Moonraker 30° Anniversary

Moonraker was released on June 26, 1979, in the United Kingdom and was released three days later in the United States, grossing $70,308,099 in the UK. It opened in 788 theaters, grossing a total of $210,308,099 worldwide. In mainland Europe the most common month of release was in August 1979, opening in the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden between the 13 and 18 August. Moonraker was released in Kenya on 27 August 1979. Given that the film was produced in France and involved some notable French actors, the French premiere for the film was relatively late, released there on 10 October 1979.

Moonraker is the eleventh spy film in the James Bond series, and the fourth to star Roger Moore as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. The film, directed by Lewis Gilbert, co-stars Lois Chiles, Michael Lonsdale, Corinne Clery, and Richard Kiel. In the film, Bond is sent to investigate the mysterious theft of a space shuttle, leading him to Hugo Drax, the billionaire owner of the shuttle-manufacturing firm. Along with the space scientist Dr. Holly Goodhead, who later is identified as also being a Central Intelligence Agency agent investigating Mr. Drax, Bond follows the trail of clues from California to Venice, Italy, Rio de Janeiro, and the Amazon rain forest, and finally into outer space in a bid to prevent a genocidal plot to wipe out the world population and to re-create humanity with a master race.

Moonraker was intended by its creator Ian Fleming to be turned into a film even before he completed the novel in 1954, since he based the novel on a manuscript he had written even earlier than this. The producers of the James Bond film series had originally intended to do Moonraker in 1973 with Roger Moore making his debut as Bond, but the making of this movie was put on hold and finally released in 1979, coinciding with the science fiction genre which had become extremely popular during this period with films such as Star Wars (1977).

Derek Meddings, a long-time contributor to the James Bond series, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for the special effects used in this movie and its space scenes.

Moonraker was the highest grossing film of the series until the Pierce Brosnan Bond film GoldenEye. Moonraker earned a total of $210,300,000 world wide - surpassing the earlier Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Moonraker was also noted for its high production cost for a Bond film, spending almost twice as much money as the preceding James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me.

Ian Fleming had originally intended the novel, published in 1954, to be made into a film even before he began writing it and was based on an original manuscript of a screenplay which had been on his mind for years. In 1955, the film rights to Moonraker were initially sold to John Payne of the Rank Organisation for £10,000 (£188,775 present value), paying a $1000 a month option for nine months. Payne was the first person interested in making the novels into a film series, but later rejected the idea based on the fact it wouldn't be possible for him to obtain the rights to the entire 007 series. In spring 1959, due to on-going difficulties, Fleming eventually bought back the rights for his novels, shortly before selling them to Harry Saltzman.
As with several previous Bond films, the story from Fleming's novel is almost entirely dispensed with, and little more than the name of Hugo Drax was used in film, in favour of a film more in keeping with the era of science fiction. The 2002 Bond film Die Another Day makes further use of some ideas and character names from the novel. Tom Mankiewicz had written a full screenplay of Moonraker that was eventually partly discarded. According to Mankiewicz footage shot at Drax's lairs was considerably more detailed than the edited result in the final version. The crew had shot a scene with Drax meeting his co-financiers in his jungle lair and they used the same chamber room below the space shuttle launch pad that Bond and Goodhead eventually escape from. This scene was shot but later cut out. Another scene involving Bond and Goodhead in a meditation room aboard Drax's space station, was shot but never used in the final film. However press stills were released of the scene which featured on Topps trading cards in 1979 as was a theatrical trailer which featured Bond punching Jaws in the face aboard the space station, neither of which featured in the complete film. Some scenes from Mankiewicz's script were later used in subsequent films, including the Acrostar Jet sequence used in the pre-credit sequence for Octopussy, and the Eiffel Tower scene in A View to a Kill.
In March 2004, an Internet hoax stated rumours about a lost 1956 version of Moonraker by Orson Welles, and a James Bond web site repeated it on April Fool's Day in 2004 as a hoax.

Supposedly, this recently discovered lost film was 40 minutes of raw footage with Dirk Bogarde as Bond, Welles as Drax, and Peter Lorre as Drax's henchman. A film poster was created displaying the actors and the title of the film.

The role of the villain, Hugo Drax, was originally offered to James Mason. However well-established French actor Michael Lonsdale was cast as the billionaire Drax, partly due to his fluency in English, and Corinne Clery for the part of Corinne Dufour, given that the film was produced in France. American actress Lois Chiles had originally been offered the role of Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), but had turned down the part when she decided to take temporary retirement. Chiles was cast as Holly Goodhead by chance, when she was given the seat next to Lewis Gilbert on a flight and he believed she would be ideal for the role as the CIA scientist. Drax's henchman Chang, played by Japanese aikido instructor Toshiro Suga, was recommended for the role by executive producer Michael G. Wilson, who was one of his pupils. In Moonraker, Wilson also continued a tradition in the Bond films he started in the film Goldfinger where he has a small cameo role. He appears twice in the film, first as a tourist outside the Venini Glass shop and museum in Venice, then at the end of the film as a technician in Drax's control room.

The Jaws character, played by Richard Kiel makes a return, although in Moonraker the role is played more for comedic effect than in The Spy Who Loved Me. Jaws was intended to be a villain against Bond to the bitter end, but director Lewis Gilbert stated on the DVD documentary that he received so much fan mail from small children saying "Why can't Jaws be a goodie not a baddie", that as a result he was persuaded to make Jaws gradually become Bond's ally at the end of the film.

Production began on August 14, 1978. Main shooting was switched from the usual 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios to France, due to high taxation in England at the time. Only the cable car interiors and space battle exteriors were filmed at Pinewood. The massive sets of Moonraker designed by Ken Adam were the largest ever constructed in France and required more than 222,000 man-hours to construct (roughly 1000 hours by each of the crew on average). They were shot at three of France's largest film studios in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Epinay and Billancourt. 220 technicians used 100 tonnes of metal, two tonnes of nails and 10,000 feet of wood to build the three-story space station set at Eponay Studios. The elaborate space set for Moonraker holds the world record for having the largest number of zero gravity wires in one scene.The Venetian glass museum and fight between Bond and Chang was shot at Boulogne Studios in a building which had once been a World War II Luftwaffe aircraft factory during Germany's occupation of France. The scene in the Venice glass museum and warehouse holds the record for the largest amount of break-away sugar glass used in a single scene.

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Drax's mansion, set in California, was actually filmed at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, about 55 kilometres (34 mi) southeast of Paris, for the exteriors and Grand Salon. The remaining interiors, including some of the scenes with Corinne Defour and the drawing room, were filmed at the Château de Guermantes.

Much of the film was shot in the cities of London, Paris, Venice, Palmdale and Rio de Janeiro. The production team had considered India and Nepal as a location in the film but on arriving there to investigate they found it inconceivable to write it into the script, particularly with time restrictions to do so. They decided on Rio de Janeiro relatively early on, which Cubby Broccoli had visited on vacation, and a team was sent to the city in early 1978 to capture initial footage from the Mardi Gras festival which featured in the film.

At the Rio de Janeiro location, many months later, Roger Moore arrived several days later than scheduled for shooting due to recurrent health problems and an attack of kidney stones he received in France. After arriving in Rio, he was immediately whisked off the plane and went straight to hair and makeup, before reboarding the plane, to film the sequence with him arriving as James Bond in the film. Sugarloaf Mountain was a prominent location in the film, and during filming of the cable car sequence in which Bond and Goodhead are attacked by Jaws during mid-air transportation high above Rio, stuntman Richard Graydon slipped and narrowly avoided falling to his death. For the scene in which Jaws bites into the steel tramway cable with his teeth, the cable was actually made of liquorice, although Richard Kiel was still required to use his steel dentures.

Iguazu Falls was a natural location depicted in the film, although as stated by Q in the film, the falls were intended to be located somewhere in the upper catchment of the Amazon rather than where the falls are actually located in the south. The second unit had originally planned on sending an actual boat over the falls. However on attempting to release it, the boat became firmly embedded on rocks near the edge. Despite a dangerous attempt by helicopter and rope ladder to retrieve it, the plan had to be abandoned, forcing the second unit to use a miniature at Pinewood instead. The exterior of Drax's pyramid headquarters in the Amazon rain forest near the falls was actually filmed at the Tikal Mayan ruins in Guatemala. The interior of the pyramid, however, was designed by Ken Adam at Pinewood studio in which he purposefully used a shiny coating to make the walls look plastic and false. All of the space center scenes were shot at the Vehicle Assembly Building of Kennedy Space Center, Florida although some of the earlier scenes of the Moonraker assembly plant were filmed on location at the Rockwell International manufacturing facilities in Palmdale, California.

The early scene involving Bond and Jaws in which Bond is pushed out of the aircraft without a parachute took weeks of planning and preparation. The skydiving sequence was coordinated by Don Calvedt under the supervision of second unit director John Glen. Stuntman Jake Lombard was hired to double for Bond, who would later pose as Moore's double in films such as Octopussy and for Necros in The Living Daylights. B. J. Worth, who played the stunt double of Jaws, would also later become a consistent member of the stunt team for aerial sequences throughout the 1980s, into Timothy Dalton's films such as The Living Daylights. Members of the U.S. championship skydiving team aided the stunt team with the planning and the team's master rigger designed a one-inch thick parachute pack that could be concealed beneath the suit to give the impression of the missing parachute. When the stunt men opened their parachutes at the end of every shoot, custom-sewn velcro costume seams would separate to allow the hidden parachutes to open. The skydiver cinematographer used a lightweight Panavision camera, bought from an old pawn shop in Paris, which he had adapted, and attached to his helmet to shoot the entire sequence, The scene took a total of 88 skydives by the stuntmen to complete it.

For the scene involving the opening of the musical electronic laboratory door lock in Venice, producer Albert R. Broccoli requested special permission from director Steven Spielberg to use the five-note leitmotif from his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). In 1985, Broccoli would return the favor by fulfilling Spielberg's request to use the James Bond theme music for a scene in his film, The Goonies (1985).

Moonraker was the third of the three Bond films for which the theme song was performed by Shirley Bassey ( following Goldfinger and Diamonds are Forever) Kate Bush and Frank Sinatra were both considered for the vocals, before Johnny Mathis was approached and offered the opportunity. However Mathis, despite having started recording with Barry, was unable to complete the project, leaving producers to offer the song to Bassey within just weeks of the release date. Bassey made the recordings with very short notice and as a result, she never regarded the song 'as her own' as she had never had the chance to perform it or promote it first. The film uses two versions of the title theme song, a ballad version heard over the main titles, and a disco version. Confusingly, the United Artists single release labelled the tracks on the 7" single as "Moonraker (Main Title)" for the version used to close the film and "Moonraker (End Title)" for the track that opened the film. The song made little impact on the charts, reaching 159, partly attributed to Bassey's failure to promote the single, given the last-minute decision to quickly record it to meet the schedule.

Finally in 2005, Bassey sang the song for the first time outside James Bond on stage as part of a medley of her three Bond title songs.

Title sequence is designed by Maurice Binder.

The soundtrack of Moonraker was composed by John Barry and recorded in Paris, again, as with production, marking a turning point away from the English location at CTS Studios in London. The score also marked a turning point in John Barry's output, abandoning the Kentonesque brass of his earlier Bond scores and instead scoring the film with slow, rich string passages - a trend which Barry would continue in the 1980s with scores such as Out of Africa and Somewhere in Time. For Moonraker, Barry uses for the first time since Diamonds Are Forever (1971) a piece of music called "007" (on track 7), the secondary Bond theme composed by Barry which was introduced in From Russia with Love over the end credits. Barry also made use of classical music passages in the film. For the scene where Bond visits Drax in his chateau, Drax plays Frédéric Chopin's Prelude no. 15 in D-flat major (op. 28), "Raindrop") on his grand piano. Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka by Johann Strauss II was featured during the hovercraft scene on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet Overture" was used for the scenes in Brazil in which Jaws meets Dolly following his accident. Other passages pay homage to earlier films including Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra (op. 30), associated with 2001: A Space Odyssey) with the hunting horn playing its distinctive first three notes, Elmer Bernstein's theme from The Magnificent Seven when Bond appears on horseback in gaucho clothing at MI6 headquarters in Brazil, and the alien-contacting theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as the key-code for a security door as mentioned previously.

Reviewing Moonraker, Danny Peary wrote that “The worst James Bond film to date has Roger Moore walking through the paces for his hefty paycheck and giving way to his double for a series of unimaginative action scenes and “humorous” chases. There’s little suspense and the humor falls flat. Not only is Jaws so pacified by love that he becomes a good guy, but the filmmakers also have the gall to set the finale in outer space and stage a battle right out of Star Wars.”

But other reviews of Moonraker have expressed that the film is one of Moore's stronger films as James Bond. James Berardinelli of Reelviews.net for instance remarked that, "the solid special effects, well-executed action sequences, and a strict reliance upon the 'Bond Formula' keep this film among Moore's better entries." Despite criticism about the far-fetched nature of the plot, websites such as Rotten Tomatoes have awarded the film a 62% "fresh" rating.

Aside from being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, the film, given its unusual attention to the science fiction genre than the average James Bond film, received attention from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films and was nominated for several Saturn Awards in 1980. The nominees were for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Special Effects, and Best Supporting Actor (Richard Kiel). The DVD of the film was later nominated in 2004 for the Golden Satellite Award Best Classic DVD Release. Moonraker won the Golden Screen Award in Germany in 1980.

The exaggerated nature of the plot and space station sequence has seen the film parodied on numerous occasions. Of note is the Austin Powers spoof film The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) which whilst a parody of other James Bond films, pays reference to Moonraker by Dr. Evil's lair in space. The scene in which Drax is shot by the cyanide dart and ousted into space is parodied by Power's ejection of Dr. Evil's clone Mini-Me into outer space in the same way.