If you are a regular at Toronto’s Yuk Yuk Comedy Club, chances are you won’t be seeing much more of funny-man and stand-up comedian Aaron Berg. Aaron is laughing all the way to the bank. He has just sold his first spec script – Section 6, which set off a bidding war among Hollywood studios. The winner was Universal, with a bid of $1.2 million.
Section 6 is a historical spy-thriller based on the formation of MI 6, the World War I British Intelligence Agency, and its first director, spymaster Sir George Mansfield Cummings. Cummings is the inspiration for “M” in the James Bond series. MI 6 began as MI 5, and was going to be folded into a domestic threat agency, similar to the FBI in the U.S. The spies were all aristocrats recruited from Oxford and Cambridge. Cummings felt they stuck out like sore thumbs and set about finding a blue collar war veteran that he could train and send on a crucial mission. The mission involved the retrieval of coded assassination orders that had been stolen after an attack on the British embassy in Russia. If the mission had not been a success, Russia and Britain would have been on opposite sides in World War II. The script is peppered with actual newspaper clippings from the time.
Berg wrote the script while working as a stand up comedian. In an interview with Movievine he talked about how working every night for 6 years doing stand-up taught him the value of being unique, being yourself, and to never let fear control your decisions.
The war over Section 6 was unusual because no star or director was on board. A-List actor Hugh Jackman (Wolverine, Prisoners)is now rumored to be interested, as are filmmakers Justin Lin (Fast and Furious 5 and 6), and Brett Ratner (Rush Hour series, X-Men: The Last Stand).
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