Genre: War/True Story
Premise: Chronicles the clandestine CIA operation that risked igniting WWIII by recovering a nuclear-armed Soviet Sub, the K-129, that sunk to the bottom of the ocean in 1968.
About: Scott Free Films (Ridley Scott’s company) bought the rights to the David H. Sharp book “The CIA’s Greatest Covert Operation: Inside the Daring Mission to Recover a Nuclear-Armed Soviet Sub” three years ago, presumably for Scott to direct. Scott Free hired a relatively unknown writer, Dave Collard (Annapolis), to adapt the book. That ended up being the right decision, as the script finished 3rd on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Dave Collard (based on the book by David H. Sharp)
Details: 123 pages
When you ask people what the number 1 rule in screenwriting is, they’ll probably tell you it’s “Show don’t tell.” Or “Make your protagonist likable.” Or “Don’t write a scene unless it pushes the story forward.”
They’re all wrong.
Anyone who’s been reading Scriptshadow for a significant amount of time knows the real number 1 rule in screenwriting: DON’T WRITE ABOUT THE COLD WAR. There has never been a movie about the Cold War that’s done well at the box office. It turns out that when you write about a war where there was no actual fighting, people aren’t that interested. Who would’ve thought?
Which is why I haven’t read Neither Confirm Nor Deny until now.
However, the lackluster offerings I’ve been seeing near the bottom of the Black List aren’t panning out. I figured if this script got 26 votes and finished in the Top 5, it might be good. So I’m giving it a shot! Even if that’s one more shot than was ever fired during the Cold War.
It’s 1968 and the Russians have just lost one of their nuclear submarines. This at a point in history where nuclear subs were redefining the potential to win a nuclear war. No longer would sides have to wait ten endless minutes for their missiles to sail across the sea and destroy a city. Now they could park themselves off a nearby coast and strike within seconds.
Somehow, the US Navy finds the missing Russian submarine at the bottom of the Pacific. This gives CIA Assistant Deputy Director John Parangosky an idea. What if we could capture it!? A simple question that has a complex answer. Nobody’s ever tried to pick up a dead submarine off the ocean floor before in one piece, while, at the same time, hiding it from the entire world. This won’t be easy.
So “JP” calls upon the smartest engineer he knows, Dave Sharp, to create the device that’s going to capture the sub. And then he goes to fellow brainiac, and alcoholic, John Graham, who runs an ocean mining business. He wants John to design a plan to scoop this thing up.
What the crew quickly realize is that this task is impossible. They can’t use any current Navy ships as they’re not equipped to lift that kind of weight. They will have to design a totally new ship. The budget blows up to 375 million dollars, the CIA’s ENTIRE YEARLY BUDGET. And in order to explain why a weird ship is parked out in the general vicinity from where a Russian sub disappeared a couple of years ago, they have to hire eccentric Howard Hughes to pretend he’s digging for rare ocean minerals in the area.
All of this takes a lot longer than anybody planned for. They first spot the sub in 1968. They don’t get to the point where they consider pulling it up until 1974. They want to test the equipment even longer but when the press gets wind of the mission, it’s only a matter of time before the gig is up. Therefore, they have to do it! Will they succeed and save America? Seeing as I’m here typing this, I’m guessing yes. But wouldn’t it be one hell of a twist if the whole mission, instead, started World War 3?
Neither Confirm Nor Deny is going to be a hit for people who liked The Imitation Game and Argo. It’s very much in that same vein where we follow a bunch of government folks trying to pull off an impossible task, but the writer never takes the world too seriously. There’s a big emphasis on creating “Characters” with a capital “C.” You can tell that just from the way people are introduced.
“JOHN GRAHAM (50s) walks into his office, clutching a cigarette in one hand, a coffee in the other. A one-two punch that he’s perfected so well that he can drink the coffee without removing the cigarette.”
Neither Confirm Nor Deny revels in the fact that it gets to include wackadoodles like Howard Hughes, and I have to say I’m a much bigger fan of that approach than the super-serious approach. These backroom government bureaucracy flicks can feel self-important if you don’t have a sense of humor about things. That’s the vibe I got from this. It never let things linger too long without a laugh.
Secretary: Now I got a question for you– how come you never come out and play volleyball with everyone?
Dave: Because I’m here to work.
Secretary: Even God took off one day.
Dave: Yeah, well, he wasn’t trying to raise a Russian sub that’s three miles down.
That approach alone makes this script worth the read.
But, ultimately, what prevents this script from reaching impressive territory is the sheer amount of time the team has to complete their task. Hollywood movies need urgency. We need to feel like things must happen now or else we start wondering why we’re watching. If you have all the time in the world to get the job done, then I can go home and be reasonably certain you’ll get it done. If, however, you tell me it can only be done RIGHT NOW or else the whole thing blows up, I have to stick around to see what happens.
You can trick audiences for a while when it comes to lack of urgency. It requires being vague and cutting to each scene without telling us that four weeks have just passed, or two months have passed. It feels seamless because you’re not drawing attention to the time jumps. Another Ridley Scott movie, The Martian, does this well. You don’t realize that the time is passing on Mars as much as it is.
However, if you try and extend the timeline out too long, the audience becomes hip to your misdirect. I mean, we started this adventure in 1968. It’s now 1974. How important can capturing this piece of equipment be if we’ve waited six entire years and nothing in the Cold War has changed? And haven’t they built new cooler more sophisticated subs by now? It’d be like me trying to backwards engineer an iPod but by the time I was finished, they were on the iPhone 12. Big deal.
This is part of my broader problem with the Cold War as a script backdrop. It doesn’t provide high enough stakes. I remember reading The Imitation Game and, at one point, I think they said that for every day they didn’t figure out the Enigma machine, 100,000 more people were killed. Those are what I call “stakes.” That is what I call urgency.
To be clear, this is an enjoyable script. But it never convinced me that capturing this submarine meant anything in the broader scheme of the Cold War. It was just a fun side-quest for the CIA. But, for what it’s worth, it did introduce the phrase, “We can neither confirm nor deny “ into popular culture. So there’s that.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “The bad guys are getting close.” In my favorite new movie, Bad Trip, we constantly cut away from our heroes’ journey to show Bud’s psychopathic sister getting closer and closer to catching up to them. They’ve stolen her car and she’s going to make them pay. This common screenplay device is a nice way to add urgency to a narrative. If we see the enemy getting closer, we know our heroes have to hurry up. Neither Confirm Nor Deny should’ve used this device. There should’ve been a subplot where we intermittently cut to the Russians, who are getting suspicious about the Americans’ activity at sea. The more we see the Russians getting close to figuring out the Americans’ plan, the more urgency it would’ve added to the objective.
