The Thunderball Controversy

The Thunderball Controversy is a 2001 British documentary film, directed by and  in their feature directorial debuts, about the eponymous controversy in which  was associated with a legal dispute in 1961 when former  collaborators  and  sued him shortly after the 1961 publication of the novel, claiming he based it upon the screenplay the trio had written for a cinematic translation of. The lawsuit was settled out of court and and, fearing a rival McClory film, allowed him to retain certain screen rights to the novel's story, plot, and characters, and for McClory to receive sole producer credit on this film; Broccoli and Saltzman instead served as executive producers.

Overview
Thunderball was originally conceived as the first film in a possible series of films for a production company called Xanadu Productions, formed by Ian Fleming, Ernest Cuneo, Ivar Bryce and Kevin McClory. The history of Xanadu Productions is very complicated and even today very controversial. The first draft of Thunderball was written by Cuneo and sent to Bryce. The rough draft was specifically designed around an idea by Kevin McClory to shoot the film underwater using Todd-AO cameras. Thunderball would later go through several rewrites, although some elements from Cuneo's version would remain in the final novelized story by Fleming. The main villains of the screenplay at the time were the Russians but after the first draft were subsequently changed to SPECTRE. Some sources, including Raymond Benson's The James Bond Bedside Companion, claim that the idea of SPECTRE came from McClory, while other sources including "Inside Thunderball", an article by John Cork who is also the author of many official biographies, documentaries, and DVD featurettes on Ian Fleming and the James Bond films, claims SPECTRE was created by Fleming. The second draft of Thunderball was written by Fleming where the villain "Largo" is introduced as well as some of the main plot points from the novel and film including the theft of a nuclear device. The rest of the project was a collaborative effort between Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, and Ian Fleming on a story and a screenplay over a two-year period. During this time, Xanadu went bust and Ernest Cuneo supposedly sold his rights to the drafts of Thunderball to Ivar Bryce for one dollar.

The finished screenplay was meant to be produced by Kevin McClory; however, McClory had recently finished an unsuccessful film called The Boy and the Bridge. This led to complications with getting proper financial backing for the film. Pearson claimed that McClory had visited Fleming at Goldeneye, Fleming's house in Jamaica, where Fleming explained to McClory his intention to deliver the screenplay to MCA with his recommendation for McClory to produce the film. Additionally, Fleming told McClory that if MCA were to reject the film because of McClory's involvement that McClory should either sell himself to MCA, back out, or prepare to go to court. A few months later, however, Fleming met Harry Saltzman and later Albert R. Broccoli and sold them the film rights to the current series of published books as well as future James Bond novels except for Casino Royale, the rights for which had already been sold to other parties.

Because the deal between Fleming and McClory collapsed, Fleming took the story and the screenplay and novelized them as his ninth James Bond novel. Initially, the novel credited only Ian Fleming as writer although the book is dedicated to his friend Ernest Cuneo ("Muse"). Prior to publication, McClory received an advanced copy of the book and consequently filed suit along with Whittingham against Fleming in 1961 for "plagiarism and false attribution". Additionally, McClory filed a lawsuit against Ivar Bryce for "injuring him as a false partner in Xanadu Productions". The courts ruled that the lawsuit would not interfere with the publication of the novel because a number of books had already been shipped to retailers. The lawsuit, on the other hand, did prevent Thunderball from becoming the first James Bond movie, although screenwriter Richard Maibaum, who in the future would either cowrite or adapt thirteen James Bond films, did complete a screenplay adaptation.

In December 1963 Fleming settled out of court with McClory at the behest of Ivar Bruce, who felt Fleming's health was being seriously affected by stress from the lawsuit (Fleming had already been victim to one heart attack and in 1964 would die from a second). During the lawsuit, Whittingham had dropped out due to financial difficulties and had sold his rights to the scripts to McClory. The settlement forced future versions of Thunderball to credit on the title page: "based on a screen treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, and Ian Fleming", in that order though Ian Fleming's main author credit remained. Additionally, McClory was given the right to make a film adaptation of the book as well as the rights to all aspects of Thunderball, which supposedly included the rights to the villainous organization SPECTRE, the character Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Blofeld's white Persian cat, and nine additional plot treatments and outlines. In an October 1997 interview with The Daily Telegraph, McClory stated this included the rights to any James Bond film plot that would include an "atomic bomb hijacking".