In the 007 flick “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), Australian actor George Lazenby replaced Sean Connery and famously quipped, “This never happened to the other fellow.”
Now, “The Other Fellow” is the title of an intriguing new documentary by Australian filmmaker Matthew Bauer, who follows real-life people with the name of James Bond.
“It’s one of those ideas that just came to me,” Director Matthew Bauer told WTOP. “I jumped on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Before I knew it, I had messaged a bunch of dudes named James Bond. … I thought it was going to be all Aston Martin jokes! Very quickly they were telling me about running from police, stalkers and cases of identity theft.”
The documentary opens in 1952 as British author Ian Fleming creates 007 for his first novel “Casino Royale,” ironically naming James Bond after a Philadelphia ornithologist.
“Heroes of the time in fiction were called Peregrine Carruthers or Bulldog Drummond,” Bauer said. “He didn’t want that because Bond was supposed to be this anonymous secret agent. He wanted the flattest, quietest name he could find. He looked up and saw on his bookshelf ‘Birds of the West Indies’ by the Philadelphia ornithologist James Bond.”
Now, the Philadelphia ornithologist Bond is just one of four main characters in the documentary, including James Alexander Bond, a gay theater director in New York City. “He obviously has to deal with constant jokes of being compared to the world’s most famous womanizer,” Bauer said. “He’s the first James Bond in the New York phone book!”
There’s also James Bond Jr., a Black man awaiting trial for murder in Indiana State Prison. “He complains a lot of being given, as he says, ‘the whitest name in the world,'” Bauer said. “He very proudly says he’s only ever seen like half of one of these movies.”
Most bizarre is Gunnar James Bond Schäfer, the son of a Nazi who opened a Bond Museum in Sweden. “He wanted to establish himself a new identity for himself given his family’s history. Over the course of 60 years, he’s slowly turned himself into James Bond. He drives around his snowy community in Sweden in an Aston Martin drinking martinis.”
It all builds to another surprise James Bond, but we won’t spoil it here.
“It’s best to let the viewers discover that story for themselves,” Bauer said.
The film opens in select theaters and is available on Video on Demand on Friday.
Listen to our full conversation here.
