"Camera follows up the rope to top: BOND - hanging onto base of balloon, hunched up several yards out in the water. CAMERA PULLS BACK to include BLOFELD. He smiles, pulls out a gun.".
- Tom Mankiewicz's 1st draft for DAF (24th Feb 1971) *
"Mary Poppins, I presume?" That's one piece of dialogue from Tom Mankiewicz's original draft for Diamonds Are Forever you won't find me using in this re-edit/animation project.
Certainly though, much of the "lost climax" to DAF that I am busy reconstructing will take inspiration from the broad strokes of Mankiewicz's ideas. But with key changes to make it more suitable for an OHMSS sequel's grittier tone.
The original
The whole situation with the weather balloon pursuit that I have concocted is a little more ambitious than what Mankiewicz wrote. In his version, Bond tails Blofeld into a hidden passageway from the Oil Rig's control room.
The passageway has a hatch that Bond can't enter, but he sees Blofeld through the hatch's window getting into his mini-submarine with water rising around it. Bond then goes up some stairs to a platform which has a weather balloon attached.
He quickly unties it, jumps into the water behind the submarine, then attaches the rope of the balloon to the back of the craft.
The script then does not describe much of the journey of Blofeld's submarine to the salt mine and simply cuts to him arriving at the Mexican coast and then spotting Bond hanging in mid-air behind him (see the above quote).
The "Re-Imagined" scene
The final print of Diamonds Are Forever, of course contains the sequence with the crane which Bond hi-jacks to ram Blofeld's Bathosub into the control room. This is of course will be removed in Diamonds Reimagined.
Whilst I could've written a scene similar to what Mankiewicz envisioned for Blofeld's escape, I instead decide to modify the crane sequence into a scene that now has the weather balloon/Bathosub pursuit.
I always felt the weather balloon idea would've worked amazingly as a real stunt (if it were even possible to do), so why not expand on the idea a little and present more of it in the scene?
For this I wrote the new scene to be something like this:
One of the Oil Rig's legs has already been detonated via limpet mines. This has left parts of the Oil Rig covered in smoke.
Blofeld emerges from a secret passageway under an oil derrick tower. He catches the eye of the crane operator, who is hiding from the withdrawing Unione Corse men.
One Helicopter is still on the Oil Rig. Bond, Felix and Marc Ange Draco are supposed to get on it but they suddenly hear the crane moving behind them.
They look over and barely see through the smoke that the crane is lowering Blofeld in his Bathosub towards the ocean.
Bond gives chase, with Draco giving him his blessing to kill Blofeld once and for all. Bond then climbs up onto the crane and tries to reach the winch at the top.
The crane operator tries to shake him off, but Bond manages to hold on for dear life and attach to the cables an inflatable Q branch weather balloon (with a rope) he takes out of his pocket.
Blofeld gets angry when the crane operator ignores his orders and keeps pulling him out of then onto the water (he doesn't know this is to shake Bond off the crane!). He switches on the engines of the submarine and eventually this snaps the cable/rope connected to the crane.
Bond jumps off the crane, and allows the travelling Bathosub to pull him along as the weather balloon keeps him up in the air. As in Mankiewicz's draft, the submarine heads to the Mexican coast.
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A shot of the Bathosub travelling underwater, Blofeld not realising Bond is right above him... |
I like to think of it as the calm before the storm. The storm that is, being Bond and Blofeld's climatic confrontation at the Mexican salt mine, which will be the next major sequence I will tackle...
- The Retro Captain
* Credit to this fabulous website for details on Tom Mankiewicz's original DAF draft:
https://www.commander007.net/2016/diamants-eternels-scripts-originaux/
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