"I mean it really is beyond bizarre," says Jhodi Mace Chambers, award-winning video artist, granddaughter of Dayton Mace, and the person primarily responsible for exhuming The Forgotten Bond Film. "I mean I had heard things, over the years, but ... it was only after Grandma died and they were clearing out the garage, and lo and behold, all these old film cans ... Imagine my excitement when I found out what they were. I'd always assumed she'd had them destroyed."
For the past three years Jhodi has been waging a war on two fronts: to restore the footage, much of it badly deteriorated, for public showing; and to persuade the Bond franchise holders to allow it at least a limited arthouse release, probably integrated into a documentary about its making, and possibly even incorporating the iconic Bond Theme into a suitably retro-007 music score. "In all, we have maybe forty minutes of usable scenes," Jhodi explains. "Mr Welles" - charmingly, she refers to the director thus throughout - "had several script pages, around half the total, still to shoot. These we're hoping to re-create, or at least approximate, with the help of some digital wizardry. Right now, we're negotiating for permission to take suitable footage of Mr Bogarde, Mr Welles and other principal players from various films they made in the mid-'50s in order to synthesize, as it were, some semblance of the unshot Moonraker scenes. Maybe we'll even shoot some new stuff - who knows? Maybe the best we can do would be a series of stills, filling in the gaps, and possibly with sound, employing voice artists. It's going to take time and money, but in my belief it's a worthwhile venture. This is a Bond film like no other. Cinema history."
