If you grow up in SoCal, you’re apt to know some movie
folk. When I was a small tyke living in
a Hollywood apartment complex, my playmate’s father was a long-time cameraman
at Paramount, a man who’d worked on such classics as Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard.
And just recently I met someone whose dad was a studio carpenter. His claim
to fame? For Cecil B. De Mille’s The Ten
Commandments he constructed the “stone” tablets that Moses carried down
from Mt. Sinai.
Then there’s my friend, Matthew Maibaum, who descends from
genuine movieland royalty. Matt’s father, Richard Maibaum, contributed to the
scripts of over fifty Hollywood movies, including Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, The Pride of the Yankees, and the 1949
Alan Ladd version of The Great Gatsby. But
his real claim to fame derived from his long association with a certain famous secret
agent. It all began over ice cream at Wil Wright’s in Hollywood. His friends Albert
(“Cubby”) Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had enjoyed some success making low-budget
war movies in England. Now they had a new idea. Broccoli handed Maibaum a paperback
novel by a failed British spy named Ian Fleming, saying, “There may be
something in it.”
Maibaum was stirred instantly by Fleming’s suave leading
man, a chap named James Bond. He liked the possibility of action-adventure
films set in exotic locales, but recognized that the outlandish elements of
Fleming’s plots would only work if the scripts were laced with humor. In his
hands, the Bond movies had the knack of making sly fun of themselves without
resorting to buffoonery. As the filming of 1962’s Dr.
No, commenced, author Fleming was surprised that the filmmakers were not
going for an elegant and brainy hero, on the order of David Niven. Instead they
chose a brawny former Edinburgh milkman who’d also been a minor league soccer
player, an underwear model, and a Disney musical star (of the forgettable Darby O’Gill and the Little People). The
rest, of course, is movie history, with Maibaum writing 13 screenplays for a
whole parade of Bonds.
Maibaum had started out as a serious playwright with social
issues on his mind. While he was still a student at the University of Iowa, his
anti-lynching drama made it to Broadway. He also wrote the very first anti-Nazi
play, Birthright. Then his stage comedy
about the insurance industry, Sweet
Mystery of Life, was picked up by Hollywood and turned into a Busby
Berkeley musical, Gold Diggers of 1937. After
that he found himself in Hollywood to stay.
Unlike so many east coast intellectuals, Maibaum never
believed he was lowering himself by writing for the movies. He was an affable
man, tolerant of the beliefs of others, by no means a rabble-rouser. (Which
meant he escaped from the Hollywood “red scare” of the 1950s totally
unscathed.) Instead he was known for his gentleness, his wit, and his intellectual
curiosity. My friend Matt remembers the day when his younger brother discovered
in an encyclopedia the oddly shaped ring of islands known as Phuket, Thailand.
Looking up from his Underwood cast iron typewriter, Maibaum was instantly
fascinated by his son’s find. This was, he proclaimed, exactly where an exotic
hit man would choose to live. That’s how Phuket became a location in one of the
James Bond films starring Roger Moore, 1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun.
Richard Maibaum died at a ripe old age in 1991. His last
Bond film was 1989’s License to Kill. What
he would have thought of the latest and most serious Bond, Daniel Craig, is not
for me to say.
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