Just the opposite of theater director James Bond, from New York. New York theater director James Bond making an ad for an online casino.īeing a James Bond carries a stigma of alcoholism, womanizing and untrustworthiness. Some time later he was accused of murder (he was later exonerated) in his city, South Bend, Indiana, a town of just over 100,000 inhabitants where, as unlikely as it may seem, another James Bond lived, this one white, whose business almost went belly up when the television news reported – without a picture of the defendant – that a James Bond from Indiana was incarcerated for murder.

That Bond’s case is paradigmatic: at a police checkpoint, an African-American telling a police officer that his name was James Bond got him 60 days of jail time, regardless of the fact that it was, indeed, his name. As the documentary goes on, one can see some of its protagonists gradually disappear, while new cases appear over time, like that of the black James Bond, inmate 280938 of the state of Indiana. From left, a politician from the Caribbean, a British elite soldier, a New York theater director and a man from Indiana who spent 60 days in jail because the police didn’t believe his name was really James Bond.īauer selected some of the most striking stories that he came across. Four of the real James Bonds that appear in the documentary. What in the 1970s and 1980s was little more than an opportunity for an innocent quip, today, in the digital age, can sometimes be hell on Earth even more so when a new film comes out.

According to official figures, there are 75,249 people in the United States with the surname Bond, and the most common first name among them is James (2.89%, or 2,242 James Bonds). The Other Fellow, available on the streaming platform Filmin, was filmed between the releases of Skyfall (2012) and No Time to Die (2021). In it, director Matthew Bauer follows for 10 years some of those real James Bonds, men who live as best as they can under the shadow of a sexist, petulant and adventurous legacy. Without consulting the investigator, he gave his name to his agent 007 and forever changed his life his, and that of his thousands of namesakes, to which the documentary The Other Fellow (2022) is dedicated.

He looked around and remembered a book he had used to identify the birds that flew over his mansion in Jamaica: Birds of the West Indies, by ornithologist James Bond.

When Ian Fleming wrote his first story about a womanizing, highly skilled British secret agent in 1952, he wanted the “most boring name” (his own words) he could find.

Ian fleming goldfinger book