepmom (1998), you've probably strip-mined its riches. It might be time to move on to another movie. Just a thought.

Question: Why is everybody saying this new guy can't be James Bond because he's blond? Roger Moore was blond! — Sharron

FlickChick: Thank you, Sharron! Yes, Roger Moore was indeed dark blond, as is Daniel Craig. And while fans are entitled to be as skeptical as they want, facts are facts: The Bond series has been going on for more than 40 years, and in order for it to continue, the actor playing Bond has to be replaced periodically. There have already been five James Bonds: Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan. Six if you count Barry Nelson, who played Bond in TV's 1954 Climax Theater production of Casino Royale. Seven if you count David Niven in the 1967, swinging '60s spoof Casino Royale (and please, let's not get into all the other James and Jimmy Bonds in that movie -- it makes my head hurt just to think about it). Protest all you want, but technically Nelson was the first Bond, and that version of Casino Royale (which featured a pretty cool performance by Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre) was the first Bond adaptation. In any event, for my money, Moore was the weakest of the bunch — loved him as international bon vivant and man of mystery Simon Templar in TV's The Saint, never believed him for a moment as a man with a license to kill and the cojones to use it. But never in a million years could I have summoned up the outrage to have put together a moorenotbond.com, assuming there had been a Web to put it on back in the olden days. And yet there's Craignotbond.com (subtitled "Home of the Casino Royale Boycott"), taking up space that might have been used to collate links to smut sites or allow people to post really, really cute pictures of poor sleeping cats piled high with Cheez Doodle bags.

Leaving aside my feeling that the world would be a better place if we all let go and let Bond, I don't know that I'm wild about shaking up the formula by treating Casino Royale as an origin story — that's what comic-book writers do when no one can think of one more blessed thing to do with a classic character, and the results aren't always good. On the other hand, there are no more Bond novels, and he's been done just about to death since Dr. No (1963), so what the hey? This might be a way of reinvigorating the franchise and paving the way for some tougher and more vigorous films, something the Bond team was clearly trying to do with the last couple of Brosnans. Director Martin Campbell has said the film will include Bond's first less-than-perfect assignments, which could be interesting, and that it will be less dependent on gadgets, which is just fine by me. Eliminate all the extraneous endings and I'll be one happy camper. The danger is that the whole back-to-the-beginning thing might just be an excuse to start remaking all the early Bonds, and a clearer sign of imaginative bankruptcy would be hard to imagine. An updated rehash of Octopussy (1983) — now there's the ticket!