Lots of Big Screen Spy Movies at L.A.'s New Beverly This Month

The June line-up at Quentin Tarantino's L.A. revival theater The New Beverly Cinema has lots to offer for spy fans! Foremost among them, in terms of big screen rarity, is a Sixties Irving Allen spy double bill of the fourth and final Matt Helm movie, 1969's The Wrecking Crew (advertised as being a gorgeous new 35mm print!) and the highly entertaining 1968 Eurospy movie Hammerhead. (Read my review here.) Like all of the Dean Martin Helm movies, the former (also starring Sharon Tate, Nancy Kwan, Tina Louise, and the villainous Deadlier Than the Male duo of Elke Sommer and Nigel Green) has relatively little to do with the gritty Donald Hamilton novel whose title it bears, but the latter is a pretty faithful adaptation of James Mayo's debut Charles Hood novel, despite changing hero Hood from a Brit to an American (Vince Edwards). This swinging double feature plays two nights--Wednesday, June 12, and Thursday, June 13. The first feature starts at 7:30, and the second at 9:45.

They'll also be showing Alfred Hitchcock's two late Sixties spy movies on consecutive Wednesday afternoons as part of their "Afternoon Classics" matinee series. Since these aren't among Hitch's most famous titles, they're also relative rarities on the big screen. I wish they weren't only playing during the day when I'll be at work! But should you be lucky enough to have Wednesdays off, be sure to check out "vibrant" IB Technicolor prints of Torn Curtain (1966), starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, on Wednesday, June 19, at 2pm, and Topaz (1969), based on the Leon Uris novel and featuring a Eurospy all-star cast of Frederick Stafford (OSS 117: Terror in Tokyo), Michel Piccoli (Danger: Diabolik), and Karin Dor (You Only Live Twice), on Wednesday, June 26, at 2pm.

There's also a slew of spy-adjacent Sixties movies on the docket, including Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman's other giant Ian Fleming adaptation, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, playing as a 2pm matinee on Saturday, June 22, and Sunday, June 23, Sean Connery in another Wednesday matinee of Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) on June 12, Eurospy goddess Elke Sommer in the heist picture They Came to Rob Las Vegas (paired with another Gary Lockwood vehicle, Jacques Demy's mesmerizing love letter to Sixties L.A., Model Shop) on June 18 (one night only), and on June 19 and 20 a double feature of Frank Sinatra's second Tony Rome movie (essentially an attempt to reinvent the hard-boiled P.I. genre for the Swinging Sixties Bond-Age), Lady in Cement (co-starring Fathom's Raquel Welch) and the faux spy thriller Pretty Poison, wherein mental patient Anthony Perkins convinces Tuesday Weld he's a secret agent. That's quite a month!

It should be noted that both The Wrecking Crew and They Came to Rob Las Vegas both feature in the latest trailer for Tarantino's upcoming 1969-set Once Upon A Time... in Hollywood (the former in a clip and poster, the latter flashing by in a billboard adorning the Chinese Theater).

Tickets for all shows are available through Brown Paper Tickets.

Tradecraft: Matt Helm Movie Reactivated

Paramount has been trying to make a new Matt Helm movie for nearly a decade, ever since the studio came away with the rights to the character in their split from DreamWorks in 2008. Prior to that, DreamWorks had been attempting a screen revival of Helm closer to Donald Hamilton's gritty novels than the spoofy Dean Martin movies ostensibly based on them in the Sixties. At various times director Robert Luketic, star Josh Duhamel, and writers Michael Brandt and Derek Haas had been attached. But Paramount started fresh. In 2009, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (Alias, Mission: Impossible III), riding high on the success of the Star Trek reboot they'd co-scripted, came aboard to produce the Helm film, with veteran screenwriter Paul Attanasio (The Sum of All Fears, The Good German) scripting. Orci and Kurtzman told me at the time that their goal was a tone somewhere between the Hamilton novels and the Dino movies, but leaning toward the former—serious, but also fun. A few months later came the big bombshell, when Variety reported that Steven Spielberg (Munich) was circling the project to direct. Spielberg had long harbored a desire to make a popcorn spy flick. (Having approached the Bond producers in the late Seventies and been crushingly denied the opportunity to direct 007, he jumped at the opportunity to helm a project his pal George Lucas had dreamed up that he claimed was "better than Bond"—a little movie called Raiders of the Lost Ark.) Sadly, by that August, his brief flirtation with directing Matt Helm was over. A few months later, Seabiscuit director Gary Ross (fresh off of scripting another big project that never came to be, the fourth Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spider-man movie) was considered the front runner to direct Matt Helm, and for the first time Bradley Cooper (Alias) was mooted as the film's likely star. The script of note was still Attanasio's. But despite an apparently unanimous appreciation for that script, the movie, of course, never came to be. And the project seemed to go dormant.

Until today.

Today, Deadline reports that Paramount is once again attempting to revive the franchise, this time with Tom Shepherd penning a new script. Shepherd is the writer of the forthcoming The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle, starring Robert Downey Jr. as the beloved Victorian vet of children's book fame, as well as an action-adventure spec script teaming a young Agatha Christie with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to solve a baffling mystery, and a script about the real-life wartime espionage adventures of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming. While the writer may be new, a lot of familiar faces are still attached in behind-the-scenes capacities. Bradley Cooper remains attached to star as Helm, and Kurtzman and Orci (though no longer business partners) remain attached as executive producers, now joined by Grant Heslov and George Clooney (who was, at one point, himself rumored for the lead role). Additionally, the trade tantalizingly (if nebulously) reports that, "Steven Spielberg is involved in some capacity."

I've long since learned not to hold my breath on a new Matt Helm movie, but I'm still happy every time I read about movement on the project. Hamilton's 27 novels, beginning with 1960's Death of a Citizen, are largely secret cornerstones of the spy genre, and they deserve wider exposure and a faithful screen treatment. I admit that I'm a fan (to an extent, at least) of the quartet of Sixties Dean Martin pictures, but they're so far removed from Hamilton's wonderful books that they might as well bear no relation. I've often said that only one of them, Murderers' Row (co-starring Ann-Margaret and Karl Malden) even really qualifies as a movie. The others are bizarre assemblages of Sixties genre tropes like motorcycle chases, copious cocktail consumption, gratuitous zoom-ins on bikini-clad bottoms, and even, in the case of the first film, The Silencers, Martin singing. Plots are secondary at best, and non-existent at worst, and production values are generally low. Hamilton's novels, on the other hand, are terrific gritty, cynical, and brutal espionage stories on par with Ian Fleming and deserving of much wider recognition. It's possible that they've never gotten the credit they deserve outside of cult circles because they were published as paperback originals (excepting the 11th novel, The Menacers, which was the only one published in hardcover... but only in England), but that shouldn't be taken as a value judgment. They're fantastic, and like the spy fiction equivalent of the music of The Velvet Underground, hugely influential on the genre from Tom Clancy to 24 to Taken. Every spy fan should read them, and hopefully if a movie more faithful to the books ever gets made, the books themselves will become as widely known as they deserve to be.

By the way, while the series is probably best read in order, if you're looking to try just one Matt Helm book for a taste, I heartily recommend the sixth one, The Ambushers. Packed with sexy Soviet agents and nefarious neo-Nazis and rifles and missiles and even sword fights, it's quintessential spy fiction. And, if you're listening, Tom Shepherd... it would make a hell of a movie! Especially done as a period piece.

More Matt Helm on the Big Screen in Los Angeles Tuesday Night

Following the August screening of The Wrecking Crew (which turned out to be an absolutely beautiful 35mm print!), Los Angeles' New Beverly Cinema will show two more Dean Martin Matt Helm movies in 35mm on Tuesday, September 6. This double feature will consist of The Ambushers (1967, in an IB Technicolor print) at 7:30, and my own favorite in the series (the closest to being a "real movie"), Murderers' Row (1966), at 9:40. The Ambushers co-stars prolific Sixties spy babe Senta Berger (The Spy With My Face, To Commit A Murder), and Murderers' Row co-stars Ann-Margaret (The Swinger) and Karl Malden (Billion Dollar Brain). Tickets for the double bill are $8, available at the theater box office or online.

Lots of Los Angeles Sixties Spy Screenings Coming Up in August

There are a lot of very stylish Sixties spies playing on the big screen in Los Angeles this month.

First up, on August 7 and 8 (a Sunday and a Monday), Quentin Tarantino's New Beverly Cinema will screen the fourth and final Matt Helm movie, The Wrecking Crew (1968) on a Sharon Tate double fill with Roman Polanski's wonderful Hammer spoof The Fearless Vampire Killers. Besides Tate, The Wrecking Crew stars Dean Martin (The Silencers, Murderers' Row), Nancy Kwan (Wonder Women), Tina Louise (Fanfare for a Death Scene), Nigel Green (The Ipcress File, Deadlier Than the Male) and my own very favorite Sixties Spy Girl, the stunning Elke Sommer (Deadlier Than the Male, The Prize). Sure, the silly, spoofy Helm movies are very poor representations of Donald Hamilton's terrific, hard-hitting, and very serious novels, and sure, they're not very, er, good (in the conventional sense), but they are certainly entertaining! It's rare to see any of them play the revival circuit, and when one does it's usually one of the first two. I don't think I've ever seen The Wrecking Crew playing in a theater during the 16 years I've lived in L.A. The Wrecking Crew will screen in 35mm. Tickets are just $8.00 for both films, available at the box office or online.

Then, on Sunday, August 21, the American Cinematheque's Aero Theatre in Santa Monica will present a double feature of two particularly pop art spy movies, Our Man Flint and Modesty Blaise (both 1966) as part of their series "The Groovy Movies of 1966.") The first of the Derek Flint spy spoofs stars the inimitable James Coburn as the suave, know-it-all superspy, along with Lee J. Cobb, Gila Golan and Charlie Chan regular Benson Fong. But the film belongs, 100%, to Coburn. It simply wouldn't work without him, and because of him it's a must-see.

Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise has about as much to do with Peter O'Donnell's series of novels and comic strips as the Dino Matt Helm films do with those books... and also like the Helm movies, it can't really be called good. But it's still an eye-popping miasma of glorious Sixties design excess with a wonderfully infectious score by Johnny Dankworth (The Avengers). In fact, it boasts by far the best production design of any of these three films, and would be well worth seeing on the big screen for that reason alone... except that there is another reason. And that reason is Dirk Bogarde (Hot Enough for June) as Gabriel--positively the greatest Sixties spy villain trapped in one of the decade's otherwise weaker mainstream genre entries. Bogarde is an absolute treat in this film. Every line delivery is exquisite, and surely this role ranks among the all-time great camp performances. Terrence Stamp (Chessgame), Harry Andrews (The Deadly Affair, Danger Route), Clive Revill (Fathom) and a hopelessly miscast Monica Vitti in the title role also star. These films will be shown on DCP. Tickets to the double feature (which kicks off at 7:30pm) are $11.00 for the general public and may be purchased online or at the theater box office.

L.A. spy fans, don't miss the rare opportunity to see any of these campy Sixties spy spoofs on the big screen!

Secret Agent Spoofs on TCM Tonight

Set your DVRs: Turner Classic Movies has a great lineup of Sixties spy movies tonight! Spy spoofs to be exact. The fun starts at 8PM with James Coburn in Our Man Flint, followed by a pair of Matt Helm flicks, The Silencers and Murderers' Row (the latter being best of that series, in my opinion), Carry On Spying, and the two Vincent Price parodies, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs. So it's a very silly night of spying. In my opinion, every one of those movies are worth watching, though the actual quality varies quite a bit. Girl Bombs, in particular, is rather horrible, even though it's directed by one of the all-time masters of the craft, Mario Bava. The U.S. cut airing on TCM, however, is not very representative of Bava's work, as it differs considerably from his Italian cut, which actually served as a sequel to an entirely different movie. (Read more about that here.) But the first Dr. Goldfoot film is really quite enjoyable! The only downside is that there are no real rarities in this batch; all of these titles are available on DVD. But despite owning them all, I have a feeling I'm going to find myself sucked into this marathon tonight nonetheless! It serves as a terrific primer to the sillier side of the genre. For more information, check TCM's excellent website, which has incredibly in-depth and informative write-ups on each individual title.

Tradecraft: Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman Circle Corporate Espionage Movie

According to The Hollywood Reporter, former Air Force One rivals Harrison Ford (Patriot Games) and Gary Oldman (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) are circling an industrial espionage thriller called Paranoia, to be directed by Robert Luketic. The Hunger Games' Liam Hemsworth is also in the mix, adding a draw for the youth market for whom the combination of Indiana Jones and George Smiley isn't enough on its own. All the trade reveals about the plot is that it's "a corporate espionage thriller set in the world of dueling telecom giants," but it appears to be based on a book by spy writer Joseph Finder. (I've read other Finder books, but not that one.) Luketic's more famous for romantic comedies like Legally Blonde, but his previous spy experience includes directing the Ashton Kutcher flop Killers and flirting at one point with the forever-in-the-works Matt Helm reboot, at that time set to star Josh Duhamel.

Spies In Video Watchdog

The next issue of Video Watchdog Magazine has plenty to offer for spy fans!  Tim Lucas has posted the cover of issue 154 on his blog, and it's, frankly, irresistable.  The issue covers the new Optimum Entertainment Region 2 release of The Avengers' second season (and the few suriviving episodes of the first).  This remastered special edition, loaded with bonus features, is one of the major, major spy DVD releases of the year, and to my shame I haven't covered at all yet.  It caught me by surprise in the fall and I've probably got several unfinished posts about it and one day I'll finish one of them, but in the mean time pick up this issue of Video Watchdog.  I'm sure you couldn't hope for more in-depth coverage than Kim Newman provides.  (Personally, I can't wait to read it!)  Furthermore, this issue also examines the Matt Helm movies and the recent Region 1 release of the obscure Sixties Japanese spy film 3 Seconds Before Explosion (yet another one I've been meaning to post a review of but haven't had the chance).  On top of all that and totally un-spy-related (but of great interest to me) it also covers Bob Dylan's epic 1970s film Renaldo and Clara, filmed on his amazing Rolling Thunder Tour.  I watched all four plus self-indulgent hours once on crappy bootleg VHS while I was home sick, and found it to be a unique and rewarding experience.  (Granted, it helps to be a huge Dylan fan, and it probably also helped to be running a high fever.)  Anyway, Dylan aside, there are more than enough reasons for spy fans to pick up this issue of the best cult movie/home video magazine out there!  It hits newsstands January 2.

Gary Ross Interested In Directing Matt Helm?

I'm still smarting over Steven Spielberg's decision to pass on directing the new Matt Helm film in favor of an invisible rabbit. Ah, what might have been! Now, Aintitcool tips a story on The Playlist reporting that another director is circling the project: Gary Ross. That's right, the Seabiscuit guy. Ross recently contributed to the script for Spider-man 4 and just signed on to write and possibly direct Venom, a Spider-man spinoff for Sony. According to The Playlist, however, "Venom is a ways off and will have to wait; Matt Helm is coming first and is being scheduled to shoot in the summer of 2010 if all goes according to plan." The site goes on to reveal that Madmen's Jon Hamm was at one point considered for the titular role (if it was a period piece, that would have been incredible, but it's supposedly a contemporary, dare I say it, Bourne-ish take on Helm), but Bradley Cooper is now the frontrunner. Cooper's got spy cred from his Alias days, but I can't quite picture him as Helm. Whoever ends up in the lead, though, I'm very excited that that project has so much momentum. I keep hearing wonderful things about Paul Attanasio's script, and it's high time Helm were done right for the screen!

Tradecraft: Spielberg Passes On Directing Matt Helm Reboot

Aww. Both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety are reporting that Steven Spielberg has chosen his next directing project... and it's not Matt Helm, the big budget spy reboot being prepped at Paramount. The director, who is apparently attached as a producer to that project, had briefly flirted with directing it himself last week, but that isn't happening after all. Whether that was Spielberg's choice or Paramount's isn't known (studio politics were said to play a big role in the decision when the story was first reported), but instead he'll be directing a remake of the 1950 imaginary rabbit movie Harvey for DreamWorks and Fox. Too bad. Still, the mega-director's brief flirtation with Matt Helm (after apparently falling in love with Paul Attanasio's latest draft of the script) should at least be enough to assure that the film does, at long last, make it into production. Ah, what might have been...

Tradecraft: Steven Spielberg Interested In Directing Matt Helm!

Holy shit! Sorry, I try to keep my content family-friendly, but this item deserves such an exclamation! It looks like the long-gestating Matt Helm reboot may finally be gaining traction. Big traction! Variety's Michael Fleming is reporting that Steven Spielberg himself may direct the movie. As previously reported, Paul Attanasio has penned the latest draft of the script, and Mission: Impossible III and Star Trek writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (currently the hottest guys in the business) are producing. The trade says that "the current script is set in the present and the tone is closer to The Bourne Identity than those campy Matt Helm films that Dean Martin toplined in the 1960s." That bit should delight the many fans of Donald Hamilton's novels who have long dreamed of a truer, grittier screen adaptation!

Spielberg has famously long wanted to direct a popcorn spy movie. (I say "popcorn" to indicate that Munich doesn't count.) He approached the James Bond producers back in the late Seventies while still riding the success of Jaws, and Cubby Broccoli turned him down. Broccoli reasoned that a director of Spielberg's stature would surely not only demand final cut, but also profit participation, both things that the keepers of the 007 franchise have always been loathe to give up. When Broccoli refused his services, it's an oft-told tale that Spielberg's buddy George Lucas called him up and said, "I've got something better than Bond," and thus began the Indiana Jones phenomenon. Lucas and Spielberg later tipped their hat to Indy's cinematic progenitor by casting Sean Connery as the archaeologist's father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Now, ironically, Spielberg may once again be denied his spy-directing dreams. Even though he's pretty much the King of Hollywood and has his pick of scripts, Matt Helm remained at Paramount following Spielberg's DreamWorks' divorce from that studio. "While some DreamWorks-developed projects left behind at Paramount give Spielberg and [DreamWorks prexy Stacey] Snider the option to co-finance and co-distribute, Matt Helm isn’t one of them," reports Fleming. "The picture is 100% owned by Paramount." And Paramount, he reminds us, "has made a concerted effort to cut back on first-dollar gross deals [and] might not want to step up to Spielberg’s traditionally rich deal and could save money by going with another filmmaker." So poor Steven Spielberg, who used to clear his head by flying remote control helicopters around his garage while blasting "The James Bond Theme" from a portable stereo, is once again in the exact same position as he was way back in the 1970s when he wanted to direct 007!

Despite the high cost of doing business, I can't imagine the studio turning away the man who launched the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park franchises (not to mention Jaws). Fleming reports that Paramount execs are quite excited about the new script, and are excited about its franchise potential. And nobody does franchises like Steven Spielberg... Let's keep our fingers crossed. This is potentially very exciting news. I, for one, would love to see Spielberg try his hand at a good old-fashioned spy thriller!

The Variety article concludes by teasing that "the drama is expected to play out by week’s end."

Matt Helm Movie Update

A story in The Hollywood Reporter in April with big news about the latest attempt to bring Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm back to the big screen somehow escaped my attention at the time. The story was about producer Bobby Cohen being hired as president of Kurtzman/Orci Productions. And, yes, that means that Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the script masterminds behind the excellent Star Trek reboot that's currently raking in the dollars, are now officially producing Matt Helm! But the Star Trek scribes aren't writing it. Those duties fall to screenwriting heavyweight Paul Attanasio. All involved have impressive spy CVs already. Kurtzman and Orci wrote for and executive produced the 1800s-set Bruce Campbell tongue-in-cheek spy series Jack of All Trades early in their careers, then went on to write and produce on Alias, one of the best spy series of the modern era. They also wrote Mission: Impossible III. (That's the good one.) Attanasio co-wrote the screenplay for the most recent Jack Ryan movie, The Sum of All Fears, and also penned the infinitely superior Steven Soderbergh film The Good German, an underrated black and white tale of espionage and intrigue in postwar Berlin. So, in my opinion, Matt Helm appears to be in good hands. Attanasio moderated a panel with Kurtzman and Orci at the WGA tonight in Beverly Hills, and all three confirmed their involvement in the Matt Helm movie afterwards. The target date is Summer 2010, and they're aiming for a tone somewhere between Dean Martin's goofy spoofs and Donald Hamilton's gritty novels, but leaning more toward the latter. Serious, but fun.

Tradecraft: Paramount Developing New Matt Helm Movie

In a sidebar to the print version of an article about Paramount streamlining its slate to produce only twenty films in 2009 (bad economy, sign of the times, etc.), The Hollywood Reporter lists how Paramount and former partner DreamWorks will divide custody of properties formerly in development as part of the partnership. They say, "Paramount will develop another group of films that DreamWorks will have the option to co-finance and co-distribute, such as Matt Helm and Imaginary Friends." That's it. That's all the info. But it's interesting, because this is the first we've heard in a while of this project being alive at all!

DreamWorks optioned Donald Hamilton's series of Helm novels way back in 2001, aiming to develop a film closer to the books than the Dean Martin spoofs of the Sixties or the Anthony Franciosa TV series of the Seventies. At that time, Legally Blonde director Rober Luketic was attached to the project. He was still involved as late as early 2004, when he touted his Win A Date With Tad Hamilton star Josh Duhamel as a possible Helm. By the following year, however, that version of the project was dead, and Variety reported that DreamWorks had hired Michael Brandt and Derek Haas (the same guys who are now adapting Robert Ludlum's The Matarese Circle for MGM) to write a new Helm film "in a high six-figure deal." That was the last I'd heard anything about the project until today, so I'd assumed it was dead. I'm glad to hear that it's not, and to see that Paramount cares about the potential franchise enough to wrest it away from DreamWorks in the split! Hopefully that means it will actually become one of those twenty films they're planning to make...

Random Intelligence Dispatches For Tuesday, April 3

Spy DVDs Out Today
Universal releases last year's excellent spy opus The Good Shepherd on DVD today. It's not the expanded version writer Eric Roth promised in November, but it does contain a few deleted scenes (sixteen minutes' worth, to be precise). Hopefully we'll see something close to director Robert De Niro's early 4-hour cut on an eventual double-dip.

And from Fox comes the comedic Donald Sutherland/Eliott Gould reteaming, S*P*Y*S (1974). Hint: It's not M*A*S*H. One of the stranger features is an hour-long documentary director Irvin Kershner worked on early in his career, made for the U.S. government, called The Road of a Hundred Days. In the introduction to the film, Kershner recalls being asked to spy for America while in the Middle East filming! He turned the government down.

New Spy DVDs Coming To the UK
Network has announced release dates for a few of their upcoming spy DVDs. Foremost among them is Danger Man: The Complete 50 Minute Series which presents all the hour-long episodes (which aired in America as Secret Agent) on July 23. Producer Ralf Smart's earlier The Invisible Man: The Complete Series, which was sort of a dry run for Danger Man, arrives two months earlier on May 21. Smart's take on The Invisible Man reimagines H.G. Wells' classic anti-hero as a Cold War asset for the British Secret Service. Both series are already available in the US, the former from A&E and the latter from Dark Sky.

ITC's short-lived The Zoo Gang: The Complete Series, recounting the adventures of a group of aging WWII veterens on the beautiful French Riviera, comes out June 18. Finally, the 1977 UK TV movie Philby, Burgess and Maclean, starring Derek Jakobi as Burgess, is due on July 16. Neither of these is available on Region 1 DVD.

RIP Donald Hamilton
Aintitcool reports the sad passing of Donald Hamilton, author of the Matt Helm series of books. The Helm books were gritty, hard-nosed espionage tales, bearing little resemblance to the silly drunken swagger of Dean Martin's film versions. Hamilton straddled the rift between Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming, and his creation was sort of a hardboiled James Bond. Hamilton died in Sweden at the age of 90. According to the obit, a final Helm adventure currently remains unpublished.

Rumors continue to persist of a new film series, truer to the source material, but any such films have yet to materialize. The last name mentioned for the role was Las Vegas actor Josh Duhamel.

MI5 Replaces Avengers On BBC America
Variety reports that BBC America is radically overhauling it's schedule, and the first order of business is dumping vintage mainstays like The Avengers, The Saint and The Prisoner. The network's new chief, Garth Ancier, said, "We're undergoing a complete transformation. We've taken shows like The Avengers and The Saint off the schedule. We want to present a view of contemporary Britain. It's what the BBC does best. I'd rather have Wire in the Blood than Benny Hill." Part of the new, younger-skewing line-up is the latest season of MI-5, formerly seen (in an incomprehensibly cut-up version) on A&E.

Young Bond Updates
I'm a little late in the game in doing so, but I finally picked up the new American paperback edition of Charlie Higson's second Young Bond novel, Blood Fever. It's available now at bookstores everywhere. I like this edition much better than the British first edition paperback. It's a quality trade printed on good, heavy paper. (The British one had cheap, thin pages.) It's a good size, and will actually sit open on a table top. If you want to preserve the collectibility of your British version, you have to read it very carefully to avoid cracking the fragile spine. No such precautions are required with this version.

In other Young Bond news, be sure to check out The Young Bond Dossier's amazing gallery of cover art for all the various international editions! It's a truly impressive collection.

Stephen Fry To Write Bond?

Young Bond Dossier also has a truly tantalizing rumor today! They report (while professing no certainty whatsoever) that the one and only Stephen Fry might be the next author of adult Bond novel! (A new continuation novel is planned for Ian Fleming's Centenary next year.) Seeing how well Charlie Higson has done with the young version of the character, it might be a wise choice to pick again from the ranks of the British Comedy Elite (who seem to all be adept at spy writing), and Fry is as elite as it gets. Plus, he's a great writer! Although based on his previous spy novel, The Gun Seller, I'd also love to see his old comedy partner Hugh Laurie take a crack at the literary 007... (Not that he has time for writing these days.)

Moneypenny Diaries on Ebay
Finally, for American readers interested in obtaining the first volume of Kate Westbrook's James Bond continuation series I write about so often here, the first volmes of The Moneypenny Diaries is currently up on Ebay for the low price of $3.50. It beats paying for shipping from Amazon.co.uk! For the record, I am not the seller and have no connection with this auction other than a strong desire to see more readers become acquainted with this fantastic series, which still has yet to see publication on these shores.