Reader Question: What makes a stellar logline?
Two words: Concept. Concise.
Two words: Concept. Concise.
Reader question via Twitter from Kindra:
@GoIntoTheStory This is great advice. Now, what type of logline gets your attention? What makes one stellar?
Kindra, you are asking the $64,000… $640,000… $6.4M… $64M question. Believe it or not, a logline can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to a movie studio as it provides the foundation of everything that comes after it: script development, casting, marketing strategies, merchandising, sequels, franchise, etc.
First, some background on loglines. I did a series of posts on Go Into The Story analyzing a major agency’s instruction packet, specifically about loglines. In that section, the document says:
The logline provides a one-sentence summary of the script’s premise and plot. It should succinctly describe the situation of the protagonist and include any major story elements.
Concise, concise, concise. One sentence that generally describes the script. General is the key word. Don’t worry about every detail of the story in the log line.
“Concise, concise, concise.” They didn’t use that word in triplicate because of some errant repeat key. People who work in the Hollywood movie business are extremely busy and they have the attention span of gnats. Therefore, a good logline is a concise one that says what it needs to say in the briefest possible form.
That brings us to the idea of high concept. It may not be as in vogue as previous decades, but believe me, a story that is compact and unique is much more likely to generate interest compared to a laborious, convoluted idea.
How can we understand “high concept?” A story idea that can be summed up in 1–2 lines. A high concept movie must have a clean, simple, and basic idea.
We can even go more granular by talking about the idea of a story-conceit, which we would define as the “central premise of the story.” With the movie K-9, it was the premise of a human cop teamed up with a dog cop. With Inception, it’s the premise that people can enter into other people’s dream states. With Groundhog Day, it’s the premise that someone has to relive a day over and over again.
So what kind of logline gets my attention? First off, one with a strong story conceit.
The next attribute: A clear emotional center, one that can resonate with a significant movie audience. How does your logline make the reader feel?
Finally, there is the six word test. This from my interview with screenwriter Daniel Kunka:
Scott: You followed that up with the spec script “Agent Ox” in March of 2011 that sold to Columbia. That’s described as a human spy on an alien planet who’s trying to stop an invasion of the Earth. How did you come up with that idea?
Daniel: Sheer desperation. As great as the 12 Rounds experience was — it got me into the guild, it got me health insurance — this town for a young screenwriter is about “what can you do for me now?” I wasn’t at the point where studios were knocking down my door begging me to work for them. I’m still not. The movie came out, it didn’t do very well, so even though my name was out there I still had to bring a new idea to the table.
And for a few years I tried to recreate the same thing that happened with 12 Rounds. I wrote two or three action-thrillers much in the Taken vein that just weren’t me. The scripts were fine scripts, but nobody cared. I got a lot of “this is great” reads and that was it. I think the success I had getting the move made put me on a path where I tried to take the easy road and I thought I would hit the lottery again and it just didn’t happen.
It’s a lesson that was valuable to learn though. I wasn’t writing to my voice. I was writing to what I thought Hollywood wanted. And Hollywood, she’s a fickle mistress. So Agent Ox was my response to that. It was my return back to what the script Copies was that I had written all those years before. A big, fun, genre movie. It was still marketable, it was still trying to give Hollywood something that would hopefully sell, but it was my version of that, my voice, and not some watered-down other thing.
That decision really defined who I became as a writer. It had taken four years of college and maybe eight years after and I had a movie made and I still didn’t quite know until I started writing Ox. And that original idea of the script, it was so simple. I made a document called “High Concept Story Ideas” and just brain dumped a bunch of stuff down for two or three days, and the very last idea in this document were the six words “Human Spy on an Alien Planet” and I knew that was it.
I always joke in meetings now that those were the six words that changed my career and how I think about writing screenplays, but it’s the absolute truth. I started writing three weeks before my son was born, I finished it during his midnight feedings and then I sold it ten days before my WGA health insurance ran out. The first sale is always special, but it’s the second one where you really start to think you can do this as a career.
Scott: That six word thing. You’re really talking about drilling down the high concept so they can see it. Like what’s the simplest thing you can convey, and it’s really important because the people on the other end are so busy, you really want to have that concise description, yes?
Daniel: For sure. I know that people don’t like that concept. Like they think that it lessens an idea or it lessens what you do as a screenwriter, but again, this is the game we’re playing. If you want to write at a studio level, you must be able to communicate big ideas in simple terms. That’s how specs climb the food chain. If an assistant reads your script and loves it, that six-word idea will make it that much easier for the assistant to sell it to his or her boss, and then for that producer to sell it to the studio and that studio to sell it to marketing and hopefully, marketing to sell it in a three minute trailer to the entire world to get people to come see your movie.
Even if you’re trying to write a more independently-minded movie — what are the six words that make your independent movie different from every other independent movie? I don’t want to diminish the actual craft of telling your story and creating memorable characters and dialogue and conflict and emotion, but I also think younger writers don’t necessarily think of the bigger picture as well.
The six word test for K-9: Headstrong cop. New partner. Police dog. Boom. You see the movie.
Circling back to the original question, here are three stellar loglines from spec scripts which sold in the last few years:
Once a year globally, people lock themselves at home and fend off the senseless and random attacks by Grims. Tonight’s that night. — The Grims
A 7-year-old girl accidentally misspells “Santa” and instead invites Satan to bring her a toy for Christmas — and he does. — Dear Satan
A dog will go to any length to ensure its owner ends up making the right choice between two eligible young women. — My Owner’s Wedding
With a logline, don’t tell the story, sell the story. What is the central conceit? Find that, then build a logline based on it. That’s most likely to lead to a logline buyers will respond to.
What are some stellar movie or script loglines you’ve seen recently? Please head to comments and provide your thoughts.
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