Forever and a Death

Afterword by Jeff Kleeman

I discovered the joys of James Bond in 1973, when I was nine years old and my stepfather took me to see Live and Let Die. Two years later I discovered Donald Westlake. While wandering in a bookstore I came upon a novel by Tony Kenrick. One reviewer compared Kenrick to Westlake. Who is this Westlake guy who’s supposed to be so great, I wondered.

So I went hunting, like a heist artist in a Westlake plot. But trying to find a Westlake book in a sleepy California suburb, long before the days of Internet searches, wasn’t so easy. Eventually, I unearthed a trove of them in the public library and once I overcame the final obstacle (a librarian concerned the books were inappropriate for a child), I was hooked for life.

Twenty years later, a veteran fan of all things Westlake and Bond, I joined United Artists, where I found a way to unite them for the first time. Or so I thought. While I was unaware at the time, it turns out that watching Live and Let Die in 1973 was actually the first moment I laid eyes on both Bond and Don. Here’s Don divulging it to me in 1995:

The tale of reviving the James Bond franchise is too lengthy to be unspooled here, but this you need to know: when we made GoldenEye, the film industry didn’t believe it would succeed. They had good reason. Marketing surveys revealed that the majority of teenage boys in 1995 had no idea who James Bond was. The few who were aware described him as “that guy my father likes.” There was a good reason for this: a Bond film hadn’t done substantial business since Octopussy in 1983. The Dalton Bonds never found a large audience. Fifteen-year-olds in 1995 had been only two years old the last time James Bond had been culturally significant.

The massive doubts about GoldenEye were accentuated by several factors: Pierce Brosnan was an ex-TV actor whose biggest recent role was a supporting turn in the Robin Williams comedy Mrs. Doubtfire. Martin Campbell had done some wonderful television but had never directed a successful feature film. Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson had grown up working on the Bond films, but they had never before been lead producers.

The first hint that GoldenEye would explode conventional Hollywood wisdom came during production, when Martin Campbell did something I’d never seen another director do: even though we were in the middle of a complex shoot, Martin managed to cut together the opening sequence and then showed it to the cast, crew and all of us at the studio. This was his way of keeping morale high. Boy, did he succeed.

The next indicator came when we released a teaser trailer that displayed everything we believed a Bond film should be. In theaters across the country the response was ecstatic.

By the time we saw a first cut in early 1995, the feeling at MGM/UA had shifted from doubt to hope that Bond might be the savior the studio needed.

In 1993, when I joined United Artists, I rewatched every Bond film, reread every book, dove into the archives and learned everything I could about the history of the franchise. I was struck by the unusual connections between the movies and novelists. Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice and the finished film has a unique, rebellious wit I suspect comes directly from Dahl. Anthony Burgess wrote the first draft of the Spy Who Loved Me screenplay.

I began to fantasize about what a Donald Westlake version of Bond would be. Don struck me as having it all — intricate plotting, Dahl and Burgess’s anarchic wit, plus an ability neither of them had: writing ingenious, tough, gritty action.

It’s normal for a studio to hire a writer for a potential sequel even before a film is released. If the film works then the next installment in the franchise is already on a fast track; if the film flops the money spent on a first draft is inconsequential to the studio’s bottom line.

In March of 1995, with GoldenEye’s release still eight months away, I proposed reaching out to Donald Westlake to see if he would be interested in writing the next Bond film — assuming there was going to be a next Bond film.

The studio was game for anything. And Barbara and Michael were intrigued by the idea. They’ve always supported bringing fresh voices to Bond as long as we protect the particular qualities that make Bond singular in the action genre. So they gave me their blessing to reach out to Don.

Now, while Don had written the occasional screenplay (and had even been nominated for an Academy Award for The Grifters in 1990), he’d never courted Hollywood. He had a rule that he would never adapt of one of his own novels, so the frequent options on his books never led to direct involvement with the filmmaking community. But I had to try — I couldn’t pass up the chance to get him involved with this.

How many people get the opportunity to do something that would thrill their childhood self beyond all imagining? Working on a James Bond movie was just such an opportunity for me, and working with Donald Westlake on a Bond film would be even more so. When I reached out to Don through his agent, I had the incredible feeling that I was fulfilling a promise to that eleven-year-old boy who is still very much a part of me. Of course, I had no idea what Don’s response would be.

Don was interested! We exchanged faxes — email had not yet become the norm. Don immediately had an idea involving a computer hacker who’d been stealing information from British Intelligence and the CIA. Because he’s in their systems, the U.K. and U.S. can’t use any of their wired tech, they have to go old school and thus, they turn to Bond to take on this very modern villain. The villain’s in league with some Third World financiers and their big scheme is to create chaos in the stock exchanges, destroying the entire economic system of the premier nations. As Don summed his thinking up:

Don’s idea was prescient. Except for WarGames back in 1983, movies hadn’t tackled our newly wired world. Hackers (which we were in production on at UA when Don made his pitch), The Net, and all the other films that would soon explore the issues Don was intrigued by hadn’t yet been released. But there was one intractable problem with Don’s pitch (though it was also the most reassuring thing about it): clearly he had already mind-melded with our thinking about Bond because his idea was integral to the premise of GoldenEye, a villain planning to take down the world’s stock exchanges via the Internet. I filled Don in on GoldenEye’s plot and three days later I received a fax from him that began, “Okay, Plan B. Round two. The second coming. Hello again.”

This time he proposed a story about a villain in Southeast Asia who is planning to use weather satellites to destroy all the grain in North and South America, effectively killing all the livestock, resulting in the elimination of the entire food supply for the Western Hemisphere.

That idea didn’t feel quite right for us. But Don’s excitement wasn’t dampened. He was committed to rising to the challenge of creating a new Bond story.

We arranged a trip to London so Don could meet with Barbara and Michael. I’d idolized Don for twenty years and now, suddenly, I was taking a trip to Europe with him in order to work together on building a story from the ground up. I was ecstatic, and oh-so-nervous.

The London trip was perfect. Don loved travel and he did it well. And, having had a little more time to ruminate, what ideas he had conjured up by the time we arrived!

Bond movies always begin with a pre-credit sequence, often in an exotic foreign locale. Don suggested we open on Bond running through moonlit woods. It would feel very real, very dangerous. A chyron would flash on the screen displaying the location: Transylvania. Since Transylvania is a part of Eastern Europe, it’s perfectly reasonable that Bond might have a mission there. And yet... Transylvania. It was a brilliant idea in the same vein as the brilliance Dahl brought to You Only Live Twice. It’s unexpected, attention-getting (immediately you’re leaning forward because this is and yet isn’t a typical Bond opening), funny while still grounded.

Then Don unveiled his biggest idea: if GoldenEye succeeded — a necessity for the 18th Bond film to be greenlit — then we knew the studio would want the film currently known only as Bond 18 to be released in theaters by 1997. This was a certainty because MGM/UA was going be sold in 1997, and to attract the highest bids it would need a slate that promised bankable films. Another certainty was that one of the biggest events of 1997 would be the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom (Bond’s employer) to China. What if Bond 18 was the first James Bond movie that correlated with a real historic event, one that happened simultaneously with the film’s release?

It was bold and exciting. We were thrilled by the possibilities and locale (Bond hadn’t spent real time in Hong Kong since The Man With the Golden Gun). A deal was quickly made and Don went to work writing a treatment.

I’m fascinated by how ideas take shape and how writers write. Some writers outline extensively, some start with an ending and work backward, some write a bunch of scenes in no particular order and with no obvious connection and then eventually pick a few of the best and build a story around them. None of these were Don’s method. He relied on what he called “narrative push.”

Don would get an idea, usually for a beginning, an opening scene, something like, What if there’s a bank robbery in progress and the getaway car can’t find a parking space in front of the bank? (This was the idea Don said was the spark for writing the first of his Dortmunder novels.) Don would start from a premise like that and just write, without any plan for where he was going, trusting that eventually he’d end up with a story. He told me there was only one story he ever started that he couldn’t puzzle out a way to finish. It involved insurance fraud and after six weeks Don realized he’d written his characters into such a tight corner he was unable to keep them moving all the way to a resolution. I hope one day Hard Case Crime will unearth the manuscript and we’ll get to see Don’s version of an impossible story.

But the method worked for him the rest of the time, and as a consequence, Don didn’t outline.

Bond films work differently. For those, a treatment — basically an outline — that represents a blueprint for the story is required before we send the writer off to draft a screenplay.

When a writer who doesn’t naturally outline is asked to do so, the result is often either dry, like a mathematical proof — B follows from A; C from B — or cartoonish because the real voice of the characters and the tone hasn’t yet been found through the writing. As far as I know, Bond 18 was the first time Don had ever been required to perform the interim step of fully plotting out an original story in a relatively schematic fashion. Not his natural process, but he gave it his all.

In September 1995, Don delivered a thirty-five page treatment for Bond 18.

It was a delight to read. Every page brimmed with ideas and fun. But not all of it worked, or at least worked for us. For example, Don had come up with an intriguing new pre-credits sequence, but Bond was absent from it. We needed one with Bond in it. Don had also placed most of the action in Australia, and while amusing — Q equips Bond with a boomerang “that goes boom” — the Crocodile Dundee movies were still pretty fresh in people’s minds, creating a risk that the overlay would tilt us toward unintentional comedy.

Fortunately, because GoldenEye’s release date was still two months away and we didn’t yet know if it would be successful enough to trigger pre-production on the next film, we had some time to work on Bond 18. So we sent Don off to write a new treatment that satisfied our Bond parameters.

There were elements from Don’s work to date we wanted to retain: the Carpathians (Transylvania), the handover of Hong Kong to China as central to the villain’s plot, and Bond partnering with a female Chinese agent. Don went to work and in October, a few weeks before GoldenEye hit the theaters, he delivered a new outline.

This treatment was substantially shorter — nine pages. Once again it had wonderful moments, but it now hewed so closely to traditional Bonds that it didn’t clothe the expected beats with enough fresh surprises.

As we pondered what to do, GoldenEye opened to immediate success. Barbara, Michael, Pierce, Martin, Bruce Feirstein and the rest of our cast and crew delivered a Bond film that reminded the world why Bond, since the 1960s, has been the most beloved action hero of the western world. The ripple effect expanded far beyond the box office. The entire library of Bond films gained new value. Nintendo launched a tie-in videogame that took the gaming world by storm. Almost overnight, GoldenEye created an entire Bond industry.

Within a month of GoldenEye’s release, MGM/UA realized that producing the next Bond film as quickly as possible was the top priority.

As Don, Barbara, Michael and I had predicted, MGM/UA demanded that Bond 18 be released in 1997. The fate of the studio was riding on it.

So: what to do.

Don’s treatments had all the wonderful ideas he’d pitched in London, but neither was fully convincing as a Bond movie. I know Don would have found the right balance if he could have written the script and discovered the story’s details as he wrote, but GoldenEye’s enormous success now imposed on us a full-speed-ahead production time-frame.

If you’re making a movie as complex as a Bond film and you’re rushing toward a release date, then an outline is a necessity. The schedule for Bond 18 necessitated that locations be scouted, stunts planned, actors cast long before a shooting script would ever be completed (as it turned out, the actual shooting script wasn’t completed until three weeks before production ended). If Don continued, he’d have to change out most of what he’d created, going back to the drawing board yet again, while continuing to do the thing that wasn’t his natural writing method — creating an outline before he wrote the script.

This issue was compounded by a growing concern from the studio over centering the story around the transfer of Hong Kong to China. Nobody knew what would happen when Hong Kong changed hands and some people were predicting violent, bloody outcomes. What if we made the most expensive movie in the history of MGM/UA, the movie that the studio was relying on to keep it in business, and it took a lighthearted approach to something that emerged as the biggest global horror-show of 1997?

It was analogous to what would happen in 1999 with Y2K: there were just enough smart people who predicted disaster that even though disaster appeared unlikely, it was still wise to make sure you had a good emergency kit stashed away for the new year. While MGM/UA knew the odds were in favor of a peaceful handover, was it worth taking a risk on when some experts were predicting carnage?

China also turned out not to be a fan of GoldenEye. The Chinese blocked the film’s release due to the opening credit sequence, which the Chinese deemed anti-communist. China was an emerging film market and if things didn’t go well with the transfer of Hong Kong, MGM/UA didn’t want to be unable to release yet another Bond film there.

Heartbreakingly, all of this meant parting ways with Don. Don was disappointed, but not angry. He’d become attached to his idea of robbing Hong Kong’s banks and then destroying the city. Now that MGM/UA didn’t want Bond anywhere near Hong Kong during 1997, Don saw it as a practical matter — the conceit he’d fallen in love with collided with the studio’s anxieties.

Don, his wife Abby, and I remained friends. Whenever I went to New York the three of us would meet for dinner at the most interesting restaurant of the moment — along with a love of travel, the three of us shared a love of good food. And watching the two of them together was such a pleasure. They delighted in each other and that made them always delightful to be with. Abby’s sense of humor, and her curiosity about the world and about people, fully equaled Don’s. It would not surprise me if when he wrote, it wasn’t to please all of us, it was to please her.

Over the years I learned a vast amount from Don about writing and storytelling. I turned to him for advice while working on The Thomas Crown Affair. A few years later, when I received an urgent a call for help from John McTiernan who was in preproduction on a movie called Basic — John was having difficulty planting subtle but memorable clues in a way that would leave the audience feeling the film had played evenhandedly with them when a surprise twist occurred near the end — I asked Don if he’d help John out. Don agreed, so John and I spent a wonderful afternoon at Don’s house, where Don applied his theories of storytelling to John’s problem (my favorite: if you want the audience to feel a clue was laid in fairly, you need to show it to them in three different ways). All the while, Don and I continued to try and figure out a movie we could make together.

When Don died there was every reason to think I’d read my last Westlake novel. Don’s lifelong narrative push had come to a halt. This was a painful loss for all of Don’s readers and fans, but doubly so for me, because as massive a body of work as Don left behind, it was still missing one entry: the movie we were going to make.

I never imagined Don still had one more trick up his sleeve — that he’d taken the underlying McGuffin in his Bond 18 treatments and fashioned an original thriller around it. In retrospect it makes complete sense — when you’ve come up with something as interesting as using Hong Kong’s unique geography to destroy it, how can you let such a good scheme go to waste? But in all our conversations and meals since 1995, he’d kept it secret.

There’s a history of repurposing storylines in Hollywood which, as far as I know, begins appropriately with James Bond. Ian Fleming, Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham wrote Thunderball as a screenplay for an original Bond movie, but they failed to sell it. So Fleming turned the script into the novel Thunderball. After the novel’s success, it was then transformed back into a screenplay and made into the fourth James Bond film.

I had a brush with plot repurposing on the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. One of the first writers we discussed the project with, and who then pitched us an approach, was Ron Bass. Ron’s a wonderful writer and his approach was intriguing, but it didn’t deliver what we were looking for so we passed. Ron, not wanting to abandon a clever idea, immediately reworked it into the movie Entrapment. In 1999, two Bonds, Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan, both starred in romantic cat-and-mouse heist movies inspired by the 1968 Thomas Crown Affair.

Charles Ardai told me about Westlake’s clandestine reworking of his Bond 18 premise a few months ago and I was giddy. The pleasure of reading several hundred more pages of Don’s writing, the wonder of seeing the idea I’d watched him come up with made into a fully wrought story... it was even better than making a movie together, it was knowing that an author I’d loved for forty years had written a book I’d played a part in inspiring.

Authors often imagine their readers, and readers imagine conversations with authors, but rarely do they result in a book.

John le Carré sent a one-line telegram to George Roy Hill after seeing a screening of The Little Drummer Girl. It said, “You’ve taken my ox and turned it into a bouillon cube.” Don, however, slyly reversed the process.

Forever and a Death is not to be confused with a novelization, which is a fleshing out of a movie’s screenplay without traveling too far from any of its elements. Don has taken a place, an event and a McGuffin and created an entirely new story and characters around them. His treatments and this book share the same germ of inspiration, but they take it in completely different directions. It’s a wonderful exercise in seeing how the same core idea can be imagined two different ways.

It’s impossible for me not to wonder if there are certain aspects of the book — beyond the central device — that are Bond-influenced. For example, Manville bears an uncanny resemblance to Michael Wilson, the Bond producer. Michael physically resembles Westlake’s descriptions of Manville, and Michael has an engineering background, something every Bond writer is aware of because Michael takes an engineer’s approach to dissecting story and action sequences, in the same way that Manville approaches solving the problem of the gun’s safety mechanism when facing down deadly enemies on Richard Curtis’s yacht. Then again, I can also see Manville as an alter ego for Don, who also had an engineer’s head for plot, whether it be the conception of the soliton device or any number of his exceptional heist ideas. Either way, how wonderful to have a pulpy action novel where engineering solves both guns and sex.

So, what do the book and Don’s treatments have in common? In both, the villain is a wealthy and powerful businessman with a worldwide construction company who had earlier married into a Hong Kong family. He’s created a device that can produce a destructive soliton wave, which he first tests on an island in the Coral Sea that had been a Japanese observation post in WWII. The test is in service of being able to rebuild the island as a resort.

There’s an environmental watch group boat that tries to stop the test and one of its members (a female Chinese agent in the treatments, an impetuous American girl in the book) dives into the water, is knocked unconscious by the blast, and is brought aboard the villain’s boat. Though it’s only in Don’s treatment you’ll get to find Bond murmuring as he witnesses the soliton reshaping the island, “Shaken not stirred.”

The villain has a compound in a remote part of Australia where Bond and Manville are treated as both guests and prisoners. As part of their escape, both end up hanging on to the metal framework of the garage door (an idea Don lifted from one of his own Richard Stark novels!).

The villain’s plot is to rob Hong Kong’s banks and then level the city as an act of revenge (in the treatments it’s a revenge against China as they are about to receive Hong Kong in the handover, whereas the book takes place after the handover). Figuring out which Hong Kong construction site is being used; the workers barricading it against the police, resulting in a giant firefight; a radio-operated submarine to carry looted gold out through flooded tunnels; these elements can all be found in both the novel and at least some of Don’s work on the film.

In Don’s final treatment, the submarine isn’t used; rather Don came up with a method where the gold is ground up, turned into a slurry with seawater and pumped out into a waiting barge where it piles up like sand. There’s a climactic fight between Bond and the villain with the hill of gold sand rising around them. In a moment thematically reminiscent of the book’s final pages, the villain is buried by the still-descending gold as Bond says, “Too rich for him, I think.”

For a Westlake fan, Forever and a Death is a rewarding book. And that’s true whether you know about the Bond connection or not. Westlake’s quiet craftsmanship is on display with every sentence. Ten degrees to the right and any given sequence could be in a Parker book, ten degrees to the left and it could be in a Dortmunder story. (Take the set piece on the yacht where Manville and Kim have to escape three killers. The killers could be from a Parker story; Manville having to defend himself with a pepper mill could easily be a Dortmunder moment.) It’s a beautiful illustration of how carefully Don calibrated language and tone, and how he found humor in his plots without sacrificing suspense.

There are wonderful inside jokes for Westlake aficionados, like Manville learning how to be tough by reading a novel titled Payback (the title of Mel Gibson’s film adaptation of Westlake’s first Parker novel, The Hunter). And of course Don’s love of food and travel is evident throughout. It’s a novel in which much of the joy is in how wonderfully Don’s thought through the small details.

Which is not to say that there aren’t frustrations. The reader begins by expecting that Manville is going to drive the story and then he’s suddenly offstage for a large fraction of it, emerging as no more than an ensemble player by the end. The book switches from a traditional action-hero story to a fragmented structure more akin to Don’s Dancing Aztecs.

I can understand why Don abandoned Manville as his lead midway through the book. While I love Manville’s evolution from meek to hard-boiled engineer, as characters go, well, he’s no James Bond. (No doubt deliberately so — Don clearly wanted the novel to be its own work, not a “Bond novel” or a pastiche of one, and in that he succeeded.)

And I wonder whether Don might never have felt fully in his element writing a do-gooder hero, whether Manville or Bond. If you think about it, in Don’s most memorable novels his protagonists, whether it be Parker, Dortmunder or the leads of standalone novels like The Ax, are all on the wrong side of the law. They initiate actions whose reverberations propel the story. With this in mind, it’s no surprise, perhaps, that it’s the villain of Forever and a Death, Richard Curtis, who emerges as the book’s most interesting and richly developed character, and whose devastating end gives the book its unforgettable final scene.

There are wonderful things in Don’s treatments I wish I could have seen on screen. For example, when Bond first meets with M he’s discomforted to learn there’s a new 003. They recycle the numbers?!? M explains that since 00s never live for long, it’s simplest to recycle the nine digits. Bond reflects on how strange it is to realize that one day there will be another 007 and, of course, another M too. It’s a tour de force moment that underlines the danger of what Bond is about to do, makes a meta-reference to all the actors past and future who will be Bond, and generates a melancholy emotion during a scene that’s usually very dry.

But if he’d gone to script Don would have been writing a story that would then have been tossed around and reshaped by many others. It would have become more conventional Bond and less Westlake. As an executive, conventional Bond enlivened by Westlake is a dream. But as a Westlake fan, pure Westlake is still the best Westlake. So, while I still wonder what a Donald Westlake Bond screenplay might have yielded, I cherish the book.

With the publication of Forever and a Death my quest is complete. As a teenager I’d been in search of a Westlake book, then the man, then a film collaboration; and now he’s brought me full circle, back to finding a Westlake book, and one I never imagined could have existed. A book that is filled with uniquely Westlake-ian pleasures and makes me appreciate and understand his work in ways I never had before.

In our attempts to make a movie together, I worked with Don one more time after Bond 18. I convinced him to adapt a series of detective novels by Steven Saylor set in ancient Rome. Don did a superb job and the movie would have been made if not for Gladiator coming along first and stealing its thunder.

In Don’s script, the detective, Gordianus, exonerates a group of slaves for a murder they didn’t commit. On the final page of the script he learns that though he’s proven them innocent, all he’s accomplished is exchanging one bad fate for them for another: they’re being shipped to Egypt, where they’ll wind up in worse bondage than before.

The final bittersweet lines Don wrote sum up both his philosophy of life and my feelings reading Forever and a Death. “We can only do what we can,” Marcus Mummius counsels Gordianus, who replies, “And hold to beauty where we find it.”