The Battle for Bond (2007), by Robert Sellers, is a cinema history book of how the literary James Bond metamorphosed to the cinema James Bond. The book details the collaboration among film producer Kevin McClory, novelist Ian Fleming, and screenwriter Jack Whittingham to create the film Thunderball and all that devolved from it.

After the project’s collapse, without his collaborators’ permission, Fleming based his Thunderball (1961) novel upon their joint work. In 1963, McClory and Whittingham sued him in a very public and acrimonious trial. This history features unpublished letters, private lawsuit documents, and cast-crew interviews. The author obtained five Thunderball screenplays, two by Fleming, three by Whittingham, and two treatments by Fleming that document the creation and development of this seminal James Bond project.

The Battle for Bond is a story of bitter recrimination, personal and business betrayals, million-dollar lawsuits, and death: Ian Fleming was accused of and sued for plagiarism; months into the lawsuit and trial, the fifty-six-year-old writer died of a heart attack. Kevin McClory won the film rights and chose a single, co-production deal with Harry Saltzman and Albert R Broccoli: Thunderball (1965) that was released at Christmas.

McClory’s court victory entitled him to remake Thunderball as >Never Say Never Again (1983), again with Sean Connery as James Bond, the cinematic competition Broccoli had desperately tried to legally ban. With the success of the remake, McClory attempted to continue with his own James Bond film series, but was legally thwarted by Broccoli and MGM. In a later unsuccessful lawsuit, McClory went further and now claimed that he created the cinematic James Bond, and demanded a share of the three billion dollars earned by the official EON film series.

Apparently, in late February 2008, the Ian Fleming Will Trust threatened legal action against the publisher of The Battle for Bond, per a posting on the publisher’s website. It has been suggested that these threats have their basis, at least in part, on the usage of Fleming’s private correspondence as a primary source. At the current time, the book has been pulled from publication, although copies remain in stock at online retailers. The implications of the threatened litigation remain undetermined.

See also:

• Thunderball: Controversy