Discovering The Lost Script Of Casino Royale, Written By The "Shakespeare of Hollywood," Ben Hecht

In the 1960s James Bond was King at the box office and Sean Connery WAS James Bond, according to the movie advertisements.

In 1966 a film producer who held the film rights to a single Ian Fleming novel, Casino Royale, attempted to buck the powerful Bond film producers by making a rival Bond film.

Rather than compete with Connery and the Bond series, the producer ended up making a broad awful comedy (although there are some funny bits) rather than a thriller.

But before he made the comedy, the producer hired "the Shakespeare of Hollywood," Ben Hecht (seen in the below photo), author of The Front Page, to write a screenplay that closely followed Ian Fleming's dark thriller.

I happen to be reading a collection of Hecht's columns, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago this week, when I came across a story in the British newspaper The Telegraph that reveals that Hecht's Casino Royale script drafts have been discovered.

You can read the newspaper story via the below link:

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/jamesbond/8345119/Casino-Royale-discovering-the-lost-script.html#