MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Salvador Dalí almost made a movie prop for the James Bond film, Live and Let Die

One of the fascinating things about popular culture is how our sense of timing is often way off, in terms of different generations, when it comes to the most famous figures of different fields. What I mean by this is that we obviously know how to put, say, famous athletes into proper context with each other, so we know that, say, Willie Mays and Babe Ruth weren't of the same generation. Similarly, we know how to put famous actors into proper context with each other, as well, so that we know that Cary Grant and Tom Cruise are not of the same generation. When things often fall apart, however, is when you're dealing with famous people from different fields of life. A good example of this would be Colonel Sanders, the famous creator of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He feels like he is from the Antebellum South, and yet here he was participating on a game show panel in 1963...

Similarly, famous painters and sculptors also tend to have a sort of timeless feel to them, in the eyes of the public, while a number of these iconic artists were still around well past the time that we tend to think of when we think of famous painters. For instance, when you think of the surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí, you don't think of Alice Cooper, and yet...

salvador-dali-alice-cooper

So it with this in mind that we come to the strange tale of how Dalí almost did a movie prop for a James Bond film.

RELATED: Did Steve McQueen Crash His Car to Become a Movie Star?

WHY WOULD THE PRODUCERS OF JAMES BOND FILMS TRY TO HIRE SALVADOR DALI?

Salvador Dalí was born in Catalonia, Spain in 1904. Dali was an example of that brilliant form of art evolution where an artist takes the approach of one type of artist (in this case, the Renaissance masters), mixes in another approach (the Impressionists) and then throws in a seemingly antithetical approach (cubism) to result in a breathtaking new style of art that is commonly referred to as surrealism. His most famous work in the field was 1931's The Persistence of Memory, with its iconic melted clocks...

the-persistence-of-memory-1931.jpg!Large

By the 1940s, Dalí was now one of the most famous painters in the world and one of the most commercially successful, as well. This fame allowed him to pursue a number of other interests, including doing a number of pieces specifically in the world of film. In 1946, Dalí and Walt Disney worked together on an animated film, Destino, that was never finished.

A year earlier, Alfred Hitchcock hired Dali to work on a dream sequence in the hit film, Spellbound, and the set designs Dali came up with for the movie are stunning (he worked with another legend in a different field, Christian Dior, to design the sets for the famous sequence)....

dali-spellbound

So it really isn't that surprising to think that Dalí would be interested in doing more film work, but it is still a bit surprising to imagine Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, the famed producer behind the James Bond films (through his Eon Productions, which he co-owned with Harry Saltzman for many years), thinking that Dalí and Bond were a mix, but that's precisely what Broccoli decided for 1974's Live and Let Die, the first James Bond to feature Roger Moore as Bond.

One of the major characters in the film was Solitaire (played by a young Jane Seymour), who could tell the future with tarot cards (so long as she was still a virgin because...well...I dunno, man, Ian Fleming was weird). Broccoli wanted to hire a well known artist to design the tarot cards, so he turned to the legendary Dalí and the two appeared to come to an arrangement.

RELATED: Did Atari Make a Special Video Game Just for Superman III?

WHY DIDN'T SALVADOR DALI DO THE JAMES BOND TAROT CARDS?

Dalí's wife, Gala, was fascinated with mysticism, so the appeal by Broccoli to do his own tarot cards was compelling for Dalí. However, one of the other interesting things about Dalí is that he also tended to be a bit...overly interested in money. Is that a polite way of saying it? His peers nicknamed him "Avida Dollars" for his love of money, and he even famously was quoted as saying, "Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory."

Therefore, after seemingly coming to an arrangement with Broccoli, Dalí then shocked the producer by asking for an exorbitant fee for the tarot cards. Obviously, the precise details are lost to history, but suffice it to say that it was well beyond the point that Broccoli could work it into the film's budget, and so Broccoli passed on the deal.

Dalí ended up creating the cards, anyway, basing the characters on himself and his wife. They really are quite remarkable...

dali-tarot-1

but luckily, during the 1980s, Dalí agreed to sell limited editions of the deck and I believe there have been more released in the years since Dalí passed away in 1989....

dali-tarot-2

Just stunning pieces of work. Here, he put Gala’s face on the statue of a goddess seen in the painting Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi by Eugène Delacroix.

Ultimately, Fergus Hall was hired and Hall's "Tarot of the Witches" deck is still popular to this day...

james-bond-tarot-cards

So yes, Salvador Dalí really came very close to contributing a movie prop for a James Bond movie, to the point where he actually DID create the props, he just couldn't work out a deal for the props to make their way into the film. Amusingly, for the Emperor card in the deck, guess whose face Dalí used?

dali-tarot-3

The original movie Bond, Sean Connery.

Hilarious.

The legend is...

STATUS: True

Be sure to check out my archive of Movie Legends Revealed for more urban legends about the world of film. Click here for legends specifically about James Bond films.

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com.