Not everything about Live And Let Die, James Bond’s blaxploitation adventure, has aged well. The rubber snakes shown are not very convincing, for one thing, and for another the whole movie is really racist. (A review in The New York Times noted that you rarely saw its level of racial animus in theaters “these days,” meaning 1973.) But there is something about the film, apart from the crocodile stunt, that’s only gotten more amazing over time: the shooting journal that Roger Moore wrote as an official tie-in, which Phil Nobile Jr. of Birth. Movies. Death. has brought to the internet’s attention.
Writing with the candor of a man who knows that nobody is ever giving his role back to George Lazenby, Moore fills his book with powerful burns on producer Harry Saltzman:
Harry has a nasty habit of walking into a restaurant and demanding whether the service is quick and, of course, they always say it is. When the soup arrives he says it is cold and sends it back, so it is advisable to hold on to your soup plate as soon as it arrive or he sends yours back too. Cubby Broccoli says that if Harry had been at the Last Supper he would have sent that back.
Moore apparently goes out of his way to own co-star David Hedison every day of his life:
It’s nice to have David Hedison as Bond’s CIA buddy, Felix Leiter. We met in Hollywood years ago when he was making The Fly with Vincent Price. It was a science-fiction story about a fly with a man’s head and David, in the title role, had a last line of “Help me. Help me” delivered in a squeaky, high-pitched voice. I always greet him with my own falsetto version of his line. By a curious coincidence The Fly was shown on television the day David arrived in New Orleans.
He notes that he has learned the truth about the JFK assassination:
Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans, who conducted his own investigation into the assassination of Kennedy, invited me, along with a couple of FBI agents, to his office to view some film. I am not at liberty to disclose what I saw but it left no doubt in my mind that it was not Oswald who fired the fatal shot. Garrison’s assertion is that Oswald was not acting alone but as part of a CIA conspiracy.
Yet Felix never said a word! In further excerpts posted on Birth. Movies. Death., Moore mentions that on the day his favorite hairdresser was fired, “I… flung my breakfast toast across the room in rage.” He also reports that he threw a tantrum when the hotel could not supply “All-Bran cereal” on his birthday. Moore always seems to have had a sense of humor about his own vanity, though: Years later, he told an interviewer that he was “only 400 years too old” for his role in A View To A Kill.
[via r/movies]