I was watching Moonraker the other night (yes, of my own free will) and I noticed a rather funny reference.
In the scene where Bond is in Venice, and he’s breaking into Hugo Drax’s palatial laboratory, he watches two scientists go into a locked room, typing a passcode into a keypad on the wall. Each number they press generates a musical note, and the code is five numbers long. Thus, the code is five notes long. And that melody, that five-note pattern, was really familiar.
Take a look:
“That sounds exactly like the theme to Close Encounters of the Third Kind!” I cried.
“That‘s the theme to Close Encounters of the Third Kind!” my husband said at almost the same time.
“But what’s it doing in this movie?” Indeed… what on earth is it doing in Moonraker? It couldn’t be a coincidence… Moonraker came out in 1979, while Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out in 1977. Moonraker is about space, and obviously, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is about space.
Moonraker actually was green-lit because it was about space. In the end credits to 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, it is announced that “James Bond will return in… For Your Eyes Only.” But due to the wild success of Star Wars, which was released that same year, EON decided to capitalize on the cinematic space craze and adapt Fleming’s novel Moonraker.
So we looked it up.
After the success of Jaws (1975) Steven Spielberg contacted Albert R. Broccoli (whose nickname was “Cubby”) and offered to direct a Bond film. He said, on the podcast, The Rest Is Entertainment “I’d always wanted to make a James Bond film from the day I saw Dr No.” In a 2016 interview with Michael Ball on his BBC Radio 2 show, he elaborated, “I called Cubby Broccoli twice, and after Jaws which was such a huge success, I thought ‘Hey people are giving me final cut now.’ So I called up Cubby and offered my services but he didn’t think I was right for the part… ‘Then even after Close Encounters [of the Third Kind came out and was a big hit – once again – I tried to get on a Bond film.”
He told The Rest Is Entertainment, “Cubby called me again after Close Encounters came out and that was a big hit … and said, we’d like to use the five notes in Moonraker. And I said, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll give you permission to use the five notes if you let me direct a Bond film. And he said, nope. But I gave him the five notes anyway.”
He joked to Michael Ball in 2016, “…Now they can’t afford me. So Barbara, forget it.”
So there you have it… the Broccoli-Spielberg connection we’ve all been waiting for!
