The Economics of Roger Moore, the Greatest Bond of Them All
It's not a hard and fast rule, but when it comes to James Bond films, viewers generally like the individual they saw playing Bond first, the most. People of my father's era often tend toward Sean Connery, younger fans speak most highly of Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, but in my case Roger Moore will always be the only Bond.
Moonraker wasn't Moore's first Bond picture, but since it was mine, it still brings back great memories. Moore has a grand resume that includes successful film and television franchises including The Saint and The Persuaders!, but he remains best known for his twelve-year stint as a suave, MI6 agent.
So while his work schedule is a bit more relaxed in light of his advancing age (86), Moore remains a very social person who seemingly knows everyone. He released a well-received memoir in 2009, another one focused on his time as Bond in 2012, and then his latest release is One Lucky Bastard: Tales From Tinsletown. To this day Moore has an office at the legendary Pinewood studios outside London, and as he's still very much on the inside of the film business, his recall of film-business stories from the past and present represented an essential read for this reviewer.
As is always the case, no one reads the same book. Everyone gleans different insights from what's on the page. In my case, this review will cover the economic ideas behind what's been a highly interesting and glamourous life. Moore's stories about the movie industry ably reveal the folly of excessive taxation, why worry over the wealth gap is wasted, the wonders of free trade, the essential importance of the much-demonized ‘1 percent', and they arguably remind us yet again that we weaken Wall Street and the world of finance at our peril.
Considering the wealth gap, economists too often offer evidence-free assertions about the horrors of inequality. They say inequality sets the overall economy back, but never explain why. With good reason. In truth, rising inequality in terms of wealth is the surest signal that the lifestyle gap is being shrunk by the very individuals growing rich. More to the point, what the rich enjoy exclusively in the near term strongly signals what we'll all eventually enjoy if markets are free. Moore writes that in 1939,
"I saw my first TV pictures on a tiny box with a fuzzy little screen....The local baker was the only person we knew who owned a TV set and it was so exciting to gather around it waiting for the valves to warm up and seeing the little picture emerge."
Nowadays televisions aren't just the ubiquitous norm, but thanks to innovators like the late Steve Jobs, many of us watch TV on our phones that we carry in our pockets. Jobs died a billionaire, and no doubt many of the shows we watch on television are produced by individuals worth many millions, but would any reader seriously give up the wonders of the moving picture so that inequality could shrink?
Moore himself hardly grew up well-to-do (he was the son of a policeman), but as evidenced by homes in places like Gstaad, Moore is quite rich today thanks to his success in TV and films. The person who excitedly watched a fuzzy television screen in 1939 was by 1949 being viewed at 8:30 pm on The Governess. Moore's success has doubtless increased the wealth gap too, but would any reader seriously begrudge Moore his fortune? Those who decry the wealth gap explicitly suggest that the rich must "give back," and while Moore travels the world for UNICEF, his wealth is a powerful signal that he gave an entertainment-starved public what it wanted in a pretty grand way.
The name Albert "Cubby" Broccoli is quite familiar to any Bond fan today, the late film producer grew very rich producing Bond films that portrayed lavish living, but can any reader say with a straight face that the wealth and glamour that Broccoli brought to the screen somehow hurt the 99.9% of the world not living like James Bond and his cohorts? Notable here is that per Moore the grandson of Italian immigrants in Broccoli "was born in April 1909 in a tenement block in Astoria, Queens," and "didn't enjoy a financially rich childhood, far from it."
Rather than let what he didn't have hold him back, Broccoli took advantage of being in the Land of Opportunity. In his mid-twenties he left his family's farm and moved to Los Angeles. Life out there wasn't easy at first, and as Moore notes, "Cubby sold hair products and Christmas trees to get by." But thanks to introductions from a cousin, he got a job as an assistant on a film production, moved from there to a talent agency, then eventually moved into film production. The enormous popularity of the Bond franchise and Broccoli's wealth speaks yet again to the truth that people grow rich by virtue of enriching the lives of others.
Were Broccoli and Moore merely lucky? More on Broccoli in a bit, but former Congressman Richard Gephardt once said that the rich are that way for (I paraphrase) having "won life's lottery." This almost certainly wasn't Moore's intent, but in Tales he offered up a different angle revealing just how wrong Gephardt was. It arguably signals that movies don't make the star, rather stars tend to make movies. There's a difference. Moore writes:
"Other actors who died mid-shoot and were doubled include John Candy, Bruce Lee, Heath Ledger, and Donald Pleasence. A sense of morbid curiosity may have helped to fill seats, but ultimately I don't think any of their films fared tremendously well - you just can't fake a star's power (or even double it)..."
It's certainly the case that GE isn't the same without Jack Welch at the helm, the New York Giants imploded when Ray Handley took over for Bill Parcells, and Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy before founder Steve Jobs returned to revive it. Some readers will no doubt say acting is different, even some movie producers might agree that actors are interchangeable, but Moore is on to something even if what's written here wasn't his true intent. Just as Welch has proven difficult to replace at GE, it's fair to say that star power is similarly sui generis. It's something to think about at the very least. Figure no one would suggest that all Bonds are created equal...
And while politicians would have us believe otherwise, trade occurs among individuals, and individuals are free traders. By definition. Absent the ability to do the work we're best at, and then exchange the fruits of our labor with others doing the work that most animates their skills, life would be most notable for its unrelenting, impoverished drudgery.
People in film and entertainment don't often consider it, but the entertainment industry shows the wonders of free trade or the division of labor very ably. As Moore writes, "While the writers and directors come up with interesting ways to spend the money, it's the producer's job to raise it." Absolutely. Movie and television production amounts to myriad people doing what they're best at on the way to a final product. Absent the division of labor that Adam Smith elevated in Wealth of Nations, there would be very little entertainment to consume, and none of it very good.
All this is worth bringing up simply because trade and the division of labor across country borders is too often seen as hazardous by the political class; that we're somehow weakened by imports. The truth is quite different. No doubt we import televisions from Japan and Korea, but the fact that they make TVs for Americans gives Americans more time to produce so much of the content shown on those TVs. The Japanese are surely not harmed economically by the popularity of American and British content so popular in Japan, and just the same, we're not hurt by the inflow of Japanese-manufactured televisions that broadcast what we produce.
If anything, and this is a tautology, we're made better off. When free individuals work together they're not only more productive, but they're logically able to focus even more on what best advances their skills. Along those lines, Moore was very good friends with Dean Martin. About Martin and his sometime stage partner in Jerry Lewis, Moore wrote that "Dino and Jerry were both very talented individuals in their own right, but together they were dynamite." Much the same was said about Jobs and Steve Wozniak, not to mention Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
Moore recalls about film producer Elliott Kastner that upon arrival at always luxurious hotels in Los Angeles, "he would slip a very handsome gratuity to the reservations manager and ask if there were any residents from Texas in the large suites. He'd then go their rooms, knock on the door and introduce himself. Over the years, Elliott had worked out that they were pretty likely to be wealthy oil executives and he'd always have a script to tell them about and an exciting opportunity for them to be in the movies." Such is the work of the film producer, and while most directors, scriptwriters and actors would doubtless blanch at the idea of knocking on random doors for money, the beauty of free trade is that they don't have to. Free trade means we not only get to divide up labor with the worker next to us, but similarly get to do so with workers overseas. It's never a bad thing, and as movies and television remind us, it's an integral part of the industry's success.
Thinking about Kastner through the prism of Wall Street, people who should know better decry the fees paid to investment bankers skilled at raising money for companies through IPOs and other financing vehicles. Of course the seen is the money they earn, but the unseen is the amazing skill and energy required to raise money. Kastner's story is a reminder of how difficult it can be, and also why movie producers, like investment bankers, earn so much money.
All of which brings us to Harry Saltzman, Broccoli's production partner for the Bond films. About him, Moore writes:
"I know Harry didn't have a particularly happy childhood and ran away from home aged fifteen to join the circus. Such was his entrepreneurial spirit, two years later he was running his own circus troupe."
It bears repeating that Salztman ran away from home at fifteen only to have his own circus troupe within two years. It raises a question worth asking for us all: could we do what Saltzman did? Do most of us possess even a sliver of the entrepreneurial spirit that defined Saltzman? How many of us would sell hair care products and Christmas trees like Broccoli did in order to pay the bills while trying to break into film? Stories like theirs are too often ignored when talk of the much vilified ‘1 percent' arises. Nearly always we're talking about truly remarkable people. Some were born rich, some middle class, and some like Saltzman and Broccoli came up from nothing. But that's almost not the point. The important point is that achievement in a free society is something special, and these achievers are the ones pushing the world forward. When politicians, pundits and economists talk about taxing the rich, too often they're talking about penalizing the Saltzmans of the world who while alive very much enriched our lives. We seek to neuter the productive to our detriment. Always.
Speaking of taxes on the rich, Moore writes that:
"When I started playing Bond it became apparent, in 1977, that I would have to leave the UK if I wasn't to pay ninety-eight per cent tax on my salary: an actor's life in the spotlight is short, so we need to look after our pennies, and that's why I decamped to Switzerland with its lovely snow-capped tax benefits."
It's perhaps shooting fish in an increasingly crowded barrel, but tax rates matter. The Paul Krugmans of the world act as though they don't, that politicians can decree a right to the earnings of others such that they'll soon enough be able to redirect the earnings of others to that which they deem worthy. Not so fast as Moore's story reminds us. More than anyone, the rich are mobile. They can and should avoid taxes not just because success (particularly in acting) is ephemeral, not just because politicians are lousy allocators of resources relative to their superiors in the marketplace, but because force shouldn't be used to separate people from what they've earned.
Whatever one's opinion of taxation, Moore's recall of escaping Great Britain's excessive taxation in the ‘70s is a reminder that politicians don't create wealth, rather they presume to redistribute the wealth created by others in wasteful fashion. England wasn't made rich in the ‘70s by the country's bloated government; instead it was rendered very poor thanks to the wealth-destroying political class driving the country's wealth creators out of the country.
Early on in Tales, Moore recalled being seated at a dinner next to Grace Kelly, and Kelly saying to him, "You know, Roosevelt sold us down the river. ‘I'm afraid I had no idea what she was talking about, and for some time after that I often kicked myself for not being able to continue the conversation.'" This story rates mention mainly to make the point that Moore's Tinseltown memoirs are decidedly - and quite happily - non-political. Still, in an endlessly entertaining book about his experiences in the film industry, Moore either on purpose or unknowingly offered up some very worthwhile examples that explain what economists themselves too often cannot. Readers will enjoy One Lucky Bastard.
