Written Interview: Tom Mankiewicz
Today’s interview is with Tom Mankiewicz whose screenwriting credits include Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, Mother, Jugs and Speed, Superman: The Movie, Superman II, Ladyhawke and Dragnet.
In a two-part interview at ScriptMag.com — here and here — Mankiewicz talks about numerous subjects. Here is an excerpt re his involvement in several James Bond movies:
There’s something idiosyncratic about Bond and that’s the humor or an outrageous scene where people laugh. In The Spy Who Loved Me, he gets into this Lotus with Barbara Bach and they go into the ocean and they’re under the ocean — the car’s under the ocean. That’s fine, that’s Bond. But what makes that — what I’m proudest of — is the car turns, but he puts his blinker on under water. That’s what Bond is to me — it’s putting the blinker on and the audience roars. That’s what made it different than others, y’know.
[Re: the recent Bond films] They have to get some humor back in those films and I think they know it. Some critic said — and I agree with him totally — they just have to change the opening lines for him now and just say “My name is Bourne. Jason Bourne.” They just look like The Bourne Identity. There used to be such style. And the wit. And outrageous puns. I remember I wrote a pun in Diamonds Are Forever where Sean arrives in Vegas. He’s smuggling diamonds by pretending to be somebody and he’s picking up his dead brother in a coffin at the Vegas airport. Felix Leiter is there and he looks in the coffin and he says “I give up. The diamonds have to be in here somewhere, but where?” And Sean says “Alimentary, my dear Leiter.” And so Cubby Broccoli read this and he said, “What is this?” I said, “Cubby, it’s the alimentary canal. It’s his ass and the diamonds are stuck up his ass.” And Cubby said, “Well, nobody’s going to know this.” And so Guy said, “No, no, Cubby, it’s wonderful. We’ve got to keep it in.” Anyway, we shoot it and we go down to the opening night here at the Grauman’s Chinese and it’s packed. And they’re clearly enjoying the movie. And Sean says, “Alimentary, my dear Leiter.” And four people out of eight hundred laughed. And I looked over at Cubby — we were standing in the back — and he said “Big deal, four doctors.”
But you wouldn’t want to keep those things out. In that same film I had Blofeld — at the end, he’s captured Bond on the oil rig or something. And Bond says, “Well, it looks like you’ve won.” And Blofeld said, “As La Rochefoucauld once observed, Mr. Bond, ‘Humility is the worst form of conceit.’ I do hold the winning hand.” And Cubby said, “La-what?” He said, “This one is out.” And I said, “No, no. Cubby — he’s a French writer of maxims.” And (Cubby) said, “Out! Get it out.” So, every draft came and this thing was still in there. And I don’t know why it became Micklemas to him, but he said, “Get Micklemas out of the script.” He couldn’t say La Rochefoucauld. So it comes time to shoot it and Guy shot it in such a way that you couldn’t cut it out. And Cubby was just steaming. So, we’re starting Live and Let Die and Guy said to him, “By the way, Cubby, I saw Diamonds Are Forever in Paris and La Rochefoucauld… got a big laugh.” And Cubby said, “France was the only place we didn’t make any fucking money.”