Art of Bond book

I've avoided this book for years, but once I saw it today for about 80% off cover, I had to bite, if for no other reason than a couple of good pics of Dalton and some really nice Connery ones. But geez, just from skimming, the production value of this book is godawful!

They just stick the photo captions at the back, and some of them aren't even accurate (saying there are 2 subs not 3 in the SPY tanker pen, or that L&LD was the last time Bond used a gadget w/o it being set up earlier in the story - when MR violated this rule most egregiously with the watch that Bond uses to escape the shuttle blast,which shot darts but nobody said anything about it having plastique of some kind inside it.)

This was done by the guy who is the genius behind most DVD supplements, but I really wonder if it was done in a couple weeks, because it just doesn't show any care (and this is based on a half-hour look through, not a cover-to-cover.)

Part of me is pissed about this because I tried floating a 007 MAGIC: The Art of James Bond book proposal ten and twelve years back without success, and this just kind of pisses on the idea. Similar thing happened with ART OF STAR TREK, which wound up being a wretched error filled superficial mess instead of a definitive reference, as it needed to be (and on that one, I invested many months on a very THICK proposal and the publisher actually solicited it, then refused to acknowledge that I had sent it to them.) But I really do wonder why a publisher like Abrams (which is WAY higher on the quality and taste meter than Pocket, which was responsible for Trek publishing) couldn't do something better than this.

I've still got some of the GOOD coffee table books, the well-researched ones, like CREATING SPECIAL EFFECTS by Christopher Finch, which have the gorgeous pics as well as genuine content, but I hate the idea of it being an either/or for pics and content.

There are good pics though.

It is terribly egregious when these supposed authoritative books can't get their facts straight.

Like two subs in the Spy tanker pen. They need actual Bond film buffs to fact check these things otherwise the mistakes are inevitable.



Actually good journalists and editors don't have this problem. They don't commit to anything they are not sure of. If in doubt, look it up.

Sometimes looking it up isn't a guarantee. I still flinch over a mistake I made on a GODZILLA article. I included a reference to KING KONG VS GODZILLA that I had seen both in-print and online about the film's ending that isn't actually correct, and I got appropriately crucified for it on a GODZILLA website.

Also, editors can kill you. A STAR TREK article I did had all sorts of errors introduced after I turned it in, including references to the particular ENTERPRISE featured in STAR TREK VOYAGER (????!!!)

Yes true we can only be really sure of things that we actually do know ourselves and that only covers so much. Looking up requires a trust in the source. I guess that's the key. A good journalist really has to be able to know what's a reliable sources and what isn't.

Other journalists work with a "what they think they can get away with" approach. ie "whose gonna know anyway?"

Its amazing how many mistakes we Bondphiles can find in published Bond articles by non-experts.

Makes you wonder how many mistakes we absorb every day when reading stuff we are not expert in.

Well, I'm paranoid enough to think a lot of the mistakes are deliberate misinformation or spin. A writer who did one of the only great episodes of STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION (probably the only one that got nominated for a writers guild award either, the one where they try to determine whether the android has human rights or is just a tall toaster) said about the folks who ran the show, 'beware men who are thinking mainly of their place in history' (or words to that effect, I don't have the quote in front of me, but I'd hate to be accused of 'spinning' this point!) because they aren't focused on what they should be focusing on.

trevanian wrote:

Well, I'm paranoid enough to think a lot of the mistakes are deliberate misinformation or spin. A writer who did one of the only great episodes of STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION (probably the only one that got nominated for a writers guild award either, the one where they try to determine whether the android has human rights or is just a tall toaster) said about the folks who ran the show, 'beware men who are thinking mainly of their place in history' (or words to that effect, I don't have the quote in front of me, but I'd hate to be accused of 'spinning' this point!) because they aren't focused on what they should be focusing on.

That Star Trek Next Generation writer is offering up an opinion challenging the motives of the guys who run the show.

Sounds like an interesting episode. At first blush I'd say the android does not have human rights, not being human, however if you watch Battlestar Galactica, cylons had become as human as the humans (even to the point of having souls which means God had granted them human souls) and if you buy the series premise, they walk among us now and have been interbreeding with us since the dawn of civilized time, so they have human rights - even the pure cylons among us - that is, if any actually exist that are aware that they are of pure cylon bloodline. Actually they would have to know, otherwise they wouldn't know to keep the bloodline pure.

tiffanywint wrote:

trevanian wrote:

Well, I'm paranoid enough to think a lot of the mistakes are deliberate misinformation or spin. A writer who did one of the only great episodes of STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION (probably the only one that got nominated for a writers guild award either, the one where they try to determine whether the android has human rights or is just a tall toaster) said about the folks who ran the show, 'beware men who are thinking mainly of their place in history' (or words to that effect, I don't have the quote in front of me, but I'd hate to be accused of 'spinning' this point!) because they aren't focused on what they should be focusing on.

That Star Trek Next Generation writer is offering up an opinion challenging the motives of the guys who run the show.

Sounds like an interesting episode. At first blush I'd say the android does not have human rights, not being human, however if you watch Battlestar Galactica, cylons had become as human as the humans (even to the point of having souls which means God had granted them human souls) and if you buy the series premise, they walk among us now and have been interbreeding with us since the dawn of civilized time, so they have human rights - even the pure cylons among us - that is, if any actually exist that are aware that they are of pure cylon bloodline. Actually they would have to know, otherwise they wouldn't know to keep the bloodline pure.

The episode in question is called THE MEASURE OF A MAN, and it benefits from being a good script, but even more from not getting run through the rewrite process that murdered a lot of good TNG premises. Within a year, that writer was having her 'hands tied behind my back and told to write" and bailed on the show.

I'll have to check out that episode. Thanks!