Here’s a quick cheat sheet for your next logline.ġ) An idea that feels simple and easy-to-grasp.Ģ) Some sort of unique element must be involved.ģ) The story must feel big and important.ġ) An idea that feels simple and easy-to-grasp – So many of the loglines I’ve received are agonizingly complex. Okay, so now that we’ve established what you SHOULDN’T be doing, let’s focus on what you should. For example, do you really want to write another “group of people stuck in a log cabin with zombies movie?” Even if you tweak something here or there (maybe the occupants are trained hunters!), it still feels similar enough that people are going to go, “Eh, I’ve seen that before.”
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You also want to steer clear of common movie TYPES unless you’ve found a fresh element to add. Or I’ll get stuff like, “A group of space explorers crash-lands on an icy planet where a local alien species starts hunting them.” Come on! That’s Alien or The Thing. Let’s say you come up with an idea about a shark that terrorizes a small Italian town. It’s always better to be more unique than more similar. While I kind of understand how this mistake can be made (writers are told to come up with ideas that are “familiar but different”), I’d advise against ideas that sound, in any way, similar to past movies, or similar to past movie types. But now we can see a bit of a movie here, right? Obviously, the younger sister suffers from the same issues the mom had, so this trip becomes about saving the sister before she ends up like her mom. “A young man, grieving from his alcoholic mother’s death, must pick up his troubled sister from an addiction program and drive her cross-country to the funeral.” Conceptually, it’s no Jurassic Park. For example, let’s rework the road trip logline. There’s got to be something unique there, either in the concept itself or in the execution of the concept. Remember, movies have to be bigger than life. There isn’t a single original element or hook in this concept! I get a lot of stuff like, “A young man, still recovering from his mother’s death, takes a cross-country trip with his brother to heal.” Uhhhhhh, I’d volunteer to join that mother in her coffin before reading this script. The biggest violator of this tends to come from road trip ideas for whatever reason. Where is the hook? Where’s the “strange attractor?” “When new evidence emerges in the death of an NYPD cop, his son plots revenge on the gangsters responsible, against the wishes of his fiancée and his father’s ex-partner.” Cops, revenge, gangsters? Gee, I haven’t seen that before.
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The logline is too simplistic and has NO HOOK, so it ends up reading like a bland TV episode.
The third biggest mistake is, strangely, the opposite of the second.
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“A young wannabe ninja joins “Hitman Incorporated,” a school that teaches young men and women how to be hit men, but when he gets his first assignment, it ends up being a circus performer who used to be his best friend, so he will have to seduce the performer’s boss, who also happens to be the Hairy Woman, to help him pull off a fake hit, which ends up saving the circus in the process.” The scariest thing about this logline is that everyone is thinking how ridiculous it is, and yet at least 60% of you have sent me a logline similar to it. The number of elements is endless, and the point of the movie seems to change several times during the logline. The second biggest mistake is loglines that have way too much going on in them. “A professor who moonlights as an archaeologist must beat a determined Hitler to one of the most elusive and mysterious artifacts in history, the powerful Ark of the Covenant.” A good concept consists of manipulating elements into a storyline that sounds intriguing. I’m pretty sure all you have to know is how to type to pull that off. Nor is placing two of them in the same sentence. Coming up with buzzwords (aliens, zombies, sharks, time-travel) isn’t difficult. So by merely saying, “Five aliens arrive on earth and search for a vampire who they believe possesses the key to saving their planet,” that they’ve come up with a good idea. The biggest problem I seem to be running into is writers who think splashy movie-friendly elements on their own equal a good idea. So today’s post is dedicated to supercharging your concept and coming up with a great logline. OMG, we only have a WEEK before we have to start writing our script! And most of you still haven’t come up with an idea that’s even close to being script-worthy.
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