We experience one of the most critical battles of World War 2, Dunkirk, from three different perspectives – on land, on sea, and in air.
A confused and frustrated Catholic School senior seeks to escape the boring town she grew up in and do something important with her life, all while coming of age.
Born with a facial deformity, a young boy is thrown into the biggest challenge of his life, going to public school.
A mother living in a small town erects three billboards that taunt the local sheriff into doing more to find the man who raped and killed her daughter.
A Navy SEAL sniper who attains hero status due to his legendary kill count on the battlefield struggles to find peace when he returns home from war.
The above loglines represent five films that either achieved commercial success, critical success, or both. However, if any of these loglines appeared on Amateur Offerings, I fear that they’d be ripped apart. Dunkirk sounds like a movie. But where are the characters? Lady Bird sounds like every coming-of-age movie ever. Wonder has the best setup of the five, but who’s going to make a movie about a kid with a facial deformity? Three Billboards doesn’t sound bad, I guess. But it feels like there’s something missing. And American Sniper sounds like every shitty “back from war” movie ever made.
The reason I bring these loglines up is because while we’re all searching for that perfect movie idea, the concept that’s tailor-made for a logline, the reality is that most script ideas don’t fit perfectly into a logline, or at least the logline Hollywood would prefer that we write.
For example, a logline LOVES a single hero. It loves when you can start with: “An archaeologist who moonlights as a tomb raider…” But what happens when your movie doesn’t follow a single character? What if you’re writing a logline for an ensemble, like the movie, “It?” Since you can’t describe every single character, you have to describe the group. This automatically forces you to be more general (“A group of misfits…”), which increases the chances of the logline sounding generic. What we tend to forget in the world of writing is that every story is unique. And therefore, each will have its own challenges when being summarized into logline form.
Hopefully I can make that process easier for you. Every logline has what I call “hotspots.” If you get the hotspots right, you increase the chances of the logline making an impact. What are hotspots? Well, the goal with every logline is to be SPECIFIC. The more specific you are, the more you’re highlighting what’s UNIQUE about your idea. There’s a problem with being specific, however. It leads to a longer logline. And the longer the logline, the uglier it reads. This presents the writer with a contradictory task. They must write something simple and quick, yet fill it with detail.
This is where hotspots come in. A hotspot is a point in the logline where important story information is being conveyed. There are three hotspots. They are:
1) The main character.
2) Major story beats.
3) The conflict.
The first one should be obvious. Whenever you describe your main character, you want to give us one or two adjectives (sometimes more) that make them specific. So you wouldn’t say, “A man attempts to resurrect his career…”. You would say, “A failed actor attempts to resurrect his career…”. Notice how much more you know about our character in the second example.
As for the second hotspot – major story beats – this is anywhere in your logline where you’re highlighting a major story development. There will usually be one of these in the logline, but there could be two, and sometimes even three. One of easiest ways to fail logline school is to not include any major story beats in your logline. Go back and look at my logline for American Sniper. There’s no major story beat included. The closest we get is “he comes back home from the war.” Talk about generic, right? No wonder the movie sounds so boring.
For those of you confused why I’m bashing a movie that made 300 million dollars at the box office, keep in mind that the logline was meaningless for that project. The movie was a success because everyone in middle America loved Chris Kyle and wanted to see a movie about him. But I’m getting off track.
Let’s use the logline from Molly’s Game to demonstrate what a major story beat is. “A former Harvard grad begins running a successful private poker game but finds her life turned upside-down when the FBI busts her for tax evasion.” The major story beat is “begins running a successful private poker game.” If you’ve seen the movie, you know that the logline is majorly underselling that point. Hence, we need to be more specific. How bout, “begins running Los Angeles’s premiere underground celebrity poker game.”
Bonus Tip: Loglines love words like, “Premiere,” the “biggest,” “greatest,” “all-time,” “most dominant.” The best stories are about extremes. So these words will serve you well.
My rewrite of that story beat seems obvious in retrospect. But I can’t tell you how many boring loglines I’ve read because writers weren’t able to sell those major story beat hotspots.
The third hotspot – the conflict – is the trickiest. This is because the resolution of your logline isn’t the resolution of your screenplay. It’s the main conflict in your screenplay. In other words, you don’t finish the Silence of the Lambs logline with, “And then Clarice kills Buffalo Bill and saves the girl.” You finish it with, “attempts to find the warped killer before he can finish the job.” The conflict in a logline is its resolution, and therefore will be what you finish your logline with.
Since there’s a whole lot to take in here, let’s use a lifeless logline as an example and apply our hotspot technology to beef it up:
A black man accused of killing a white cop goes on trial.
Okay, so this idea has potential. Let’s start with the first hot spot. “A black man.” That doesn’t tell us much. We need SPECIFICITY here. Notice how if we change it to, “A black law student with a checkered past,” the story already begins to take on new life. Now we know something about this “man.”
“Accused of killing a white cop.” This is a major story beat. Yet it doesn’t paint a picture. We need to dress it up. How bout instead we go with, “Accused of killing a white cop during a routine traffic stop.” (this is assuming this actually happens in your script of course)
Finally we have, “goes on trial.” This is one of the WORST logline mistakes I see writers make. They provide tons of detail in both the character and the major story beats. Then they tinkle out the conflict with so little conviction, it destroys any chance of a reader wanting to read the screenplay. The ending of a logline, which is you highlighting the script’s major conflict, should land with a bang. How bout, “must argue his own case in a predominantly white community determined to make an example of him.”
So let’s look at our new logline…
A black law student with a checkered past accused of killing a white cop during a routine traffic stop must argue his own case in a predominantly white community determined to make an example of him.
Now you’re probably looking at this and saying, “Whoa Carson. That’s REALLY detailed.” That’s fine. Once you get your hotspots down, you do the same thing you do when you finish a script: YOU CUT. That means you make choices about which details are most important to convey your story. The idea is to consolidate five words into two here. Three words into one there. Try and make it snappier
This might leave you with…
A black law student accused of killing a white cop during a traffic stop must argue his own case in front of a white community determined to make an example of him.
This isn’t perfect. And the nature of logines is that you’ll keep fiddling with them until you get it right. But as you can see, we’re already in a much better place than we were with our original logline.
One final note. Every logline has a ceiling based on how good the concept is. Even the worst version of Jurassic Park’s logline is going to be better than the best version of Lady Bird’s. But if you have a strong main character and a compelling main conflict, you should be able to write a good logline. Just make sure you’re adding detail to those hotspots.
