Million dollar spec Tuesday! wooooooo-heeeeee!
Genre: Spy Thriller/Period
Premise: The origin story of MI:6, Britain’s secret intelligence service, that came about out of necessity after the horrors of World War 1.
About: I’d forgotten about this script, which sold for a million bucks back in 2013. I was reminded about it recently when I saw that the writer, Aaron Berg, was in the news for his Atlantis project that sold to Netflix and is teaming him up with Batman director, Matthew Reeves. The reason Section 6 hasn’t been made yet is said to be that the Bond franchise is prickly about the similarities between the project and its own famous spy character. The two were going to go to court over the matter but Bond got cold feet when they realized that, by going to court, they would have to define exactly what makes James Bond “James Bond,” potentially offering a blueprint for other studios to “write around” those tenets and create a bunch of James Bond clones. We’ll see what ultimately happens but with the movement on this other Berg project, expect Section 6 to gain new life.
Writer: Aaron Berg
Details: 122 pages
Scripts like Section 6 aren’t easy reads. They’re sort of like mini-novels with the more extensive world-building, lots of history, and longer descriptive paragraphs. Outside of readers who love the subject matter, these scripts are often met with a groan because the reader knows the read is going to take twice as long.
Why?
Well-written spec scripts have a lot of white space. A lot of dialogue. This means your eyes fly down the page. There’s nothing anyone who reads scripts for a living loves more than their eyes flying down the page.
So what do you do if you’re a writer who likes to write this sort of stuff? How do you overcome this reader bias? Six simple words: Make sure your script is good.
We open on the British Embassy in Russia in 1918. World War 1 has recently ended. It’s a different world we’re told by many a character in Section 6. Ain’t that the truth. A Russian officer charges into the British Embassy being trailed by a bunch of mean Russian soldiers. Those Russians not only kill the officer, they kill all the British workers as well!
Not long after this, a British spy named Thomas Hawthorne heads to the Embassy to retrieve a secret piece of paper that’s been hidden. As soon as he gets it, though, the lights come on and standing there is this meanie named Ivan Vostok. Ivan grabs him to take him back to his torture den to get him to decode the message on the secret coded piece of paper.
Back in Britain, we meet Mansfield Cumming, a former soldier (who now uses a cane) who directs MI-1, the British Foreign Intelligence Service. Cumming is informed by a then spry Winston Churchill that the secret piece of paper Russia now has is a list of Russian politicians to assassinate for Russian revolutionaries (that’s what the opening Russian soldier was running from – he’d just assassinated a high up Russian politician)! If they figure that out, Russia will most assuredly attack Britain.
Cumming’s job is to find someone to infiltrate the Russians and get that piece of paper back before they decode it! There’s only one problem. Britain’s spies at this time were all spineless rich wimps. They were good at hiding and sneakily exchanging information. But they couldn’t do the dirty work. Cumming needs someone who can do the dirty work.
Enter 23 year old Alec Duncan, a soldier who’d been smack dab in the middle of World War 1. If there’s anyone who saw dirty, it was this guy. Currently making his living pickpocketing pedestrians and cheating at poker, Cumming collects Duncan from jail after he’s caught by a local policeman.
You know what happens next. That’s right: training! Cumming helps Duncan ditch his soldier impulses and approach things like a spy would. You have to be sneakier. You have to be faster. You have to be strong under pressure. The only thing Cumming is worried about is whether Duncan, a brute at heart, can hang with high society types. So he sets up a test at a local upper crust function that ends with Duncan crashing two 1918 subway train cars. I’d say that’s a success, wouldn’t you?
After his training, Duncan is sent by boat to Helsinki (this is around page 72) where he meets up with another spy, a beautiful woman named Nightengale, and they sneak down into Russia, find a badly tortured Hawthorne, and get him out. But the Russians don’t give up easily, pursuing them all the way to the sea. Will our tiny team be caught resulting in World War 2? Or will Section 6 be born?
Section 6 is a solid script.
I’m not the biggest spy film fan. But when I do like spy films, it tends to be when they’re doing something differently. I like this angle of a time before spies could be spies. And this was the transition to get them from these polite hoity-toity wusses who got mad if they spilled wine on their shoesies to dudes with a license to kill.
This is always a good thing to keep in mind when it comes to concept creation. You don’t want to just look for subjects. You want to look for subjects in transition. For example, you could make a story about the train industry in the U.S.. Or you could make a story about the train industry during the birth of the American highway system. Because the highway system is going to make the train industry irrelevant, you’ve got a much more conflict-heavy playground to play in.
Disruptive forces are entertaining. Polite spies don’t work in the post World War 1 era where hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lips have been seared off from exposure to chemical weapons. You need a dirtier spy, someone with a more varied, nastier, skillset.
The reason the script doesn’t get higher marks with me is because of the structure. We don’t send our hero out on his mission until page 72. This creates a second half of the script that feels rushed. For example, we’re meeting this primary character in Nightengale on page 75. Considering how well we know everyone else by this point, she feels paper thin and never quite makes sense for the mission.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand the writer’s dilemma. This is essentially an origin story. With origin stories, you need to lean into the whole learning process. When Spider-Man first gets his powers, you don’t send him after Octopus Guy five minutes later. Spider-Man must first learn how to use his powers, as well as balance out how these newfound abilities affect other parts of his life. That takes time.
I guess it comes down to if you’re an origin-story guy or not. Some people like getting into the nitty gritty of the origin. I just found it hard to reconcile that time was “of the essence” with the Russians getting closer and closer to cracking Hawthorne, and yet we’re taking weeks to train Duncan here. I understand it’s 1918 but still. The whole timing of the separate plotlines didn’t organically mesh.
I did like, however, that by making this a period piece, we got a more interesting McGuffin. These days, the spy film Mcguffins are all the same. They’re some variation of “the nuclear launch codes.” I liked that this was a list of assassinations to be made.
You have to understand, as a reader, we’re experiencing what you experience at the theaters, times 20. So every time you see “nuclear launch codes” in a movie, I’ll read 20 scripts with “nuclear launch codes.” Which means I’m easily turned off by any highly used trope. In contrast, I value writers who change these tropes up. And one of the easiest ways to change tropes is to do it at the concept level. Take us to places we don’t normally go. Naturally, when you do this, you’re going to find things you don’t normally find.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this because it’s one of the better scripts I’ve read in the genre in a while. But it does seem to have this giant hurdle to leap in the looming Bond Producer Brigade who are at the bridge, 24/7, shouting, “Though Shall Not Pass.”
And yes, I’m thinking the same thing all of you are thinking. Which is that I should’ve had Scott review this. :)
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Section 6 has one of the more interesting Save The Cat examples. It’s “Befriend the Cripple.” Duncan is friends with a fellow soldier who got half his face blown off in the war and now wears a Phantom of the Opera type mask. It’s a bit cheap. But the love Duncan has for him is very effective in making us like him, especially because he’s a pretty harsh guy that isn’t the easiest to root for.
