Bond--Stirred, Not Shaken

Bond is in the details. the script for the latest 007 adventure, "The World Is Not Enough," called for the legendary superagent (Pierce Brosnan) to be helicoptered to a wintry mountaintop with a gorgeous oil heiress (Sophie Marceau), who wants to "check out the pipeline." The script then called for Bond to be ambushed by flying snowmobiles. Easy enough. But how should Bond elude the attackers--how, exactly, should he get down the mountain? Before the scene was shot in Chamonix, France, the production team and some MGM executives had a tense meeting. Skis were the obvious answer. But the studio's marketing department pressed for a cooler, younger mode of transportation. "There was a huge discussion whether Bond would be on a snowboard to make him more hip," says Michael Wilson, whose family's production company co-owns the Bond character. Wilson still likes Bond best in his tuxedo, and his family had already allowed 007 to act more casually in the movie, to dress down on occasion, even to sport a stubbly beard in one scene--all in the interest of attracting a younger audience. He drew the line at snowboarding: "It just wasn't right."

"The World Is Not Enough" may be Bond's 19th outing, but MGM is fighting to keep him forever young. The 007 juggernaut is already the most successful franchise in history--the movies have made about $3 billion worldwide since 1963, not to mention decades' worth of TV and video revenues. But while Bond rules the world, teens and twentysomethings now rule the box office. So MGM has been waging an astonishingly successful campaign to pander to Generation Y, an audience perfectly primed by the "Austin Powers" spoofs. ("I love what Michael Myers does," says Brosnan, 46.) "The World"--in which a terrorist played by Robert Carlyle attempts to stop the flow of oil from Russia--is typically preposterous, escapist fun, and it should beat the living daylights out of Arnold Schwarzenegger's "End of Days" at the box office. "When we made 'GoldenEye' [in 1995], we wondered how, in the Arnold era, we could keep someone like Bond alive," says screenwriter Bruce Feirstein. "Now those guys look like Macy's Thanksgiving Parade balloons. They're freaks. And Bond lives."

As recently as 1989, Bond had a near-death experience. "Licence to Kill," with Timothy Dalton, made just $32 million. Then a new crop of executives took over the foundering MGM and realized that, sickly or not, 007 was still the studio's most valuable asset. MGM doubled the production budget on the films. They dumped Dalton in favor of Brosnan, and ditched the antiquated Aston Martin in favor of a souped-up BMW. The studio also launched a Bond videogame to introduce kids to the cold-war icon and gave 007 a female boss named M (Judi Dench) to put the sexist pig in his place. "GoldenEye" made $106 million in the States, and twice as much worldwide. The rebirth of Bond was so remarkable that Sony Pictures tried to make a rival 007 series, setting off a legal battle that continues to this day. "Bond resonates with the culture," says Sharon Lee of Look-Look, a market-research company specializing in the 15-to-30 crowd. "Today, brawn has to be sleek. Heroes aren't pumped up. While Arnold hasn't updated his image, Bond has. These kids list Muhammad Ali, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon and Andy Kaufman as their heroes. For them, Bond works."

For "The World," MGM has gone after the youth audience more randily than ever--and been rewarded with an unprecedented 100 hours of original MTV programming to run worldwide. How did the studio pull it off? It made sure all its villains were under 40. It ran trailers before "Austin Powers 2." According to MTV's marketing executive John Shea, however, MGM's smartest moves were hiring Garbage to play on the soundtrack and casting pinup girl Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones. Richards is best known for the elan she displayed--along with much else--in a menage a trois in the seamy cult hit "Wild Things." "Denise is a hot prop," says Lee, from Look-Look. "She scores very high right now in our surveys of kids." But would a nuclear physicist really wear hotpants? "There is no reason why a smart girl cannot be attractive," says "The World's" director, Michael Apted, a little wearily. "I would have been s--t on from a great height if I had not delivered jiggle-vision." Much has changed for Bond in 36 years, but some things are still sacred.

© 1999