over what was happening with his beloved
creation, provide locals to help with location
scouting and offer advice from behind his very
busy cigarette holder. He was suitably impressed
with what he saw in Connery to meddle with
the ancestral lineage of Bond in his next book,
You Only Live Twice, noting that Bond’s father
was from Glencoe. Also,Dr. Nois one of a
select handful of film adaptations of Fleming
works that stick relatively close to the source
material, with only minor changes implemented:
Bond’s fight with a squid was removed, and
a spider, rather than a centipede, crawled over
him in his bed.
As a thanks for putting Broccoli and
Saltzman together to make the deal, their
mutual friend, screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz
(The Millionairess, The Day The Earth Caught
Fire), had been tasked, along with Richard
Maibaum, with adapting the book into a
screenplay. After a few false starts (for instance,
writing the eponymous villain Dr. No as a
monkey god worshipped by the island natives
— Broccoli told him to change it immediately),
Mankowitz would later ask for his name to be
removed from the script. Having seen the initial
rushes, he was convinced it was to be a disaster.
Irish screenwriter Johanna Harwood and
thriller writer Berkely Mather were hired to
stitch together all of the elements of Maibaum’s
script and inject the appropriate degree of
Britishness, laying the foundations for the future
franchise as they did so. Harwood later worked
onFrom Russia With Love — these would be theonly times a female screenwriter wrote for Bond
until Phoebe Waller-Bridge was hired in 2019 for
No Time To Die.
Connery made Bond sexy, but a slinky, virile
theme tune would help further, adding an extra
layer of cool and devil-may-care. Bond and
music, it would transpire, were like fl owers and
rain, Wint and Kidd; essential together, and
nowhere near as eff ective alone. Singer and
composer Monty Norman, the hot property of
the London theatre scene, was immediately
hired by the producers to give Bond some more
je ne sais quoi. At fi rst he was hesitant, but when
he realised it came with a free holiday to Jamaica
for inspiration, became keen, digging up a theme
entitled Bad Sign, Good Sign that he’d had sitting
around in a drawer, from an unproduced musical Making of Dr. No: © 1962 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. and Danjaq, LLC.