These days it’s quite common — expected, even — for a film to arrive with hours and hours of behind-the-scenes footage, making of documentaries, bloopers, deleted scenes, interviews, and whatnot. It used to be that we’d have to wait for the DVD release for this sort of thing, but now the promotional material kicks into high gear months before a film even releases (whether this is a good or bad thing for a film fan is a topic for another day).
It’s easy to think that this phenomenon is new, but movie publicity — and whetting the appetite of fans with more than just a trailer — was around long before home video.
A lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff we take for granted must have been pioneered by the James Bond movies, I think. Here was, for the first time, a series with a rabid fan following, production schedules that meant they were produced almost back to back, and an endless curiosity about the gadgets, girls and of course guns of the fictional universe.
Sean Connery introduces this video — he’s on the Fort Knox set of the then-upcoming Goldfinger and suave & sardonic as ever (but that’s a topic for another day too) — that takes us through some of the iconic weapons of James Bond, including the Walther PPK (which, film fans should note, Bond didn’t originally carry in the books).