Genre: Spy
Premise: When a U.S. physicist defects to North Korea carrying a mysterious suitcase, old school CIA agent Leo Diamond is tasked with helping some young CIA upstarts prevent another Snowden situation, or worse.
About: This script sold in 2014 for high six figures. It was written by Ken Nolan, who scripted Black Hawk Down and who was ripping off a number of big spec sales during the time. Nolan was reportedly obsessed with the book on which the script was based, pitching it to everyone in town. Nobody wanted anything to do with it. That is until he changed the setting from the Cold War to the present day, where it could be pitched as an “Edward Snowden” like spy story.
Writer: Ken Nolan (based on the novel by Robert Littell)
Details: 116 pages
Honestly, if I were a writer desperate to sell a script, I would type “spy novel” into the Amazon search bar and go down the list of books that come up. Find the lesser known books, the ones that have less than 200 reviews, and look for a concept you like. As soon as you find one, get in touch with the writer and ask for the rights to adapt the book. Doesn’t matter which direction the breeze is blowing in Hollywood, they ALWAYS buy spy scripts. Always always always. The trick is finding one with an electric main character that you can build a franchise around.
The Defection starts with a fat man discreetly following a skinny man through the streets of Hanoi, Vietnam. We get the impression that the fat man has been tasked with doing this for awhile and doesn’t believe the skinny man is worth the trouble. Either that or he’s looking for an excuse not to have to run around the city so much. That lazy attitude ends up costing our blubbery buffoon, as the skinny guy disappears, and is found on CIA security cameras 48 hours later walking into the North Korean Embassy with a large suitcase.
We learn that the man’s name is A.J. Lewinter, a respected but introverted American physicist and computer hacker. It is the CIA’s belief that Lewinter is going to the North Koreans to sell them something, possibly information about the U.S.’s nuclear missile program. Young buck CIA agents Billings and Ferri see this as an opportunity to make a name for themselves, revving up their millennial mind muscles to take this dude down. But their boss, Winton, has other ideas. He wants them to team up with 50-something dinosaur agent Leo Diamond. Winton believes that Diamond’s boots-to-the-ground old school approach is the key to figuring out what this dude is up to.
Ferri and Billings scoff but what can they do? Diamond struts in and nails the younglings with a forced monologue about the importance of high quality coffee in the CIA. As soon as the CIA coffee budget goes down, he tells them, the whole system falls with it. Naturally, Ferri and Billings think Diamond is nuts. But he’s only getting started. While Ferri and Billings think the key to the case is finding out what’s inside the suitcase, Diamond’s more interested in what’s going on in Lewinter’s head.
While Ferri and Billings use Google for the bulk of their research, Diamond heads out to talk to the people Lewinter knew, a co-worker at MIT as well as a couple of secret girlfriends he had on the side. They all seem to agree on one thing – Lewinter has a strict moral code. Which doesn’t jive with this North Korean defection at all. The deeper our agents dig, the more information they find on Lewinter. He’s not your average physicist. This is a guy who knows how the U.S. Defense’s missile array works. How the power grids in America operate. This is a man who, theoretically, could turn the entire United States off then blow it up. Which means they must act fast and stop Lewinter!
This is a cool little script.
When I read that it was a spy movie, I assumed it would be your typical James Bond knockoff. A fiercely intelligent effortlessly charming hero running around the world in search of his next set piece. But this story is actually more contained and realistic. Our heroes aren’t baking fake face masks to trick stuffy tuxedoed men with thick Eastern European accents. They’re in boring offices a million miles away from the problem, and time is running out for them to figure out who their traitor is and what he plans to do. It reminded me of that great little British drone movie from a couple of years ago, Eye in the Sky.
With spy movies, I’m always telling writers, “What makes your spy movie different?” You should ask this question of every genre, of course. But especially this one because it’s such a formulaic genre. There’s nothing more boring than a generic spy movie. So setting this up as a contained CIA thriller and making it a 24 hour mystery where the entire world is at stake was a welcome diversion from the snore-worthy Ethan Hunt clones I’m used to reading (how many times can one man blindly ride his motorcycle 100 miles an hour through an 8 lane intersection and not get hit????).
My biggest issue with the script was that despite the perfect movie character name, Leo Diamond wasn’t that distinctive as a character. For example, we’re told that he’s old school. That’s the whole reason they bring him in. But one of the first things he does is call on the local police to jump into their computer archives and retroactively give Lewinter a lengthy criminal record. That seems a lot more like a new school move to me.
Also, you want to make an impression with your hero’s entrance. Especially in a genre like this where we’re meant to believe that this guy is special. Charging in with a big long fun monologue is a perfectly acceptable way to achieve this. But if the monologue bombs, the character never recovers. We will always see him as the guy who spewed out that try-hard nonsensical rant about CIA coffee. I’m serious, guys. The stuff your hero does in their first few scenes is pivotal in winning over the reader.
I didn’t love 2012’s Jack Reacher but it had a great character intro. We see the entire FBI desperately trying to find Jack Reacher. It’s impossible, they’re told. Jack Reacher is one of the most skilled and hard-to-locate people in the world. As they chart out the effort and manpower and number of days it will take to find this man… Jack Reacher just walks through the door and says hi. No big silly monologue. Just one simple cleverly-executed action and we love this guy.
Luckily, the script overcomes this hiccup. The setup is too fun not to work. In addition to what I’ve mentioned, The Defection uses one of the more entertaining tropes in the genre – which is to either take a new school problem and inject an old school character into it, or take an old school problem and inject a new school character into it. The reason this works is CONTRAST. Contrast = conflict = drama = entertainment.
If you even casually like the spy genre, you’ll like this script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If your script isn’t working, try playing with the setting. For example, if your script is set in 2019 and it feels dead, ask what it might look like if it were set in 1969. Or 1929. Or 1984. Everything about this idea seemed boring to Hollywood when Nolan was selling it as a Cold War story. By shifting the setting to modern day, it all of a sudden came alive.
