James Bond in film of the funding for the Bond films, fell into financial difficulties following the box office failure of "Heaven's Gate" (1980), bringing uncertainty to the future of the funding. The situation was resolved in May 1981, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer acquired United Artists. Following "For Your Eyes Only", Roger Moore had expressed a desire to stop playing James Bond. His original contract had been for three films, a requirement fulfilled with "The Spy Who Loved Me". Subsequent films had been negotiated on a film-by-film basis. The producers engaged in a semi-public quest for the next actor to play Bond, which would be for
The Spy Who Loved Me (soundtrack) Chopin crops up later, when Bond first meets Stromberg, as reportedly does an excerpt from Saint-Saëns' "The Aquarium" from "The Carnival of the Animals". Finally, Hamlisch cheekily segues his score into an excerpt from that of David Lean's 1962 film "Lawrence of Arabia" when Bond and Anya Amasova are wandering through the desert; according to a documentary on the DVD, this idea was originally a joke by one of the film editors who played the music over the dailies of the scene. It became a trend, with the subsequent two films in the series similarly referencing 'classic' film music within