Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
Premise: A memory dealer finds herself wrapped up in a murder she must prove she didn’t commit or else the city’s biggest crime lord will kill her.
About: Graham Moore burst onto the scene when his breakthrough screenplay, The Imitation Game, won a screenwriting Oscar! But that was six years ago, and while Moore has still worked steadily, he’s struggled to live up to that achievement. Hey, I’m not hatin’ on you, Graham. Just ask Christopher McQuarrie how easy it was to win an Oscar with his first big Hollywood script. Well, Moore is finally taking things into his own hands as he wrote this script, which was purchased in 2018, and will direct it.
Writer: Graham Moore
Details: 120 pages
The ‘memory’ concept.
They’ve been around for as long as people have written movies. When they go well, they go really well (Eternal Sunshine, Memento). And when they go bad, you wish *your* memory could be wiped. Anybody remember that Ben Affleck John Woo movie, Paycheck?
I read a lot of sci-fi memory-based concepts and I’ve learned you have to do three things well to pull them off.
1) You have to know the world/mythology back and forth – These scripts work best when the world feels like it’s been combed through. The vocabulary is second-nature. The process of how the memory conceit works is seamless. It doesn’t feel like a bunch of first draft choices but rather like this writer has lived in this universe for decades.
2) The execution cannot be messy – What I’ve found with these concepts is that they get messy quickly if you don’t stay on top of them. What I mean by that is, if you’re injecting a memory into someone’s brain, you have to think about how that actually works and what the rules are. How it affects them. How it affects the story. The more you know, the clearer you can keep the plot. But if you flippantly decide late in the script, “oh, I’ll also give the police chief a false memory” and you don’t really know how that connects to everything else, the reader will pick up on it. So these scripts need to be rewritten more than your average script to plug up all those holes.
3) They need to be clever – You need at least a couple of big clever plot developments when you’re working with something like memory distortion. The genre is built for it. Any memory anyone has can be false. That gives you so many avenues to manipulate the story in clever ways. Take advantage of it.
Did “Naked Is The Best Disguise” pass this test?
Let’s find out!
Ardis Varnado is a female memory dealer in near-future Chicago. Taking old memories out or injecting new memories is illegal. So you need to hire someone like Ardis to come by and do the process for you.
That’s how 50 year old banker Richard Fitzgerald meets Ardis. Fitzgerald is a geeky family man who’s always wanted to do something crazy. So Ardis is going to inject him with a memory of a woman sexually dominating him. Fitzgerald is embarrassed about the whole thing but for Ardis, it’s all in a day’s work.
Speaking of that work, Ardis commonly abuses her own product. Some nights she gets home, pulls out a few memories from her briefcase, and shoots them up. This is the problem with memory juicing – you do it enough and you start to lose an understanding of your true self. It’s like drug-addiction but worse. Because at least with drug addiction, there’s a chance you get back to who you once were.
Not long after Ardis leaves Fitzgerald, she learns he’s been shot dead. And she’s the prime suspect. When she goes back to her boss, it turns out he’s been killed too. Ardis realizes that she must clear her name by the end of the night or she’ll be done in by the cops or the city’s primary memory crime boss, Chinese billionaire, Wing.
Ardis teams up with an old friend, Mason Russell, who has some connections with the police. This allows the two to stay a step ahead of the cops all night as Ardis investigates what happened. She eventually discovers that Fitzgerald was a “courier.” He’d just been in China where he was injected with a memory to take back to the U.S., where it would then be extracted.
This confuses Ardis, since Fitzgerald had said this was his first memory injection. Mason floats the idea that they could’ve extracted the memory of him receiving the memory in China, so that he didn’t know he had it. Which is when we realize this is all way more complicated than we thought. When Ardis learns the China memory was also extracted, she realizes that their only way out of this nightmare is to find that memory – a memory so show-stopping it has the power to change everything.
“Naked” is a strong script because Graham is a strong writer.
And he mostly knocks down the three pins I talk about above. He knows his mythology well. The execution is solid. And there are several clever twists. The problem is these rules aren’t met nearly as convincingly in the second half of the script as the first. Which, I guess, makes sense. When you’re playing with memory in a story, it’s a bit like time travel. The more of it you do, the harder it is to keep everything clean.
I remember learning that lesson myself. I once wrote a time-travel script that had a lot of rules and even after re-writing 20+ times, I was still getting the same feedback – “This is confusing. There are too many rules.” I remember thinking, “No! You just don’t get it!” Lol. I think that’s a major step in every screenwriter’s career, when they stop blaming the readers and, instead, look at themselves. That experience taught me the importance of simplicity when dealing with complex concepts.
That doesn’t mean you can’t play around with the concept. But you have to realize that every additional use of your concept you inject into your script, it’s going to make your job harder. In “Naked,” once a memory is extracted from you, you can no longer remember it. You’re also getting injected with new memories, which you don’t know aren’t your memories. Within seconds, they work just like your own memories.
So if Ardis killed Fitzgerald and then had the memory erased, but then she was injected with the memory of meeting with her boss, which she hadn’t, you can begin to see how complicated it gets.
But to Moore’s credit, he never quite crosses over into the land of “Okay, now I’m fucking lost.” He’s good at explaining the rules and checking back in to let you know what’s going on. That means most of the memory developments were fun. Because now it’s a puzzle. And you’re trying to figure out which memories are real and which are fake, and how all of it fits into the murder.
Despite that, I don’t think Moore had as much fun with the concept as he could have.
When you’re talking about private memories, you’re talking about a level of darkness that doesn’t exist in the open. There are skeletons in everyone’s past, the kinds of things people don’t discuss. And I was waiting for a few of those to pop up. But all the memories were relatively tame. Even Fitzgerald’s sex memory was weak. He wanted to be dominated? You can hire someone to be at your doorstep in 15 minutes for that.
And that carried through to the final memory everyone was after. I was disappointed because the memory reveal works for the plot. But when you’re building up THE MEMORY OF ALL MEMORIES the whole movie, you’re hoping for something more than just a bow for the plot.
I’m being hard on this because I love concepts like this so much. My expectations are high. All things considered, Moore did a good job. This was definitely worth the read. It’s a lot better than the scripts I usually read that deal with this topic, that’s for sure. Curious to see what the finished product will look like.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Your daily reminder that when you have a strong concept like this, it is imperative you look for every opportunity to exploit it. Strong concepts are what give your script all the things other scripts don’t have. Take Fitzgerald’s sex memory desire. Like I said, he can get that with a prostitute. Which means you’re not exploiting your premise. If you’re exploiting your premise, the memory he asks for is something there’s no other way for him to experience.
