Still BOND after all these years

The new James Bond is blond, with a pale, flattened face and large, fleshy ears. And his accent: Well, it isn’t Oxbridge.

By the time Daniel Craig came churning up the Thames River in a power boat for Friday’s official announcement in London that he had been cast as Agent 007, much of the world was already in the know. The mystery in the selection of the 37-year-old actor, who had cleaned up nicely in a blue suit and red tie, was why it had taken so long.

The extravagance of the media event belied many months of maneuvering and worry, in which the longtime guardian of the Bond franchise, Barbara Broccoli, and the brand-new distributor of Bond movies, Sony’s Columbia Pictures, struggled to settle on a leading actor who could make the series younger, darker and more hip. The search took nearly two years and considered some 200 actors on three continents.

"I was desperately afraid, and Barbara was desperately afraid, we would go downhill," said Michael G. Wilson, the producer with Broccoli of the new Bond film, "Casino Royale." He said he even told that to Pierce Brosnan, the suave James Bond who had a successful run of four films.

"We are running out of energy, mental energy," Wilson recalled saying. "We need to generate something new, for ourselves."

Like much in Hollywood today, the choice of Craig came about partly because of a shift in the leisure habits of young men, who used to be the most avid moviegoers but have been migrating to other interests.

In the late 1990s, market research showed Bond movies to have the oldest demographic of any action-adventure series. But lately, the booming success of Bond video games has driven a younger audience to the movies, Wilson said, an audience that Sony and the producers do not want to disappoint.

Hence the decision to move on from Brosnan to a rangy, kinetic actor like Craig, who played a cocaine dealer in this year’s indie crime thriller "Layer Cake" and the creepy son of Paul Newman, Irish crime boss, in "Road to Perdition" in 2002.

The director of "Casino Royale," Martin Campbell, promised at the news conference that it would have "more character, less gadgets" than other Bond films.

But will audiences embrace a rougher-hewn Bond? Craig becomes the sixth actor to take on the role since 1962, after Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Brosnan.

Brosnan, 52, has been one of the more successful incarnations of the spy, starring in recent hit films including "The World Is Not Enough" and "Die Another Day." The latter took in $431 million at the box office worldwide, but press reports said Brosnan priced himself out of a sequel when he demanded a hefty raise to about $40 million, which would have included a percentage of box-office revenue.

Brosnan continued to lobby publicly for the role, and as recently as a week ago told The San Francisco Chronicle he was still available.

Wilson said the decision did not have to do with money. "If we wanted to make a deal we would’ve made a deal with Pierce at some financially viable level," he said. "This was about us trying to find new inspiration for the series."

Other impediments slowed matters down, primarily the sale of MGM, which had produced and distributed all the Broccoli-produced Bond movies, to a consortium of investors led by Sony. The film, initially scheduled for release in November, was postponed with the sale.

Casting, which had already been going on in London, then had to be re-examined when MGM came under the aegis of Sony’s Columbia Pictures and the Sony motion picture group’s chief executive, Amy Pascal.

According to several executives involved in the project, Broccoli had already settled on Craig by April. But by the summer Pascal wanted to begin a more exhaustive search that would include other, younger actors.

Eventually 200 actors from throughout the British Commonwealth came up for discussion, Wilson said. They included well-known faces, among them Colin Farrell, Orlando Bloom and Clive Owen. And they included many unknowns. Those who rated screen tests included the British actor Henry Cavill, the Australians Alex O’Lachlan and Sam Worthington and the Croatian-born Goran Visnjic.

It was only after all these ruminations that the producers and Sony finally settled on Craig. "I think that he has a kind of intensity, and a sexuality, and a rogue-ishness," Pascal said. "And he seems like he could be a spy."

For both Broccoli and Sony, executives said, the model was Jason Bourne, the character Matt Damon incarnated in two gritty spy movies for Universal Pictures, "The Bourne Identity" and "The Bourne Supremacy."

But the producers and Sony are well aware that they are tinkering with one of Hollywood’s most lucrative franchises, which has generated an estimated $4 billion in ticket sales over more than four decades.

It is MGM’s most important film property and a legacy carefully guarded by Broccoli, whose father, Albert R. Broccoli, initiated the series based on the books by Ian Fleming in 1962 with "Dr. No."

"Casino Royale," also the subject of a spoof Bond movie in 1967, was the first Bond novel. Barbara Broccoli gained the rights to it in 2001 in the wake of a legal battle.

Bond fans quickly reminded the producers on Friday just how risky their decision to shift direction may be, and that "dark" and "hip" were far from what they imagined as the shaken-not-stirred polish of the James Bond character.

Moments after the announcement, one fan wrote on the Web site www.ajb007.com, "My god, don’t the producers have any brains? Craig is not Bond material. Bond must be tall, dark and handsome. Or at least two of the three, and he isn’t even one!"

Pascal said fans would have to wait to see the movie before judging Craig. As for the online criticism, she observed: "Well, he is tall. He’s the same size as Sean Connery."–The New York Times News Service