Beschreibung:

Richard MaibaumIan Fleming's Thunderball. circa early 1961
Typescript screenplay, 129 pages, with two additional notes with manuscript annotations stapled in, with annotations throughout in two hands, green wrappers, metal staples, manuscript date "Received 18 August 1961"
AN EARLY SCREENPLAY OF THE EON VERSION OF THUNDERBALL.
Richard Maibaum, who wrote this screenplay, worked on all but three of the Bond films from Dr. No (1962) to License to Kill (1989). Maibaum once said of his Bond adaptations that “the real trick of it is to find the villain's caper. Once you've got that, you're off to the races and the rest is fun.”
This screenplay was written four years before the film was eventually released, and is one of the many iterations the film took before its 1965 final version. Thunderball was originally intended to be the first ever Bond movie, and was written purely for the screen by the Irish writer and director Kevin McClory and the screenwriter Jack Whittingham, in collaboration with Ian Fleming.
From mid-1959 the writing process began, but over time the relationship between McClory, Whittingham and Fleming soured. While Fleming was at his house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica in early 1960, he wrote the novel Thunderball, based on the screenplay. McClory read an advance copy of the book the following year and immediately petitioned the High Court to stop its publication. This eventually led to the McClory v Fleming hearing. Fleming was unwell at the time and suffered a heart attack during the hearing. He suffered his fatal heart attack on 12 August 1964, nine months after the trial.
When Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman formed Eon in 1961, they attained the rights of the James Bond movies. The company wanted to produce Thunderball first and drafted Maibaum in, which resulted in the present screenplay. However, because of the ongoing court case, they decided against this and proceeded with Dr. No instead.