Our Man Flint

So you've got all these books, whether it is The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or The Berlin Memorandum, which got filmed as The Quiller Memorandum, The Bond movies, and so many others all start to appear, and even the Dean Martin, Matt Helm films, which... have very little to do with the Donald Hamilton books that they're supposedly based on, but which I think as a kid I probably rather enjoyed.

Now, Our Man Flint was huge.

I thought that was amazing, and I loved the music, and I remember at the time when I saw it in the late 1970s, and recording it off the telly with my little tape recorder so I could listen to the theme music over and over and over again, which I did do for quite a while.

So that's sort of where I started.

You know what I mean? And they tell that to kind of everybody and say, you have to go for the horn player so that the horn player can, can what? So the horn player can start like this.

And that's important for that part of the movie, for that part of the song.

But sometimes, McCoy Tyner, right? Sometimes in the solo, and the horn player comes, and the horn player goes there.

And then the bass player goes there.

Uh, I didn't know how to deal with certain questions then, you know, but that's such an important thing to look at too.

I'd say, wow, I, I was, I can feel the part of myself that was dealing with those questions.

When I look back at playing with Wallace and that's, That something, again, it goes to movies.

I was watching the John Carpenter movie, The Thing.

The Three Stooges stuff is too old.

The Our Man Flint is too old, you know? It's like-

Yeah.

Now, Our Man Flint is a parody of James Bond.

Bing Crosby songs are... [laughs]

Yeah.

And that was 1966.

The same year that James Coburn was playing Our Man Flint.

Oh, he was terrific.

Yeah.

No longer with us, James Coburn.

It was something called Our Man Flint.

He died in 2002, but today would have been his birthday as well.

Okay.

A lot of my, a lot of my consultants and my boss are like, "Why do you talk to the listeners so long, Joe? Just shut up and play the record." I thought it was fun, and it seemed like people, like, thought it was fun.

Well, the, the, the classic story of, of acting was Harrison Ford was in Our Man Flint as a waiter, and Otto Preminger came blustering.

He goes, "You are nobody! You come on the screen, and I do not see big star." And Harrison Ford says, "I thought you were supposed to see a waiter." Storytelling.

But we all have a role to play, and, and those roles change every day.