Ten years ago I published the travel guide 'On the tracks of 007'. Obviously this didn't just fell out of the sky one day. It was compiled from a hobby that started in the early 80's. Here's the story behind it all..
My love for James Bond started when I was about 9 years old. My dad - for reasons I still don't know - was able to buy the inventory of a closed down illegal video store. He returned home one day with two huge card board boxes filled with VHS video cassettes. No official rental cassettes with nice looking covers.. no, just illegal copies. My youthful life was suddenly enlarged with 60s and 70s titles like 'Bonny and Clyde', 'Once upon a time in the West' and 'The Enforcer'. Our family VCR was on 24/7 and I loved it all. There was one film though that I watched over and over: Moonraker, strangely enough the only James Bond film in the inventory. I found the whole VCR era fascinating and soon got the hang of how it all worked, technically. We started renting the other Bond films, together with what was then known as a Moviebox: A VCR that wasn't able to record, only play. I connected the player to our own recorder and managed to duplicate the whole series in a few weeks time. Everybody I ever took home, from school friends to (later) girlfriends, just had to watch the Bond films. Over and over.
My interest for behind-the-scenes stuff came about when I got Steven Jay Rubin's book, The James Bond Films. It became my bible and even though it didn't contain any interesting behind-the-scenes photos, it was filled with anecdotes and other interesting tidbits. It also contained info on the filming locations, although not always very accurate. In 1984 I read a small article in the newspaper about filming for the new James Bond film had started, just outside of Paris. They were filming A View To A Kill in the tiny town of Chantilly, and we were just about to embark on a long weekend trip to the French capital.. I begged my parents to stop at Chantilly, but unfortunately they ignored my pleas . I vividly remember seeing the Chantilly-sign pass by when we were nearing Paris. It wasn't to be..
By 1995, I had started to compile a list of all the places where James Bond filming had once taken place. I got the info from the books and magazines I by then owned. A few years before someone figured out how to connect computers and the internet had been born. The first ten years it surely wasn't the source of information it is today. So it wasn't a way to gather useful info yet, but it was a way to publish the info. I got some free webspace on a German server and published my first website that year: The James Bond Locations Page. It was basically nothing more than one page. One long list of locations, just text, nothing fancy. But it was there, long before EON or MGM even though about web presence.
The next year another important thing happened: I saw an advertisement for the Jamaica James Bond Festival. I wasn't in the position to attend the event, but it must have triggered the realization that traveling to these filming locations was certainly possible. Around the same time my web page started generating correspondence: E-mails started coming in, in response to my locations list. Some with additional information, others simply thanking me for the list. (And I also noticed that people were starting to copy my list, almost in the same way I had copied the VHS cassettes earlier. I should have known.. Early mistakes in my list would resurface for years and sometimes still surface!)
One of the e-mails I received was from the German Dirk Kloosterboer. It was 1998 and I had finally managed to plan a holiday to Jamaica. I had done my research, but there was a lot of essential info missing. Dirk reached out, because he had just visited the island and had useful info. For instance on how to access the beach where Honey emerges from the water. After my holiday, Dirk and I became good friends and passionately talked about our mutual hobby on the phone or by e-mail. We immediately realized that the location info could easily make it into a book some day and from that moment getting it published was out main goal. The website had changed into something more visual by then and I offered the visitor pictures of my trips. Dirk added his photos and we started to travel around, trying to add info to the site all the time. We traveled individually or sometimes together. That way we could cover a lot of places in a short time. And the way we had to work, will probably blow the younger Bond fan's brains. We played a Bond film on a VCR and freeze framed it every now so we could take a photograph. An old fashioned photograph, which had to be developed. Armed with our screen shots, we started our journey. Once on our destination, we would start talking to people, cab drivers, hotel personnel, and showed them our photos. Every now and then we got lucky and people recognized a location. We then went there and tried to photograph it, matching it up as good as possible with the screen shot we had. It was a lot of fun, but a lot of work when you compare it with how it would work nowadays.
In 2000 the James Bond Locations Page became
Onthetracksof007.com, a name Dirk had come up with. So far we had been unsuccessful finding a interested publisher for our travel stories, so we decided to make use of the latest technology: the CD-R . We started to publish the location info on CDROMs, the first edition to come out in 2001. We offered online subscriptions to the members area of our website and every year we updated the CDROM. As far as we were concerned, it was a success and many of today's friends from the Bond fan community were early buyers of the CDROMs. The years following went up and down for Dirk. He started to develop mental issues and even though our adventures got bigger and bigger, he never fully recovered from it. In March 2004 I got the news that Dirk had taken his own life
2015 marked the website's 20th anniversary, making it the longest running James Bond related website on the internet. I celebrated by giving the website a huge makeover and by hosting a SPECTRE pre-premiere party at the Pinewood Hotel, just around the corner from the world famous Pinewood Studios. One hundred Bond fans and friends attended and enjoyed a fantastic live performance by Q The Music - the world's leading James Bond tribute band. Additionally I announced the YOLT50 Tour of Japan, to be taking place in 2017, celebrating the 50th anniversary of You Only Live Twice. 40 people joined me on this amazing tour to the land of the rising sun and were treated to a trip they will never forget.
So what does the future have in store?
In 2019 we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. This event will take place on two consecutive weekends, in two different countries. The last weekend of May we will celebrate in Estoril, Portugal. Here the Hotel Palácio was the home of the cast and crew during the filming and it even features in the film itself. So obviously the Hotel Palácio will be our venue for the celebration in Portugal. The weekend after that we will be at the revolving mountain top restaurant of Piz Gloria in Switzerland. This amazing place was partly financed by EON Productions especially for this film. It became Blofeld's research lab and still looks a lot like it did in the 1969 film. People who would like to attend this event can visit
www.ohmss50.com to get tickets. I urge you to do it while you still can!
2020 will mark our 25th anniversary. There will most definitely be another tour event. Ideas are already shaping up. And wouldn't it be a great moment for an updated travel guide? ;-) If you don't want to miss all this, please
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Cheers,
M.
