Last month, Barbara Broccoli ditched the family business.  Not in agriculture but in Hollywood.  The Broccoli Family was the original owner of the James Bond franchise, that action-packed series of movies regaling audiences with the exploits of fictional British spy 007.

It all began in 1951 when family patriarch Albert “Cubby” Broccoli decamped from the U.S. to take advantage of tax incentives for movies made in the United Kingdom.  Cubby had worked his way up in Hollywood starting as a gofer on the set of a Howard Hughes movie.  He schmoozed his way up to befriend Hughes, the aviator-turned-movie-mogul, soon becoming an assistant director just before World War II.  In post-war England, he partnered with filmmaker Irving Allen (née Applebaum) to make a number of action movies.  The partnership broke up when Cubby wanted to make a James Bond film.

James Bond was a secret agent in a series of novels by British author Ian Fleming.  In 1957, Cubby arranged a meeting with Fleming to buy the film rights to his books.  However, due to a family emergency back the U.S., Cubby couldn’t make the meeting, leaving Irving to negotiate with Fleming.  As luck would have it, Irving blew the meeting, insulting Fleming as a writer and dismissing the spy series as not even “…good enough for television.”

When Cubby heard of the blow-up he ended his partnership with Irving and started a new production company with Harry Saltzman, another film producer, in 1961 to gain the rights to James Bond.  Their first film was Dr. No (1962), followed by From Russia with Love (1963), and Goldfinger (1964), and so it went.  (Trivial note: My first movie date was to see Goldfinger.)

The Broccoli touch was magic.  As a producer Cubby insisted on making all the creative decisions, overriding writers and directors alike.  When he turned over his empire to his children late in life, he warned them never to cede control: “Don’t let anybody else screw it up.  You can screw it up if you want to, but don’t let other people screw it up.”

That kind of stubborn streak probably came from his Calabrian roots.  Born Albert Romolo Broccoli in Queens, NY to immigrant parents, he was destined for great things with a middle name honoring the legendary founder of Rome (Romulus).  As he grew, a cousin bestowed on him the nickname “Cubby” after a TV character.  His surname may have been bestowed on agricultural ancestors for his family soon moved from Queens to a farm on Long Island – broccoli had to be one of their crops.

Cubby co-produced nine Bond films with Harry Saltzman and four without him, including Moonraker (1979) in which he and his wife appeared as extras in Venice.  His old partner Irving Allen soon regretted passing up the James Bond franchise and acquired the rights to fictional spy killer Matt Held.  Singer/actor Dean Martin (Dino Paul Crocetti) became Matt Held in The Silencers (1966), Murderers’ Row (1966), The Ambushers (1967), and The Wrecking Crew (1969). But Dean Martin didn’t come cheap.  Allen had to make the actor a partner in the franchise. Dean Martin ended up making more money on The Silencers than Sean Connery made on Thunderball (1965).  Now Cubby had to placate Sean with a piece of the action.

With Cubby’s passing in 1996, his daughter Barbara and stepson took the reins.  By 2021, the franchise was part of the MGM portfolio purchased by Amazon.  Barbara, another stubborn Calabrese, stayed on until she was caught on record calling her Amazon partners “f–king idiots.”  That was too much for Amazon boss Jeff Bezos.  He reportedly bought her exit this year for a cool billion – the end of the Broccoli domain.

One last word on Broccoli.  The vegetable as well as the family have thoroughly Italic roots. Man-crafted from cabbage thousands of years ago in Calabria, the name derives from the Latin for ‘arm’ (brachium, in Italian braccio), describing the edible stalk rising from the plant.  It was introduced to California by the D’Arrigo Family (“Andy Boy”) growers in the 1920s.  The family also introduced its cousin broccoli di rapa, trade marked as “broccoli rabe” in 1964.

Broccoli: food and entertainment. -JLM