Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (61 page)

Line:
“Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.”

Supposedly Said By:
Colonel William Prescott to American soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill, as they lay in wait for the British

Actually:
Sounds like another American myth. There’s no record of Prescott ever saying it, but there are records of both Prince Charles of Prussia (in 1745) and Frederick the Great (in 1757) using the command.

Line:
“You dirty rat.”

Supposedly Said By:
James Cagney in one of his movies

Actually:
Every Cagney impressionist says it, but Cagney never did. He made over 70 movies but never spoke this line in any of them.

Line:
“Nice guys finish last.”

Supposedly Said By:
Leo Durocher in 1946, when he was manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers

Actually:
While being interviewed, he waved toward the Giants’ dugout and said, “The nice guys are all over there. In seventh place.” When the article came out, reporters had changed his statement to “The nice guys are all over there in last place.” As it was repeated, it was shortened to “Nice guys finish last.” Durocher protested that he’d never made the remark but couldn’t shake it. Finally he gave in, and eventually used it as the title of his autobiography.

Line:
“Gerry Ford is so dumb he can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Supposedly Said By:
President Lyndon Johnson

Actually:
This remark was cleaned up for the public—what Johnson really said was, “Gerry Ford is so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.”

Line:
“How I wish I had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done.”

Supposedly Said By:
Charles Darwin, on his deathbed

Actually:
The Christian evangelist, Jimmy Swaggart, announced in a speech in 1985 that Darwin had spoken the words as he lay dying, and asked that the Bible be read to him. But it was an old lie started shortly after Darwin’s death by a Christian fanatic who was speaking to seminary students. Darwin’s daughter and son both deny that their father ever had any change of heart about his scientific theory. According to his son, his last words were, “I am not the least afraid to die.”

Line:
“I rob banks because that’s where the money is.”

Supposedly Said By:
Infamous bank robber Willie Sutton

Actually:
According to Sutton, it was a reporter who thought up this statement and printed it. “I can’t even remember when I first read it,” Sutton once remarked. “It just seemed to appear one day, and then it was everywhere.”

Line:
“Play it again, Sam.”

Supposedly Said By:
Humphrey Bogart, in the classic film
Casablanca

Actually:
This may be the most famous movie line ever, but it wasn’t in the movie. Ingrid Bergman said, “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’” And Bogart said “If she can stand it, I can. Play it!” But the only person who ever used “Play it again, Sam” was Woody Allen—who jokingly called his theatrical homage to Bogart
Play It Again, Sam
because he knew it was a misquote.

Line:
“Elementary, my dear Watson.”

Supposedly Said By:
Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s books

Actually:
Holmes never said it in any of the stories. It was a movie standard, however, beginning in 1929 with
The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

Every
007
fan has their own opinion of which actor—Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton,
or Pierce
Brosnan—made the best James Bond. …but do you know how each actor landed the role? Here are their stories.

S
EAN CONNERY
(See
page 211
for the whole story.)

The role of James Bond turned Connery from a nobody into an international sex symbol in less than five years…but as Connery’s fame grew with each Bond film, so did his frustration with the part. He worried about being typecast, he hated reporters, and he was annoyed by the crowds of fans that followed him wherever he went. And since his image was inextricably linked with the Bond character, he was angry that Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman wouldn’t make him a full partner in the 007 films and merchandising deals. He left the series in 1967 after making
You Only Live Twice,
his sixth Bond film.

GEORGE LAZENBY

In 1967 a friend asked George Lazenby, a part-time actor, to substitute for him on a blind date when his girlfriend suddenly came back to town.

The blind date “was supposed to be some up-and-coming agent, which was why he wanted to go out with her,” Lazenby recounted years later, “but I didn’t care. I was running a health studio in Belgium.” Some months later, the agent remembered Lazenby and contacted him when the search for Connery’s replacement in On
Her Majesty’s Secret Service
got underway. “I got the part,” Lazenby remembers, “and my friend’s career fizzled.”

So did Lazenby’s: After fighting with the producers, the director, and co-star Diana Rigg during the making of On
Her Majesty’s Secret Service
, he either quit or was fired, depending on who you ask.

When it premiered in 1969, On
Her
Majesty’s
Secret Service
was panned by the critics and was a box-office disappointment; today it is considered one of the best of the Bond films.

SEAN CONNERY (II)

Panicked by the drubbing On
Her Majesty’s Secret Service
took at the box office, Broccoli and Saltzman paid a reluctant Sean Connery $1,25 million plus a huge share of the profits to return to the series in the 1971 film
Diamonds Are Forever.

Connery needed the boost—most of his post-Bond films were box-office flops—but he quit the series again after just one film, turning down a reported $5 million for
Live and Let Die.
The role went instead to his old friend Roger Moore. (Burt Reynolds was also considered, but Broccoli insisted on an Englishman.)

Connery returned for a seventh and last time in the 1983 film
Never Say Never Again.

ROGER MOORE

Moore was one of Ian Fleming’s original choices for the Bond rote, and he finally got his shot in
Live and Let Die
. Unlike Lazenby, Moore succeeded—largely by complementing, not imitating, Connery’s interpretation of the role. As Raymond Benson writes in
The James Bond Bedside
Companion,

      
From
Live and Let Die
on, the scriptwriters tailored the screenplays to fit Roger Moore’s personality. As a result, James Bond lost much of the
machismo
image which was so prominent in the sixties. It seems Bond never gets hurt in any of the subsequent films—the Roger Moore Bond uses his wits rather than fists to escape dangerous situations.

Moore’s departure from Connery’s Bond was so dramatic that it inspired a Beatles-vs.-Rolling Stones-type rivalry among 007 fans over who was the best Bond. “People who saw their first Bond with Sean never took to Roger,” says 007 marketing executive Charles Juroe, “and people who saw their first Bond with Roger never took to Sean. Roger’s movies grossed more than Sean’s.” Moore made a total of seven Bond films between 1973 and 1985, tying Sean Connery. His last was A
View to a Kill.

TIMOTHY DALTON

First choice for Moore’s replacement was Irish actor Pierce Brosnan, star of the recently cancelled American TV series “Remington Steele.” Brosnan was given the unofficial nod for the role, but when word of the deal leaked, it generated so much publicity for the failing “Remington Steele” that the show’s ratings skyrocketed to fifth place in the Nielsens, their highest in history, prompting NBC to
un
-cancel the show and force Brosnan to serve out the remainder of his contract. With Brosnan out of the running, the job went to British actor Timothy Dalton, who appeared in
The Living Daylights
and
License to Kill.

Dalton was considered by many 007 purists to be the best Bond since Connery; but he never dodged the stigma of being runner-up to Pierce Brosnan, and both films were box-office disappointments. In April 1994, amid rumors he was being fired, Dalton quit the series.

PIERCE BROSNAN

Two months after Dalton quit, Brosnan finally won the nod to play 007 in
Goldeneye
, the 18th film in the series. “Most of today’s biggest male stars were eliminated from consideration for the role,” the
New York Times
reported in 1994. “Hugh Grant was thought too wimpy, Liam Neeson too icy. Mel Gibson…was deemed not quite right. Even Sharon Stone was talked about for the part of Bond.” Brosnan turned out to be a wise choice:
Goldeneye
was the highest-grossing Bond film in history, with more than $350 million in ticket sales around the world. He signed on for three more films.

DAVID NIVEN

There will always be debates over which Bond movie is the best, but there isn’t much disagreement over which one was the worst:
Casino Royale,
starring David Niven as James Bond. By the time Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman bought the film rights to Ian Fleming’s other novels, the rights to his first book,
Casino Royale,
had already been sold to someone else.

Work on the film version of
Casino Royale
did not begin until 1967, when Sean Connery’s Bond image was already well established. Rather than compete against Connery directly, the producers decided to make a Bond spoof starring Niven, Peter Sellers, and Woody Allen.

Budgeted at $8 million,
Casino Royale
was the most expensive Bond film to date, as well as one of the messiest. Seven different
writers wrote the screenplay, five different directors worked on various parts of the film, and seven of the characters are named James Bond. “What might have begun as a great idea ends up a total mess,” Raymond Benson writes in
The James Bond Bedside Companion
. “The film should not be considered part of the James Bond series.”

POISON GAS

One of the ways the U.S. intelligence community protected itself against adverse publicity and budget cuts in the early 1960s was by sending agents to Hollywood to act as “technical advisors” in spy films, thereby making the spy business appear vital and heroic to the public. Dr. No and other early Bond films were no exception: they had real-life secret agents working on the set.

The agents turned out to be quite useful, as Bond scriptwriter Richard Maibum recalls:

      
Before we got done, we had literally about ten technical agents, all telling us marvelous stories of what had happened to them all over the world which we incorporated into the plot. There were fore-shadowings of things in the Bond films—the pipe that was a gun, and other gadgets. There were some things that we couldn’t use, such as foul stuff smelling like an enormous fart that the OSS agents used to spray on people they wished to discredit.