I should say, from my own experience, that constrictions on other acting work in contracts doesn’t go beyond “not taking work that’ll conflict with our schedule without discussing it with us first” - For Bond that’ll be “DO NOT GO DO AN AMERICAN TV DRAMA, PIERCE!!!”
MGM got a good pay day for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo because Craig’s schedule on that was going to collide.
A fundamental problem with NSNA is that it was legally bound to be a remake of Thunderball, full stop. And that alone limits its potential hugely, because TB was one of the few entries that hewed fairly closely to the source material, anyway. There’s a lot of potential in adapting a version of, say, Moonraker that’s truer to the novel, but not TB. What we end up with is “Thunderball on a budget,” which is like saying “Ghostbusters with less laughs” or “Love Story without the mushy stuff.”
Now if the question is, what if ‘Warhead’ or ‘James Bond of the Secret Service’ or whatever McClory was calling it in the 70s got made with Lazenby, that might have been worth pondering. But Lazenby in NSNA would have been just one more nail in the “low budget” coffin: scaled-down effects, scaled-down music, scaled-down stunts and scaled-down Bond.
Thinking about it, even now, you get lookalikes of connery, Moore, Dalton, brosnon and Craig, but you never see a lazenby lookalike on the books
Because he wasn’t explicitly named as James Bond. His reg plate only said “JB” for this reason.
Same reason McClory couldn’t sue Cubby for the Blofeld appearance at the beginning of FYEO.
Just wind it forward to all the Roger bits. That’s what I did.
I remember reading Cubby saying he had no influence over his actors’ other films.
But aren’t the gadgets in the db5 not a legal issue?
I wouldn’t have thought so. Some things are just part of the spy-fi subgenre. Bond wasn’t the first adventurer to have gadgets. 1930s thriller heroes like Norman Conquest had explosive cigarette lighters.
Also, even if there was an infringement, these things are taken on a case by case basis. Cubby might’ve thought it wasn’t worth the hassle, or would’ve been bad PR. He fought McClory, remember, because McClory was an actual threat (able to make a Bond film).
I agree gadgets for adventurers is nothing new, but “ejector seat in an Aston Martin DB5” is awfully specific.
Maybe it’s as simple as that Eon didn’t catch this in time - and then decided not to act as the horse was already sending postcards from greener pastures while Eon still thought this might be good advertising. They hadn’t used the Aston in ages - so much so its use in 1980 was a caricature inside a larger caricature.
In the end - if this can be considered the end already - they milked the Aston far longer and with more iconic results. Who is talking about THE CANNONBALL RUN today, apart from us?
Burt Reynolds fans?
And, until a couple of years ago, Burt Reynolds himself.
Burt Reynolds delivered some classic movies and when his 1970’s movies are on I generally watch them because they are enjoyable and he was a believable tough man.
Rather like Sir Roger and Lewis Gilbert, Burt and Hal Needham seemed to share “the same insane sense of humour” and it showed in their projects.