Too Too Utterly: Malcolm McLaren’s film pitch by fax to James Bond scriptwriters
//Fax of treatment sent by Malcolm McLaren to Neal Purvis and Robert Wade on January 9, 1991//
These faded pages constitute a film pitch Malcolm McLaren sent by fax to screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade way back in 1991.
//The first page of the fax shows that this treatment was completed a couple of weeks before it was sent, on December 20, 1990//
//From my transcription of the now-very faded fax//
Purvis and Wade are responsible for many film successes including the astounding run of screenplays for the seven James Bond movies from 1999’s The World Is Not Enough to the recently released No Time To Die. I’ve known them for a while and Neal has mentioned their contact with McLaren during preparations for their first feature Let Him Have It, so made sure it was covered in the hardback edition of The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren.
//The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren details the circumstances of McLaren’s contact with Purvis and Wade//
On publication last spring Rob contacted me with the news that he had come across the fax in which McLaren proposed to them the final version of his planned feature on Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour of America during which, according to the script, the Irish dramatist discovered the roots of rock & roll.
//’The only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” McLaren’s film idea was inspired by Wilde’s account of his visit to the untamed Rockies boomtown Leadville, as posthumously published in the 1906 booklet Impressions of America//
McLaren had been trying to shift the film out of development hell for a number of years; by the time of his contact with Purvis & Wade he had changed the title from Wilde West to Too Too Utterly.
But when I talked to McLaren about his production slate of films a few months later in 1991 in Los Angeles, where I w as west coast bureau chief for film trade magazine Screen international, he didn’t mention it, preferring to concentrate on the brace of rock & roll manager biopics he was working up about Peter Grant and Brian Epstein, which respectively aimed to uncover the criminal and dark sexual roots of the music business.
The Too Too Utterly fax, which Wade subsequently sent me, reads pretty well and I think would have made the sound basis for a decent, if off-the-wall indie film. I transcribed the by now pretty faded pages and used the text as the basis for one of the new sections of the paperback of The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren, which is published on Thursday (November 4).
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