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Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Sparks Fly: Ron and Russell Mael, beach boys of lotusland, get ‘MAD!' on their latest album
Ron and Russell Mael are that rarest of all breeds, the Los Angeles native. The brothers came of age in the 1960s on L.A.'s Westside — decades before it was '310' or west of the 405 Freeway — because the north/south artery hadn't yet been built. A sporty upbringing of beach volleyball, AM radio tuned to 93 KHJ, and Palisades High School football (for Russell) belie the intellectual cool-cult status the band has held for decades. A status, that in the last few years, after making eclectic, uncompromising and witty albums since 1971, is morphing into something approaching mainstream recognition. The Maels credit the newfound momentum to cinema, specifically the 2021 Edgar Wright documentary 'The Sparks Brothers' and 'Annette,' a film that opened Cannes in 2021 which found the creator-brothers joyful on the red carpet with director Leos Carax and stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. Up next? A 'half-musical' with John Woo ('Face/Off'). If the musicians' visibility and viability has shifted, Sparks' music remains inventive, brainy and flamboyant pop, often born of sunshiny moments and wistful memories that wend their way into lyrics. But it's hardly nostalgia. 'Perhaps in the themes,' says Ron, 'but in a musical sense, we really try to avoid nostalgia completely.' 'JanSport Backpack,' is a yearning tune with harmonies and a hazily poignant emotional tone akin to the Beach Boys —another band of Westside brothers and musical observers of youth culture. If the narrator laments the JanSport Backpack girl walking away, the love interest in 'My Devotion' has '[her] name written on my shoe,' as Russell sings. 'Maybe it isn't so much nostalgic,' Ron said. 'In some ways, we matured, in some we haven't, so we're still kind of living in an era of writing somebody's name on their shoes.' One tune is a surprising almost-love-letter to a fixture that's the bane of many Golden State warriors' existence — and satirized aptly on the 'Saturday Night Live' sketch 'The Californians': The 405 Freeway. 'I-405' is a frenetic, driving, cinematic journey that perfectly captures the drama and beauty roiling underneath bumper-to-bumper frustration. 'You kind of think of the I-405 in a negative way, because you think of being stuck on it. Everybody has their horror stories about it,' says Ron, perched next to his brother in the lounge area of Russell's bright recording studio, surrounded by the coolest pop culture tchotchkes and collectibles imaginable. 'One time when I was up at the Getty Center, and it was starting to be dusk, with the cars moving it seemed, in its own weird, L.A. kind of way, romantic. Almost like our equivalent, if you really stretch it, to the beautiful rivers in Europe and Japan,' Ron says. 'That was kind of the starting point for the song. If you look at it from a distance, there is kind of a beauty, and I think that's one of the keys to Los Angeles. You have to see things that you kind of think of as mundane in a slightly different way. Like, you go to Europe and things are obviously Art. Period. But here, a car wash or something…' '…We're big fans of supermarkets,' Russell chimes in. 'When they go away, it's kind of sad. Even department stores now are almost becoming a relic of the past. It's like a ghost town in the Beverly Center. All that's going to be gone at some point soon.' If not by gentrification and L.A.'s habit of eating its own, then natural disasters. The Jan. 7 Palisades fire burned part of Ron's high school, and the entirety of the home they lived in with their mother after their father's passing, on Galloway Street in the Palisades. Nearly every house in the entire neighborhood — the Alphabet Streets, a working-class enclave when the Maels lived there — was reduced to a pile of rubble. 'They had some of those aerial shots where they made the grid of the names of the streets, and it was gone. It's hard to comprehend, it was real suburbia there,' says Russell, 'and flat, so you think, 'well, surely that can't burn down.'' Slightly east of the 405, the Maels attended UCLA when culture was at a tipping point. Ron saw some of Jim Morrison's 'kind of impressive' student films at the school, and the brothers recall that, 'UCLA, at the time, had this amazing booking policy; you had Jimi Hendrix and Alice Cooper and Mothers of Invention, Canned Heat. It wasn't considered such a big deal. Just, 'Let's go see that person.' Now you have to go online and mortgage your house to go to see anybody,' says Ron. 'We always loved that kind of music,' adds Russell, 'but we never thought that we would ever be, you know, professional musicians. It's just that was the music that we really loved.' That said, by the age of 5, Ron was taking piano lessons and giving a recital at the Women's Club of Venice, near where the Mael family then resided. At Paul Revere Junior High, Russell won first place at a Shakespeare Festival for his sonnet recitation. Post those halcyon days, the brothers began delving into music together. Russell's powerful, at times operatic, vocals and energetic stage presence proved the perfect foil for Ron's distinctly quirky mien and adroit facility with words and keys. 'I don't know if you go as far as to call it a band,' clarifies Ron. 'It was an attempt at being a band. We played at some dorm thing at UCLA once.' 'We also played a pizza place in Westwood,' Ron remembers. 'Shakey's Pizza,' Russell adds with a laugh. 'We were top-billed that night. Yeah, free pizza. We did the local Westwood circuit and then when we got somewhat better we started playing the Whisky a Go Go a bunch. We were officially Sparks then.' The Sunset Strip, past its Doors days and with hair metal far on the horizon, wasn't especially welcoming to Sparks, though [Whisky founder] Elmer Valentine 'irrationally loved our band,' says Ron. 'The audiences, when they showed up, they really didn't like us and we were really way too loud. But he kept booking us. We would support people like Little Feat.' The L.A. Times reviewed that 1973 show, with critic Richard Cromelin noting that Sparks' 'highly stylized attitude is not complemented by the necessary abandon.' That observation may ring true for some, but for Sparks, ultimately that 'abandon' wasn't and isn't necessary. The energy of beguiling songs like 'Angst in My Pants' and 'This Town Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us,' belted out with Russell's ebullient, pitch-perfect vocals, carry the always dynamic live show. Over the last four years, the Maels are glad to shake the long-held best-kept-secret tag, grateful to 'Annette' and 'The Sparks Brothers' for the boost. 'They kind of attracted people who were coming to us from the film area; they didn't know about the band. It's a new, younger audience, really diverse,' Russell says. The lineup's last few albums are the most meaningful to that sector. 'Going back to say, [1974's] 'Kimono My House,' for them, it's not meaningful in the same kind of way as somebody who was there at that time,' the singer says. 'It's really healthy that their focal point isn't like the 'golden era of whenever' that might have been the '70s in London or the '80s in L.A. or any point in between.' New eyes on the band have elicited a seemingly increased enthusiasm and energy that's perhaps unexpected from seasoned septuagenarians. Unlike the Gallaghers, the Davieses, and many other brotherly duos in rock, the Maels present a united front. If the brothers are coy and circumspect about their personal lives, their working relationship is slightly less obtuse. Slightly. We're in the room where their latest, 'MAD!,' (released Friday) was created, and while the album credits both with lyrics and production, Ron is the main wordsmith. There's seemingly not much back-and-forth on the lyrical themes or specifics. 'I hear about it on the day it's time to start singing,' says Russell. 'There's a 'here's your lyrics, sir.'' That said, Sparks' seeming manifesto, 'Do Things My Own Way' which starts the album, is clearly a statement of the duo's longtime purpose, Russell singing, 'Unaligned / Simply fine / Gonna do things my own way.' So would it ever be 'our own way'? The Maels laugh. 'Not as long as I'm writing the songs,' quips Ron. 'Good question, though,' says Russell with a smile. ''We witnessed the breakup of Sparks,'' Ron says with a laugh. 'On the 'Greatest Hits' album, we can do a version that's 'ours.''
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
25 years on, the Eden Project is fighting for survival
The Icelandic poppies are popping. The cacao pods have emerged. The Japanese garden is bursting with colour. After a sunny March and a wet April, the conditions are just right for an explosive spring display at the Eden Project. But despite the flourishing scenes, the outlook isn't so rosy in the Eden Project's boardroom. A quarter of a century after opening its doors to the public, the visionary horticultural project faces its biggest challenges to date. In January 2025 the Eden Project slashed one fifth of its workforce due to declining visitor numbers and rising costs, with extreme weather patterns and ageing infrastructure bringing additional challenges for the institution. The Eden Project dream, like the global ecosystem that it champions, is more precarious than ever before. Yet the people behind it say their work has only just begun. The Eden Project will 'make science sexy'. That was the promise of the Eden Project's former marketing director, Paul Travers, when the first phase of the project opened 25 years ago, in May 2000. Those early visitors could visit the exhibition centre and take a tour of the former clay pit, a crater the size of 35 football pitches, where the project's famous bubbles – big enough to house the Tower of London – were beginning to spawn. 'This was the moment we realised it would be a bigger beast than we anticipated,' says Dan James, Eden Project's development director. 'The working assumption was that we'd attract around 650,000 visitors per year. In the first six months after the soft launch, half a million people turned up. It was completely beyond our expectations.' Meanwhile, exotic plant species from around the world had been selected and transported to a nursery on the estate. The scope of the project was colossal, costing £140 million in total. There was even a nationwide scaffolding shortage, because 230 miles of the stuff (a Guinness world record) was being used to build the Eden Project's biomes. Just four months after its Mediterranean and tropical biomes and gardens opened to the public, in March 2001, more than 800,000 visitors had passed through its doors. The Eden Project was such a success that its bosses placed adverts in West Country newspapers urging people to stay away. 'I think there was a general consensus at the time that Eden might have been one of the millennium projects most likely to fail, but I think the opposite is true,' says James. The Eden Project quickly became a symbol of Cornwall's prospering tourism industry. It has hosted some of the world's biggest musicians: Elton John, the Beach Boys, Amy Winehouse and Oasis have all played their anthemic hits to the backdrop of brightly lit domes. It marked its territory in popular culture, too. Halle Berry abseiled down one of the biomes in the 2002 Bond film Die Another Day. Ten years after opening, the Eden Project had attracted more than a million visitors per year, far exceeding all expectations and regularly ranking in the top 20 in the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA) list. 'It was completely beyond our expectations,' says James. The project, nobody could deny, was proving to be a roaring success. The first cracks began to show in 2012, when the Eden Project trust revealed a deficit of £6.3 million for the year, compared to a surplus of £136,000 the previous year. They put the struggles down to poor weather, the economic downturn and the London 2012 Olympics. That year, the Eden Project reported less than a million visitors for the first time and was forced to make job cuts as a result. Malcolm Bell, the former boss at Visit Cornwall, said at the time that he wasn't surprised: 'Repeat and return business is harder for Cornwall than the likes of London. What is a 'must do' the first time, becomes a 'maybe' the second time,' he said. By 2024, the Eden Project had dropped to number 54 in the ALVA list of top tourist attractions. It reported 673,625 visits, fewer than Clumber Park in the East Midlands, with a year-on-year footfall drop of 6 per cent. That number is almost a third of the 1.8 million visitors who passed through its doors during its first year of operation. While nobody expected the project to maintain the feverish levels of interest of its early days, that still represents a drop of 66 per cent. Why so? James says that, like many tourism businesses, the Eden Project suffered greatly during the pandemic and hasn't fully recovered since. 'When visitors aren't coming to Cornwall, that's a challenge. We saw a bit of that last year. We've also got some unique challenges because of our site: we're in a hole in the ground, and that costs a lot of money to maintain,' he said, adding that worsening floods and storms have affected the site, which sits beneath the water table. With visitor numbers down so dramatically, eyes naturally turn to the price point. An adult ticket on the door is £42 and a child aged between five and 16 costs £16. For a family of four, this means a family ticket costs £116 (booked online in advance: £100). 'It's always a conversation we have at board meetings, almost on a weekly basis. When you pay to come in, that's your annual pass, meaning you can come in as many times as you want for the rest of the year. There are also discounts for locals and for people on universal credit,' says James. 'The real challenge is to keep people wanting to come back, and making Eden not just a bucket list destination but a place where you want to come on a regular basis to see how it's changing and what's going on.' As for the state of the domes, James says: 'The biomes may be 25 years old, but they still look amazing. There are bits that are fraying around the edges. Generally, it's in good nick.' Nobody can accuse the Eden Project bosses of sitting on their hands. Two years ago the project drilled three miles underground and built a geothermal energy plant which now heats its biomes, along with thousands of homes near Truro, local schools and the Royal Cornwall Hospital. The site has also moved with the times in terms of its wider offering. Over the years, new play areas, restaurants, a canopy walkway, a giant swing, a seasonal ice rink and even a zip wire have added a slice of fun to the visitor experience. What's next? The Eden Project has set its sights on growth beyond the south Cornish coast. The Eden Project North, in Morecambe, is expected to open in 2028 and there are plans in the pipeline for outposts in Dundee and Northern Ireland. Farther afield, the Eden Project has a centre in development in Qingdao, China, and proposals for an Eden Project Australia in a former coal mile in Anglesea, Victoria. 'Eden's mission, inspiring positive action for the planet, is more important now than it's ever been,' says James. 'But if we want to have a national role, we need to be more than just delivering our educational work in the bottom left-hand corner of the UK. We need a bigger reach and a bigger audience. 'The best is yet to come for Eden.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
The Journal
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Journal
Quiz: How well do you know these songs about summer?
THERE'S NOTHING LIKE a classic summer tune when the sun is out. This weekend, we basked in sun across the country, and it looks like the bright weather is here to stay for a little longer. We've almost hit the summer! Advertisement Whether your choice of location to enjoy the good weather is a beach, beer garden or barbeque, the songs are essential – so let's see how well you know your summer-themed songs. How many times is the word "sun" used in the Beatles hit Here Comes the Sun? Alamy Stock Photo 6 12 17 25 In what year did Katrina and the Waves release "Walking on Sunshine" Alamy Stock Photo 1981 1983 1985 1991 Who sang the hit song 'In the Summertime'? Alamy Stock Photo Mingus Jones Dorcas Wesley Mungo Jerry Everly Whitmore Summer Nights was a duet between Danny (John Travolta) and Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) in the movie Grease. How many lines in the song were delivered by other characters from the film? Alamy Stock Photo None 3 5 7 Everybody knows where Bryan Adams got his first real six-string in Summer of '69. But can you name the two 'guys from school' who had to leave the band in the song? Alamy Stock Photo Jimmy and Jody Johnny and Jack Joey and Jason Jamie and Jacob Which of the following popular sports did the Beach Boys reminisce about doing in All Summer Long? Alamy Stock Photo Surfing Frisbee Mini golf Football The Beach Boys have an impressive collection of songs about summer. How many times did the band appear on Billboard Magazine's list of Top 30 Summer Songs? Alamy Stock Photo 4 6 1 Never In what year did Lana Del Rey release Summertime Sadness? Alamy Stock Photo 2010 2011 2012 2013 Which band is behind 1999 hit Steal My Sunshine? Youtube Ben Ken Sen Len Complete this lyric from a lesser-known but catchy track by The Corrs: "In the heat of summer sunshine..." Alamy Stock Photo I miss you I need you I miss you I am sunburnt Answer all the questions to see your result! You scored out of ! Chart Connoisseur You're the kind of person others rely on to set the perfect seasonal soundtrack. Share your result: Share Tweet You scored out of ! Poolside Prodigy You're familiar with many of the big summer songs, and it's clear you enjoy the feel-good vibes they bring. Share your result: Share Tweet You scored out of ! Semi-Seasoned Listener You've got a solid awareness of summer's signature songs — the ones that define road trips, garden parties and long, light-filled evenings. Share your result: Share Tweet You scored out of ! Casual Summer Enthusiast You enjoy the feeling summer music brings, even if you're not always sure who sings what. Share your result: Share Tweet You scored out of ! Ice Cream Dropper Share your result: Share Tweet Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
Los Angeles Times
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The 9 best moments from Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan at the Hollywood Bowl
For the second time in less than a year, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan played the Hollywood Bowl on Friday night, bringing together two legends of American song on one stage. The concert — actually Nelson's third recent visit to the Bowl after his 90th-birthday bash in 2023 — was part of the annual traveling Outlaw Music Festival, which will keep Nelson, now 92, and Dylan, who'll turn 84 next week, on the road through mid-September. Here are nine highlights from the show: 1. Last year's Outlaw tour stopped at the Bowl in late July, which at that time meant Nelson didn't have to ward off the chilly May gray that inevitably settles after dark over the Cahuenga Pass. Here, a day after reportedly suffering from a cold in Chula Vista, Nelson kept warm in a stylish black puffer jacket to go with his signature red bandanna. 2. John Stamos played percussion in Nelson's six-man band Friday — a somewhat lower-key role than the prominent guitar-and-vocals spot he often holds down these days in Mike Love's touring Beach Boys. Yet the TV star looked pleased as punch to be back there, shaking a shaker as Nelson opened his set, as always, with 'Whiskey River.' Also on hand, filling in for Nelson's son Lukas was singer-guitarist Waylon Payne, who sang lead in a moving version of Kris Kristofferson's 'Help Me Make It Through the Night' — the folk-soul masterpiece made a hit in 1970 by Payne's mother, the late Sammi Smith. 3. My favorite of Nelson's styles to hear him do at this point in his career, with a voice and a soloing hand as free as they've ever been, is the spectral country-jazz mode of 'Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground' and 'Always on My Mind,' which gave him a pair of No. 1 country hits between March 1981 and May 1982. On Friday, he nailed high notes you might not have expected him to in the former and used the latter to show off the rhythmic daring of his line readings. Both were achingly beautiful. 4. Nelson didn't perform anything from his latest album, 'Oh What a Beautiful World,' which came out last month and collects his interpretations of a dozen Rodney Crowell tunes. (By some counts, it's Nelson's 77th solo studio LP — and the 15th he's dropped since 2015.) He did, however, do a cut from his second-most-recent effort: a stately rendition of Tom Waits' 'Last Leaf,' in which he rhymes 'They say I got staying power' with 'I've been here since Eisenhower.' In fact, Nelson's been here since FDR. 5. The big event in Dylanology between last year's Outlaw tour and this year's was, of course, James Mangold's Oscar-nominated biopic, 'A Complete Unknown,' which inspired a widespread resurgence of interest in Dylan's music — particularly the early stuff Timothée Chalamet performs in the movie. Perhaps that's why Dylan is singing 'Don't Think Twice, It's All Right' on the road again for the first time in six years, including at the Bowl, where he gave the song a jaunty rockabilly vibe. (Anyone wondering why Chalamet wasn't at Friday's gig clearly hasn't seen the TikToks of him wilding out after his beloved Knicks defeated the Celtics at New York's Madison Square Garden.) 6. A rare-ish bit of stage banter from His Bobness, directed toward an audience member near the front row: 'What are you eating down there? What is it?' 7. The whole point of going to see Dylan play is to be delighted — or to be outraged, or baffled — by his determination to reinvent songs so deeply etched into the history of rock music. Yet I was still thrilled by how radically he made over some of his classics here: 'Desolation Row' was bright and frisky, while a sultry 'All Along the Watchtower' sounded like Dire Straits doing '80s R&B. 8. In addition to Nelson and Dylan, Outlaw's West Coast leg also features two younger roots-music acts in Billy Strings and Sierra Hull. (Later in the summer, the tour will pick up the likes of Nathaniel Rateliff, Sheryl Crow, Waxahatchee and Wilco, depending on the city.) Strings, who's been bringing bluegrass to arenas lately — and whose tattooed arms meshed seamlessly with the sleeves of his tie-dyed T-shirt — sang 'California Sober,' which he recorded in 2023 as a duet with Nelson, and offered a haunting take on 'Summertime' from 'Porgy and Bess.' 9. A former child prodigy on the mandolin, Hull opened the evening flexing her Berklee-trained chops in a series of lickety-split bluegrass numbers that got early arrivers whistling with approval. But she also showed off a winsome pop sensibility in originals like 'Muddy Water' and 'Spitfire' — about 'my spitfire granny back in Tennessee,' she said — and in a yearning cover of 'Mad World' by Tears for Fears.
Telegraph
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘Roger did not get the joke': Why A View to a Kill is Bond at his ridiculous best
There's a rule about the Roger Moore Bond films: the more ridiculous and less believable it is that Rodge himself is performing the stunts – whether he's skiing off a 7,000ft mountain in The Spy Who Loved Me or clambering across a train in Octopussy – the more entertaining he is. That's never truer than in A View to a Kill, Moore's final outing as 007, which premiered 40 years ago. Rodge – a less-than-spritely 57 by this point – escapes KGB agents by snowboarding through the mountains of Siberia (cut to a cover of The Beach Boys ' California Girls) and dangles from the swinging ladder of a high-speed fire engine. In the end, he fights Christopher Walken at 750 ft on the Golden Gate Bridge. Moore's age is a common criticism of A View to a Kill, which – it's fair to say – is not the most critically adored Bond film. Moore himself named A View to a Kill as his least favourite due to violence. And when I ask director John Glen where A View to a Kill sits within his five films as director, he responds, 'Roger was knocking on a bit. We all knew, including Roger, that it was his last Bond.' But A View to a Kill is a perfect swansong for the japery of the Roger Moore era. All the distinct pleasures of Moore's tenure are present and correct and magnified by the fact that Bond is – in Moore's own words – 'a bit long in the tooth'. There's thrilling stunt work by stunt men who are definitely not Roger Moore; knowing gags that raise an eyebrow to the audience; the queasy canoodling of any young woman within his vicinity; and the relentless innuendo ('I'll fill you in later, Moneypenny… I'm an early riser myself…I got off eventually', etc). It's all right there in the pre-title sequence. After the Beach Boys snowboard escape – a brilliantly inventive chase – Bond sneaks into an iceberg-shaped submarine, immediately patronises the delectable helmswoman ('Be a good girl would you and put her in automatic') then bumps the controls so she falls onto his bed. But 57 or not, Bond is still Bond, and when the titles kick in – a day-glo sequence set to the walloping synths of the Duran Duran theme – it's absolutely electric, charged by an excitement that's unique to Bond films. A View to a Kill also has two of the great Eighties Bond baddies: Walken's Max Zorin, a maniac industrialist who was born of a Nazi genetics experiment (naturally); and Grace Jones as Bond girl-cum-henchwoman, May Day. In the film, May Day parachutes off the Eiffel Tower – the film's signature stunt, performed by BJ Worth – while behind the scenes Grace Jones got on Rodge's wick. 'I've always said if you've nothing nice to say about someone, then you should say nothing,' wrote Moore in reference to Jones. 'So I'll say nothing.' Roger Moore had hinted that every Bond film would be his last for several years before A View to a Kill. It was all a bit of a game to increase his pay cheque next time around – to add a few more double-Os, perhaps. But writing in his memoir, Moore reflected that he really was taking stock of his career and thinking about winding down when producer Albert 'Cubby' Broccoli asked him to play Bond again. Moore was game. 'I was pretty fit and still able to remember lines,' he wrote. The script – by Richard Maibaum and co-producer Michael G Wilson – had little to do with the Ian Fleming short story, From a View to a Kill, other than the title and Paris setting. In the film, Zorin plans to kickstart an earthquake that will wipe out Silicon Valley, allowing him to take control of the booming microchip business. Yes, Moore's flared tuxedo may have been a touch behind the times, but Zorin was of the technological moment. Forty years on, Zorin now looks like the original tech bro, prefiguring all those jokes about how tech billionaires such as Elon Musk are almost real-life Bond villains, with their plans to travel to space and conquer Mars. 'Maybe he saw my films!' says John Glen, laughing. Zorin's plans were foiled before production began, though. The famed 007 stage at Pinewood Studios, which was set to hold Zorin's network on mines, burned down in June 1984, while being used for Ridley Scott's Legend, and had to be rebuilt. As for Zorin himself, David Bowie was offered the role but declined – 'I didn't want to spend five months watching my double fall off mountains,' Bowie said – and Sting had meetings. Christopher Walken, however, was a different class. He was already an Oscar winner by this time, having won a Best Supporting Actor statue in 1979 for The Deer Hunter. 'They sent me a script, it seemed like a good job,' Walken later recalled. 'I knew there were lots of reasons to do it. How many times does an actor get to be in a Bond film? That would just be fun to do that.' With his off-world stare and trademark lilt ('You am- USE me, Mr Bond'), Walken is an elite level Bond villain. A by-product of being genetically engineered by Nazis, we are told, is also being psychotic. He drops uncooperative business associates out of his airship and laughs to himself as he machine-guns an army of his own workers. Moore later pointed to that moment as the reason A View to a Kill was his least favourite Bond. 'Too violent,' Roger said in 1996. 'There was no slow-motion, blood-spewing Sam Peckinpah action, but with the machine-guns and thousands of people getting blown away, the violence was too gratuitous.' Walken certainly seems to relish in the violence of the massacre. 'I just let him go,' says Glen about Walken's machine-gun performance. Elsewhere, Zorin kills Patrick Macnee's MI6 agent Sir Godfrey Tibbett, putting an end to what was essentially a dream team pairing of James Bond and John Steed (whom Macnee played in ITV's The Avengers) and forcing Moore's most serious moment in the film. The story begins with 007 attending a horse auction at Zorin's estate. Zorin is both a racehorse breeder and cheat – the horses are doped by his Nazi scientist creator. Bond wanders around spying on Zorin with massive polarising sunglasses – the most glaringly conspicuous bit of gadgetry in Q's arsenal – and chats up much younger women. 'I was hoping we'd spend the evening together,' he tells sexy geologist Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts) 60 seconds after meeting her. Bond meets his match in the bedroom, however, when he slips between the sheets with Grace Jones's May Day, who looks like she could ravage Moore to a pulp. During filming. Jones surprised him in bed with a menacingly large dildo. Moore did not appreciate it. 'We played a few tricks, as we always did on the Bond films,' says John Glen. 'She was in on it... It's the first time I'd ever known him not to take the joke. He got a bit upset about it, I must say. Normally it was him playing a joke on everyone else.' Though Grace Jones wrote glowingly about Moore in her autobiography, calling him a 'softie', Moore was less complimentary. He described in his memoir how she played loud heavy metal in her dressing room, which ruled out an afternoon nap. 'I did ask Grace to turn it down several times, to no avail,' Moore wrote. 'One day I snapped. I marched into her room, pulled the plug out and then went back to my room, picked up a chair and flung it at the wall. The dent is still there.' The scenes at Zorin's estate were filmed at Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. Glen recalls that Walken had a tendency to get bored between set-ups and wander off. 'There was a lot of waiting around,' he says. 'Christopher would go off for a walk in the hundreds of acres of woods and we'd have to send search parties. In the end I delegated one assistant director to watch him all the time so we could keep tabs by radio. It became a game. Christopher would watch this assistant and the moment the assistant took his eyes off him, he was gone!' Production also visited Paris to shoot major action sequences, including May Day's BASE jump from the Eiffel Tower. Parachuting off the Eiffel Tower was suggested by stuntman BJ Worth during Moonraker, and had appeared in a draft of the Moonraker script. With the stunt greenlit for A View to a Kill, Worth and skydiving pal Don Caltvedt performed 22 jumps from a hot air balloon. They had to get the precise timing to safely open the parachute from 900 ft and clear the outward slope of the tower. They worked out that they needed to pull their chutes after three seconds, which they timed with the changing pitch of the wind in their ears. But getting permissions in Paris was complicated. As well as the Eiffel Tower BASE jump, they needed approval for veteran stunt driver Rémy Julienne to drive a cut-in-half Renault 11 around a one-way system (going the wrong way, of course) along the Seine. The filmmakers had to schmooze numerous local authorities for the necessary permissions. But plans were almost compromised when in April 1984, ahead of filming, a London couple sneaked past security measures at the tower and jumped with parachutes hidden in backpacks. Paris authorities were concerned that the couple got the idea after hearing about the upcoming 007 stunt, and almost withdrew the film's permissions. Fortunately, BJ Worth was allowed to make the jump, which he did from a driving board-like platform. (Glen recalls his reaction to first seeing the platform during practices: 'I said, 'You can't use that! This is a world-renowned landmark! You can't change the silhouette of it!') Incredibly, Worth fell asleep on the scaffolding at the top of the tower while he waited 15 minutes for a camera reload. His adrenaline had been pumping so hard in the build-up that he shut down as soon as there was a delay. The jump was a success and Cubby Broccoli declined to risk filming a second attempt. However, backup jumper Don Caltvedt was miffed that he didn't get his turn, so crept up the tower early in the morning with a friend and craftily jumped without anyone knowing – or so he thought. The crew was already setting up for the next day's shooting and Caltvedt plummeted past Glen and his team. Worth fired him on the spot, and the Paris authorities almost pulled permissions once again 'I was very upset about that,' remembers Glen. 'It was incredibly irresponsible to jeopardise our shoot in Paris. To do jumps on the Eiffel Tower we had to get top permissions and had to assure them that we wouldn't do anything to embarrass them.' There were no such problems with permissions when the production moved to San Francisco for the second half of the film. The San Francisco mayor, Dianne Feinstein, was happy to host Bond and was especially enamoured by Roger Moore. 'It was lucky and fortunate enough that she was one of the rare people that preferred me as Bond instead of Sean [Connery],' Moore later said on a making of documentary. 'And so, we got all sorts of permits.' 'Her first question was, 'How much are you going to spend in the city?'' says Glen. 'We said, 'About four million'. She said, 'Do anything you like!' When we told her we wanted to burn down City Hall she said, 'If it's OK by the fire chief, it's OK by me.'' Rather than actually burning down San Francisco City Hall, Glen and his crew lined the roof with gas burners. (Torching the building is one of several Zorin plans to bump off Bond rather than just shooting him on the spot. See also: challenging 007 to a horse race rigged with traps, and locking him in a car and pushing it into a lake). In the following action sequence, Bond and Stacey Sutton steal a fire engine and race through San Francisco. Stacey steers as Bond clings to the ladder. It took almost three weeks to complete, with shots of a stuntman hanging off the ladder and dodging oncoming traffic, spliced with close-ups of Moore. Critics and fans have poked fun at A View to a Kill for several shots of stunt doubles who are quite obviously not Roger Moore – but that's all part of the fun of it. Glen laughs about the fact he switched Moore for stunt double Martin Grace at every opportunity. 'Roger wasn't particularly athletic,' says Glen. 'He couldn't really run very well. We'd always stick Martin Grace in where we could to double for him!' It certainly wasn't Moore at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge for the climactic punch-up between Bond and Zorin, after Zorin's airship gets stuck on the north tower. Though Moore did climb up one of the replica bridge sections built at Pinewood. 'I wasn't paid enough to climb the real one,' he later said. Much of the fight is taken from shooting on the Pinewood replicas, but the shots that are taken from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge are stomach-lurchingly impressive – Martin Grace doubles for Moore on the massive sloping cables. 'We were limited with what we could do because we were right above all the traffic,' says Glen. 'But we did a bit of stuntmen fighting with safety wires on them.' Zorin, unhinged until the end, laughs as he falls to his death from the bridge. Walken was laughing for real. 'I was hanging there and I was about to fall off the bridge on to some mattresses,' he said. 'It struck me as funny, that's all.' A View to a Kill premiered in San Francisco on May 22, 1985, the last of Roger Moore's seven films as 007. Though not Moore's finest outing, A View to a Kill still demonstrates the magic of his tenure – his screen persona. That's why even at 57, he gets away with it. You don't need to believe that Roger Moore can kill a man with his bare hands or snowboard away from the KGB. The film would also facilitate a necessary change for the Bond series. After A View to a Kill, the Bond team set out to find a more serious actor and ultimately cast Timothy Dalton for 1987's more Fleming-esque The Living Daylights, which Glen also directed. 'We had to make a radical change,' says Glen. 'Roger's Bonds were light-hearted. Timothy Dalton's Bond was more akin to Sean Connery. We were going back to the darker, laconic type of Bond. We had to go back to the original Fleming concept… We'd had our fun with Roger.'
