‘Warhead’: the unmade James Bond movie co-written by Sean Connery
Plenty of actors dabble in other aspects of the creative arts, but despite finishing his career having never been credited as a writer on anything, Sean Connery was roped into putting pen to paper at one stage to try and craft his own James Bond adventure from the ground up.
There were plenty of Ian Fleming stories ripe for the picking during Connery’s tenure as the original 007, but his untested talents as a screenwriter came under much more contentious circumstances. The Never Say Never Again scenario remains something that rights-holders Eon Productions would rather not talk about, but an unofficial and unauthorised loose remake of Thunderball sounds vastly superior to whatever the hell Warhead was shaping up to be.
When enough time had lapsed for producer Kevin McClory to avoid litigation and make his own Bond movie independent of canon, he placed many irons in the fire. One of them was recruiting writer Len Deighton – who ironically penned Michael Caine’s anti-Bond trilogy The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, and Billion Dollar Brain – and Connery to put their heads together on a globetrotting espionage epic.
While it followed the general throughline of Thunderball to enough of a degree that McClory wasn’t running the risk of facing even more courtroom action from Eon, some bizarre additions were made in the draft. Had Warhead been made in its original iteration, then it would have basically been Austin Powers long before Mike Myers mercilessly tore apart the essence of Bond at the seams.
One of the female characters is called Justine Lovesit, which is just how far the Connery-penned outing was planning to plant its tongue into cheek. Dr. Evil was famous for his unending desire to have fricking sharks with fricking laser beams attached to their heads, but Warhead seriously considered doing something very similar.
The third act would have unfolded in New York City, with 007 pursuing – and wrestling – mechanical sharks in the sewers in an effort to prevent the automated aquatic predators from carrying out their goal of detonating an atomic bomb under the bustling metropolis.
Connery’s hero would have also ended up paragliding onto the Statue of Liberty’s resplendent head to battle the disposable henchmen of the Spectre organisation. Somewhat suspiciously, though, Roger Moore’s rival Bond blockbuster The Spy Who Loved Me ended up featuring an underwater base of operations very similar to the one described in the Warhead script. The same can be said of the escape pod that houses Moore’s suave secret agent and Barbara Bach’s Anya Amasova in the final scene.
Accusing his rivals of pilfering his pitch, McClory sought an injunction against Eon, who’d previously taken one out on his in-development adaptation. The litigious back-and-forth led to both Connery and studio Paramount backing away from Warhead until it was refitted into the more palatable and less easily sued Never Say Never Again, which carried Warner Bros as its backer in the United States.
Warhead remains one of Bond’s most fascinating what-if scenarios, but had it happened in its originally intended form, Austin Powers would have had plenty more material to poke fun at.
