Kevin McClory (b. 1924) is a British screenwriter, producer, and director. McClory is best known for the 1983 James Bond film Never Say Never Again, which was the result of a long legal battle between McClory and Ian Fleming (later MGM) over the writing credits and later the film rights to Thunderball.
Bio
McClory started his film career as a film technician at Shepperton Studios, then moved on to Hollywood, where he worked as an assistant to John Huston on a number of movies including The African Queen. Moving back to England, he wrote and directed The Boy and the Bridge .
In 1958, McClory met Ian Fleming and they, with Jack Whittingham, collaborated on a number of drafts for a possible film or television series. When the project was scrapped, Fleming took their work and novelized it into his ninth novel, Thunderball in 1961. McClory and Whittingham filed suit and eventually won forcing future versions of the novel to be credited as "based on a screen treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, and Ian Fleming". Due to the lawsuit, Thunderball was pushed back as EON Productions first official James Bond film. McClory would also win the rights to produce the film with Harry Saltzman in 1965 and would win the rights to produce a future adaption, which occurred in 1983 with Sean Connery returning to play the role of Bond in Never Say Never Again.
Since then, McClory has continued to try to make movies based on the Thunderball script, including most famously a project called Warhead 2001, that was to be made by Sony. The project was scrapped when a court gave MGM/UA sole control over James Bond on film. In 2004 Sony acquired MGM, which includes the James Bond franchise, however, the production and final say over everything involving the film version of James Bond is controlled by EON Productions, Albert R. Broccoli's production company.
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