Adventures in Screenwriting: “Spy vs. Spy”
Hollywood never ceases to amaze. A town filled with the best and brightest, minds educated in the most hallowed halls of academia and trained by veterans of the entertainment industry. A collective consciousness keenly aware of the history of cinema and decades long movie trends. And out of all that, this is what they come up with for a new movie project: Spy vs. Spy.
As described in this fansite:
Simple yet meaningful is one way to describe the wordless black and white comic strip that makes up Spy vs. Spy. The cartoon created in 1960 by Antonio Prohías, depicts the antics of two distinctly different yet similar spies who try to get the best of each other with clever yet strange schemes of espionage and deception.
Published in Mad magazine since 1961, Prohías began working on Spy vs. Spy in Cuban, but fled to the United States in 1960 just days before Fidel Castro took over the last Cuban free press. When Prohías came to the United States he knew almost no English, but Mad magazine readers and editors quick accepted him and loved his work.
Before he got the job at Mad, he worked in Queens at a clothing factory by day and drew by night in his cramped apartment. His earlier works “Erizo,” “Oveja Negra,” “El Hombre Siniestro,” and “Tovarich” would not work in his new country where the idea of communism was not as prevalent or well taken by pleasure readers. In Cuba if you were not a supporter of Castro you were considered a spy, and this is where he got the idea. Prohías considered himself a spy and thus the idea was born.
This recent movie announcement is not some weird offshoot deal ala the reincarnation of Vestron. The project has some heavy hitters involved. Per Deadline:
Remember Spy vs. Spy, the running comic strip of one-ups-manship between rival spooks from Mad Magazine? A live-action bigscreen version is moving forward at Warner Bros for Ron Howard to direct. David Koepp will produce with Howard and his Imagine Entertainment partner Brian Grazer. Right now, Koepp will oversee a script that will be written by John Kamps. Kamps just teamed with Koepp to write Premium Rush, the Sony Pictures movie directed by Koepp, who also just rewrote the Jack Ryan film for Paramount Pictures.
So imagine you are Mr. Kamps, the screenwriter tasked with taking a pair of literally black-and-white two-dimenstional figures, and turning who they are and what they do into a story that can sustain a 100 minute plus movie. This is pretty much your marching orders:
The film will be a physical and highly visual action comedy with two spies going mano a mano in ruthless fashion.