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Picture if you will, a world in which someone would say no to Steven Spielberg. After all, the guy changed cinema with 1975’s Jaws, creating the summer blockbuster, earning tons of money, and getting a Best Director nomination. But that’s exactly what happened, several times when Spielberg begged producer Cubby Broccoli to let him make a movie about his childhood hero, James Bond. But after numerous rejections, Spielberg’s best bud George Lucas came to him with another idea: a movie about an adventurer called Indiana Jones.
Spielberg’s James Bond Mission
It’s no surprise that Spielberg loves James Bond. As anyone who saw The Fabelmans can tell you, the director developed his remarkable cinematic sense not by going to film school but by replicating the images of movies he saw at the local suburban theaters. And few movies of that formative era were bigger in the minds of young men than the James Bond pictures. The first two Bond movies are relatively low-key affairs, but by the time a teenaged Spielberg saw Goldfinger in 1964 and Thunderball in 1965, the movies had become big-budget spectacles. So as soon as the success of Jaws raised his status in Hollywood, Spielberg thought he had a shot.
“I called up Cubby and offered my services but he didn’t think I was right for the part,” Spielberg told The Independent in 2016. Spielberg tried again a few years later, after the alien movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind made another splash at the box office. He also did get his overdue Best Director Oscar nod on that one
“[Once] again I tried to get on a Bond film, and now they can’t afford me,” he recalled in the same Independent interview.
To a modern moviegoer, the decision by Broccoli,...