I’m glad I didn’t cover this world famous movie producer last year because 2012 is the 50th anniversary of Dr. No, the first Bond film he co-helmed and what would be the template for the franchise. There had been attempts done before 1962, they just weren’t very good nor memorable. Casino Royale was adapted for TV in 1954, check it here, PU.
Broccoli is the person who usually gets the credit for transforming Fleming’s rather threadbare novels into the sexy, exciting and over-the-top movies James Bond is associated with. He is definitely responsible for the female silhouettes during the opening credits.
But first I want to cover a little territory about the man before he became involved with one of the longest running franchises in film history.
He is a descendent of the family in Italy that had the vegetable named after them, not the other way around, I’ll save the outcome of this research for next year. Carrots have a similar backstory on why they’re orange.
Cubby started out in New York when the city wasn’t as large and it still had farms; his family raised vegetables. He then went into other lines of work around the metropolis until he took a trip to LA to visit a cousin. There Cubby was bit by the show-business bug and decided to stay. He mostly tried to be an actor.
In the Thirties, he was a suspect in Ted Healy’s death. Fans of the Three Stooges may recognize Healy’s name. Moe and Shemp were originally his sidekicks for his Vaudeville act. Long story short, Healy fired the Stooges after their first movie together and tried to be a solo star. His alcoholism, bad temper and womanizing kept his career from taking off. One evening he picked a fight at the Trocadero with three people, Broccoli being one them, who beat up the tar out of Healy. It must’ve been pretty serious, Healy died of the injuries he received. The studios wanted to downplay the incident since another suspect was movie star Wallace Beery so a cover story was devised about Healy being assaulted by college students. To make things stick, Beery was shipped to Europe for a few months. I have many doubts in the validity of this account, I’ll just go with this being a rumor Broccoli had to deal with like those stories you hear about Rod Stewart and Richard Gere, we all know those.
Acting didn’t pan out. Cubby moved on to directing in the Forties. He mostly worked as an assistant director at 20th Century Fox. When America got involved in WWII, he joined the Navy where he made new connections and helped coordinate entertainment for US forces. After the war, he formed a production company with Irving Allen. Things were a little rough, their first movie didn’t do well forcing Cubby to work other gigs to pay the bills: from selling Christmas trees to being an agent; at least he represented some cool people like Robert Wagner and Lana Turner.
By the early Fifties, Allen and Broccoli moved their company to London. There the duo cranked out a few hits. It unraveled in 1960 with a film about Oscar Wilde that bankrupted them, seems the story was too frank about the author’s homosexuality which in 1960 would be just mentioning it. Allen and Broccoli dissolved their partnership, went their own separate ways.
Cubby wasn’t ready to give up but one evening, his wife asked him what would he really like to do. His answer, “I always wanted to film the Ian Fleming James Bond books.” This led to him to meet Harry Saltzman, a Canadian who owned the film rights. They teamed up and you know the rest.
Cubby continued to be the main producer all the way up to Goldeneye despite (the awful) A View to a Kill being the last chapter he actually contributed to. His daughter Barbara and stepson Michael Wilson gradually took over. They were completely in charge when he passed away in 1996.
Besides Bond, he also produced another Ian Fleming idea Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
To reiterate, James Bond is an English hero and paragon…never mind his Scottish name and background, much like his creator but it took an Italian to make the superspy viable, sexy, interesting and a worldwide name!