Genre: TV – 1 Hour Drama
Premise: The elite special agents of the Investigative Services Branch who are tasked with solving the most complex and heinous crimes committed within the diverse and majestic National Parks of the ISB’s Pacific West region.
About: Kevin Costner is expanding his Yellowstone empire. Not content with his hit show, Costner is doubling down for a more modern exploration of the national park world. This will be Costner’s first ever TV writing credit.
Writers: Aaron Helbing, Jon Baird, & Kevin Costner
Details: 63 pages
It’s a TV Wednesday. Time to get our TV on. As someone who’s spent his only TV time lately watching episodes of Storage Wars, I could use a good show. Let’s see if Costner delivers the In and Out Animal Style burger version of a TV show. I’ll take fries with that, thank you.
Off-Duty ISB (Investigative Services Branch for the National Parks Service) agent Erica Breen is checking out a complaint from a married couple who say a kid broke into their car and tried to steal from them.
Breen finds an old cabin in the Yellowstone National Park area that a family squats in. She heads up to ask if they know anything about this break-in and finds Adele, a white-trashy type, lingering about. As she begins questioning Adele, she spots kids eyeing her sinisterly. And then a few older kids. And then, behind her, a few older kids still. And then young adults. And then adult adults. They seem to be everywhere, lingering in all 360 degrees of the forest surrounding her. As Breen tries to stay calm, they eventually attack. And Breen suffers a horrible violent death.
Cut to a few days later and we meet the rest of the ISB crew, led by 30-something Lincoln Kane and 50-something Cal Foster. They’ve found the body of a dead woman in a lake and are trying to lift her out. While this is happening, they get word that Breen has been missing for a couple of days. Lincoln takes stock of this.
But for right now, the priority is the woman in the lake, and the team is highly suspicious the woman’s ex-husband might be involved. Meanwhile, we meet this nasty dude, Lee, who hikes out into the park with a couple of girls and then shoves them off a cliff to their deaths. It’s one more problem the ISB unit is going to have to deal with. But first, they find a trail camera that recorded Breen’s death. And after witnessing the horrible things the family did to their friend, they stop everything to find and take this family down.
National Parks has the kind of teaser all TV writers should study.
It’s a wonderfully suspenseful scene that follows this out-manned woman observing as more and more people begin appearing around her. The scene takes its sweet time, making us squirm just as much as the poor character. We’re hoping against all hope that she’s going to find a way out. And since I assumed the scene was setting up our heroine, I thought she would figure out a way. So color me shocked when she didn’t.
The reason I want you to study this scene is because I read too many weak TV teasers. Just the other night, I read a teaser where a guy talks to his wife on a phone call in his car. That was it. That was the opening scene of the show! Sure, the scene gave us some insight into the characters and their marriage. But it wasn’t dramatized. It was information. An opening scene without dramatization is like peanut butter and jelly without bread. How do you even get it into your body?
A good way to explore this challenge is by contrasting the first scene in National Parks to the second scene. The second scene is a group of people trying to fish a dead body out of a lake. Technically, there’s something going on here. We’ve got a dead body. We’re not sure who it is yet. You could argue that that mystery creates some drama.
But is it as good as the opening scene was? No. Not even close. The opening scene was turbo-dramatized. This scene had minor drama at best. It’s not like the body was wedged down under a rock in the water that was hard to get to and required scuba divers to go down and release it and then something goes wrong while they’re down there. It’s just logistically getting a body out of a lake.
That second scene is what most writers start their pilot with. Assuming you’re not so clueless that you’re writing that car conversation scene, this second scene, to most writers, feels like it’s sexy enough to start a pilot. I’m here to tell you it isn’t.
If you’re going to start with a dead body scene, it needs to have more going on than simply the logistics of getting a body out of some water. True Detective is a good example of dramatizing a “found body” scene. Here, something much weirder and more sinister took place. Seeing that death scene was uncomfortable. And trying to work out what the killer did and why they did it keeps the scene interesting.
Sorry to go so deep on that but the opening of any script, TV or feature, is so important. And it’s done the wrong way so often I feel it’s my duty to scream from the mountain tops – “THIS IS HOW TO DO IT THE RIGHT WAY!”
Once National Parks gets rolling, it encounters the typical Pilot challenges, namely that you’re introducing a lot of people in a very short amount of space and it becomes hard to remember who’s who. And in more severe cases, there are so many characters that it’s hard to know who the main one is. That’s an issue I had for a while here. I was halfway in when I realized Lincoln was the show’s main character.
I think the reason this happens so much in TV Pilot scripts is because most pilots are written to be made (as opposed to be sold). So they’re not as worried about readers not knowing who’s who. In their mind, that will be taken care of in the casting.
However, it’s good practice either way to make your characters different from one another. The more you can make them stand out on the page, the more distinct the characters will be on the screen. Unfortunately, I don’t know many people willing to go the extra mile to get this right. And National Parks suffers a little in that department.
But the pilot has enough going for it that I was into it until the end. Besides my desire to get justice for poor Erica Breen, it was fun to see the investigation for the second lake murder unravel. Overall, National Parks does it right. It finds a lane in the TV procedural that hasn’t been explored before then makes sure all its major plotlines could only exist in this unique environment. Worth the read!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I Learned: Not taking into account reader assumptions – Often times, we get so wrapped up in our stories that we start assuming the reader knows everything we do. Where this becomes a problem is during major scenes or important plot beats. If you overlook reader assumption, your reader could end up reading a completely different show than the one you intended. The opening scene of this pilot has a group of people killing ISB Special Agent Erica Breen. We then cut forward in time (we’re told it’s been a couple of days) and a bunch of ISB agents are pulling a dead woman (who they can’t yet identify) out of a lake. You tell me what the average reader is going to assume in this moment. 99% of them are assuming the dead body is Breen. One of the agents even gets a call that Agent Breen went missing a couple of days ago. However, it turns out this is a completely different woman and a completely different scenario that led to her death. It took me another four pages to understand that. And that’s something you don’t want the reader to misunderstand. I know it was obvious to the writers that these were two totally different women. But you showed us a woman getting murdered then cut to a dead woman in a lake. Under what circumstances would we NOT connect the two? You either have to rethink putting these scenes up against each other or be VERY CLEAR that two totally different things are going on.
Genre: Comedy/Satire
Premise: (from Black List) When Tabitha, a struggling foster kid, wins a contest to become part of the BIRDIES, a popular daily YouTube channel featuring the radiant and enigmatic Mama Bird and her diverse brood of adopted children, she soon learns that things get dark when the cameras turn off.
About: This one finished with 16 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer, Colin Bannon, has been working in the industry since 2008, when he was a Location Production Assistant for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull! He also wrote another Black List script, “First Ascent,” about a mountain climber who does a climb on a haunted mountain.
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 108 pages
Have you ever watched these family Youtube channels?
When I was at my brother’s place recently, my niece was obsessed with them. And while, on the one hand, they were fun, I couldn’t help but wonder what psychological effects the channel would have on the children. No matter how you spin it, it wasn’t healthy.
So I was expecting someone to write a script about this sooner or later. It’s too juicy of a topic not to and it’s a fresh take on the child star phenomenon, which is something that hasn’t had a fresh take in a while. Youtube (and social media in general) has created this new fertile plot of land for movie ideas, and today’s script might be the best commentary on that world I’ve seen yet.
Tabitha is a 13 year old orphan who lives in a miserable “Annie” type orphanage. Her only happiness comes form her favorite Youtube reality show, “The Birdies,” about a married couple who adopted a bunch of kids and now has one of the largest audiences on the service.
That’s changing, though. The family’s all-star daughter, Nightingale, has finally turned 18, which means she can legally leave the home and go off-grid, as far away from cameras as she can get. The good news for Tabitha is, this means they need to adopt someone new into the family! And that’s, like, Tabitha’s dream!
So Tabitha sneaks out to Best Buy to record an audition tape on one of the sample iPads. When the blue-shirted Best Buy employee spots what she’s doing, he charges forward to stop her. She rips the iPad off the security chain and goes running through the store while the video waits to upload. Just as she’s at 97%, the employees grab her and kill the upload. NOOOOOOOOOO.
After hours of crying, the other orphans tell Tabitha that her video went viral! Someone else in the store taped her. Which means – you guessed it – SHE GETS PICKED! The next day, Mama Bird (always dressed to the nines), Papa Bird (always holding a camera) and the other five children, all of them a perfect rainbow of diverse ethnicities, run to greet their new sister.
The next thing Tabitha knows, she’s IN THE BIRDIE MANSION, the home she’s been watching religiously every day for the past 8 years! And she has her own room. And she gets a brand new digital camera, iPad, iPhone, iwatch – everything an influencer needs. Yes, that’s right. Tabitha is now a content creator. And she’ll be expected, just like the rest of the family, to generate content for the daily show.
Tabitha then learns the truth about Mama Bird. When the cameras turn off at 8pm every day, so does big happy charismatic Mama Bird. She’s replaced by a cyclone of depression, of Youtube burnout. Of worry and fear and obsession. All Mama Bird has cared about for the last decade are subscribers and views. And both are plunging every day due to Nightingale leaving. What Tabitha doesn’t know is that Mama Bird is counting on her to save the channel. And for that, she will expect Tabitha to do many things she doesn’t want to do.
The first thing I want to point out about this is the clever setup, which is easy to miss since it’s subtle. Bannon is satirizing the “Youtube Family” genre by doing what any good writer would do. You take someone who doesn’t know that world and throw them into it. They then act as an avatar for us, as we ourselves don’t understand that world either. So when Tabitha is thrust into this family, we feel a connection with her and want her to succeed.
But Bannon faced an interesting problem in this setup. You can’t create a new 13 year old family member out of thin air. So how do get your heroine (Tabitha) into this family? The solution Bannon came up with was to make the entire family orphans. Now it makes sense why they would want to bring someone new into the family.
In addition to this, it adds more edge to the concept, since “adopting” isn’t that different from “casting.” You have to be a certain type of person (bubbly, charming, energetic) to make it into the family. From there, the level of love you receive is dependent on how many views you get.
Which is why this is such a clever idea. In the past, they explored similar concepts (child stars being worked like dogs) on TV shows. But in those shows, you *expected* the producers and executives to be assh*les. It came with the territory. But here, the producers are also the parents. So work and love are intertwined. Which is way more f*cked up for a child than simply needing to get ratings for your boss.
And Bannon understands this concept so well. I read a lot of scripts where the writer has come up with a good idea, but they don’t totally understand that idea, which results in a lot of non-specific scenes and characters that don’t leave an impression. It’s the difference between me making a cheeseburger and In and Out making a cheeseburger. In and Out eats, sleeps, and breathes cheeseburgers. They know that world so specifically that there’s nothing I could do to make a cheeseburger as delicious as theirs.
But let me give you a more specific example from the script itself.
There’s this great moment not long after the first act. Tabitha has just moved into the Birdie mansion, and after they finish taping for the day, Tabitha goes upstairs to see her bedroom for the first time. This is the first time in her life that she’s had her own room. So she breaks down. One of the other kids sees this and gives her a puzzled look. “The cameras are off,” the kid says. Tabitha looks back at him, quizzically. “You don’t have to cry. The cameras are off.”
It’s a perfect encapsulation of what these kids’ lives are. Every seemingly important moment requires a camera-worthy response. They’ve been trained to give that response when needed. If someone’s emoting without a camera taping it, that doesn’t make any sense to them at all.
Also, this script is another point for the power of simplicity – in this case, the power of a simple theme. A writer recently sent me the theme of their movie and it was like 8 sentences long and I chuckled and said, “This isn’t a theme. This is a thesis statement.” Big chunky long themes are not only unhelpful, they can actually hurt your script. The more you’re trying to manipulate the story so that it connects with every component of your giant unwieldy theme, the more confused the reader’s going to be.
The theme here is: The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
The theme is powerful not only because of how simple it is, but because every person on the planet understands it. Simple almost always means ‘powerful.’ That power comes from the theme sticking with us. Someone who watches this movie is definitely going to remember it whenever they’re thinking of quitting their work or leaving a relationship. Is the grass really going to be greener? Or does the other side of the hill have a Mama Bird waiting for us?
There’s only one part of the script I didn’t get. The midpoint shift has Mama Bird turning Tabitha into Nightingale (signified by giving Tabitha Nightingale’s old wig) to stop the views from plunging. I’m not sure why she would think this was a good idea. The viewers aren’t going to mistake Tabitha for Nightingale. Actually, they’re probably going to get mad. (“why is this girl pretending to be someone she isn’t?”). So I wasn’t gung-ho about that choice. But everything else here is spot on. I enjoyed the heck out of it. Good stuff!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The “Eventually Is Gonna Snap” Character. I recently spotted this character on the show about the finance industry, “Industry.” This one worker was so determined to make it at the firm that he never left work, never went home, never did anything social. You just KNEW he was going to crack. And he did, in a horrible way. Here, we get that character with Bustard, one of the “birdie kids” in the family. Bustard isn’t as quick-witted or charismatic as the other kids and is, therefore, constantly being reminded by Mama Bird to up his game. You can see him desperately trying to do better – going so far as to repeat the word “subscribers” out loud thousands of times so he can say it without his foreign accent. Eventually, Bustard cracks and becomes suicidal. Why do these characters work? It’s the car-crash principle. If there’s a car crash up ahead, you spend all that time inching forward in your car anticipating how bad it could be, and, of course, when you get there, you have to look. A “Eventually Is Gonna Snap” character ensures that the reader will keep reading because they have to stick around to see that character wreck.
Genre: TV – Period Drama (Pilot Episode)
Premise: Set in the competitive world of London’s mating season, when debutantes are presented at court.
About: This is Shonda Rhimes’s first big play on Netflix, and she didn’t come lightly. This looks like it cost a billion dollars to produce. Netflix opened up that pocketbook and didn’t close it. That approach seems to have paid off because, according to Netflix, Bridgerton is the most watched program on the streamer ever over its first month, tallying up 82 million household watches.
Writer: Chris Van Dusen (produced by Shonda Rhimes) (based on the novels by Julia Quinn)
Details: 60 minutes
The time has come.
I’ve received over 650 e-mails about it. Asking me when am I going to do a stinking review for the sumptuous Bridgerton? And by 650 e-mails I mean two e-mails. It’s taken Netflix by storm. It’s taken you all by storm. And pray-tell it has taken me by storm. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about Bridgerton. Although that’s mainly because it’s the first show pictured whenever I open up Netflix but that’s neither here nor there.
Now while the manner in which the following review is written would seem to indicate I didn’t give this show a chance, I promise you that is not true. I’m not going to swear on my life or anything to promise you that. And, truth be told, I’m probably lying. But, hey, I’m the first to admit that “Cinderella with sex” isn’t the worst pitch.
Join me now, as I attempt to make sense of… Bridgerton.
So there’s this woman. Her name is “Lady Whistledown.” She runs a gossip blog but it’s the olden times version of a gossip blog so it’s printed on a pamphlet. Nobody knows who Lady Whistledown is, which confuses me since there are probably 3 printing presses in the entire world at this point and since very few people would have access to such a device, you could figure out who Lady Whistledown was through process of elimination. Assuming there are 10 buildings total in each town, just hang outside the printing press building until you find a suspicious-looking 50-something lady with 500 blank pamphlets walk inside.
Anyway, Lady Whistledown is obsessed with our heroine, the porcelain-skinned doe-eyed Daphne Bridgerton. Daphne hops on Whistledown’s radar when she gets the attention of the Queen! You see, back then, the Queen would spend entire days having women march into her throne room so she could either give them a ‘nay’ or a ‘yay.’ Sort of like their version of America’s Got Talent. But there’s only one Simon Cowell. And it’s a woman. And this Simon Cowell woman gets creepy ecstatic when she sees Daphne, bestowing upon her a forehead kiss, which makes everyone else in the room whisper to each other loudly. Meaning ‘This is a big deal!’ I’m glad they showed that loud whispering because otherwise I would’ve had no idea that it was a big deal.
ALLLLLL the men are now obsessed with Daphne and want her to husband them. It’s a little confusing, though, because Daphne is beautiful and the Bridgerton family already had a good name before this so it seems like she would’ve done well in the husband market anyway. But I guess this is like the difference between having access to regular dudes and celebrity dudes. Zak the scruffy-suited school teacher versus Zak Efron.
Either way, it seems like Daphne’s got it made. But there’s a big bad obstacle standing in her way. Her impossible brother, the Duke of Ellington! Actually, he’s not the Duke of Ellington but every guy in this show looks like a Duke of Ellington. So whenever I didn’t know someone’s name I mentally named them the Duke of Ellington. Point being, no husband is good enough for her brother. Which is cramping Daphne’s wedding plans.
Oh! I almost forgot to tell you. There’s this really studly guy that Daphne is attracted to named Simon Basset. But guess what? SIMON DOESN’T WANT TO GET MARRIED! Yikes, what?? Yeah. And he’s the only guy Daphne’s truly interested in. Well, until Lady Whistledown reveals that Simon is a player. And then she’s all, “You and I ain’t happening.” Which Simon seems totally unaffected by.
What is going to happen next? Will Daphne find a man? Will her nosy brother keep standing in her way? Will the true identity of Lady Whistledown ever be revealed???? I ask you, dear Scriptshadow reader, to find out the answers to these questions. For I know I never will.
Okay.
Time to get serious.
Although that’s probably not going to last.
What is Bridgerton? I don’t think it’s a soap opera. It’s too expensive to be a soap opera. So is it an elevated soap opera? A soap opera +1? Cause the whole time I was watching it, I was trying to figure out what the tone was. Is it supposed to be cheesy? If so, how cheesy? Or does it want to be taken seriously? Because sometimes it feels like it’s ready to take on real life problems and shit.
Since I could never get a handle on it, I could never get myself in the right headspace to care about what was going on. Take Cobra Kai, for example. Cobra Kai is cheesy 80s nostalgia. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. When there’s a serious moment, it’s almost always played with a wink to the audience. And whenever a problem does occur, it almost always gets resolved by karate. I understand that about Cobra Kai which is exactly why I love it. I never found that clarity while watching Bridgerton.
I did learn one thing about screenwriting while watching this show, though.
High stakes only need be high relative to the story you’re telling. For example, Ferris Bueller doesn’t have end-of-the-world-stakes. But there’s a good chance that, if Ferris gets caught ditching school today, he will have to repeat his senior year of high school. And to a high school kid, that’s a big deal.
This rule is on full display in Bridgerton. The stakes are: Daphne needs to find a husband. Back then, it was really important to find a husband. And the “bigger” the whale you caught, so to speak, the better it was for you and your family. The show does a good job establishing that, so those who enjoy this sort of show are likely invested.
There are typically two things required when talking about audience investment – stakes and character. If you’re ever losing audience investment (someone’s getting bored) it usually comes down to one of those two things. We’re talking about the stakes here. If the stakes don’t feel big to the reader, why would they stay invested? Let’s say, in Bridgerton, there’s no marriage storyline. It’s just people hanging out in the city and reading gossip pamphlets. You’re probably losing a lot of audience members. That’s because you don’t have stakes.
If you have stakes and your audience is still getting bored, it’s probably because, at least, 2 of your 3 main characters are weak. You can give me the highest stakes in the world – an asteroid is going to collide with earth with 100 Decepticons on it – but if 2 out of your 3 main characters are thin or cliche or they don’t have any sort of internal unresolved dilemma going on – I’m not going to be invested.
While Bridgerton clearly isn’t my thing, I can confirm that it got those two things right. It got the relative stakes down. And both Simon and Daphne are interesting main characters. Oh, and let’s not forget Lady Whistledown. Even though we never see her face, she’s still one of the most fascinating characters I’ve ever come across (I’m being sarcastic in case you couldn’t tell).
If you’re someone who likes period dramas, I’m guessing you’ll like this. The production value is insane. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much detail and extravagance in costume and set design in a period drama TV show… ever. And with two well-cast leads, it does the job.
Does that mean I’m going to watch it again? Hell no. I would shoot my own face with a staple gun before such an act were to occur. But I understand why the show has fans.
Maybe not 82 million fans.
But I understand why people watch it.
Sorta.
Not really, though.
But I kinda do.
I reserve the right to change my opinion on that in the coming days.
In which case I’ll probably say I hated it.
Lady Whistledown.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the best screenwriting skills you can possess is being able to identify why something works even if you don’t personally like it. It’s easy to dismiss something you don’t like as “bad.” But if other people like it, it doesn’t do you any good to assume everyone who liked it is an idiot with terrible taste. It’s much smarter to figure out what they’re responding to. You might be surprised and find a new screenwriting skill you can now place in your own screenplays moving forward.
I review a big high concept sale. I come up with a great twist ending for the movie that’s better than anything they’ll come up with. I tell you all about who Chris Dennis and I are targeting for his contest-winning script, “Kinetic” and how we plan to do it. I, of course, rant about Star Wars cause I can’t help myself. I give you my Wandavision thoughts. And I take you around town to look at the latest projects being sold. This newsletter will make your weekend complete!
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A reader e-mailed me yesterday and asked a good question: Do you write a logline before you write the script or do you only write it afterwards? The question stemmed from an idea that “Save The Cat’s” Blake Snyder promoted, which is that he would never write a script until he had the logline figured out.
The reason he gave for this proclamation is that unless you can conceptualize your screenplay in a single sentence, then the idea doesn’t work as a movie. His theory boiled down to good movies have a “point.” They have a “goal.” And as long as you have one of those two things, you should be able to convey it in one sentence.
Parasite is about a poor family that tries to take over a rich family’s home. Invisible Man is about a woman trying to take down her abusive dead boyfriend. Knives Out is about solving a murder. Tenet is about… oooooh, wait a minute. We may have something to discuss here.
What is Tenet about? Tenet is a movie you cannot summarize well in a logline. Is it a coincidence, then, that the movie is unwieldy and difficult to understand? There’s no way to prove it for sure but I just shook my magic 8-ball and it came up with “Signs point to yes.” Christopher Nolan would probably shoot us for saying so but had he sat down and distilled his concept into a logline, he may have discovered its weaknesses and changed some elements around until Tenet became stronger.
One of the biggest enemies of screenwriting is vagueness. Wherever there’s vagueness, there is a story unsure of where to go. So if you’re vague before you’ve written your script, there’s a good chance portions of the script itself are going to be vague. Now in a logline, those portions may amount to a word or two. But in a screenplay, they may amount to 10 to 25 pages at a time.
Let’s take this further and think of a good movie that covers a lot of ground and therefore, theoretically, shouldn’t be able to fit into a single logline. Can The Godfather be summarized in a logline? I did a google search and found this: “The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.”
This would seem to say “no.” It’s too vague and doesn’t convey any direction in the story. But I’ll give you a logline tip. Always try and write the logline from the point of view of the character driving the story (which is almost always the hero).
Therefore we’d get something like this: “A reluctant son is forced to take over his father’s organized crime dynasty while fending off the other mob families in town who are determined to eliminate his family for good.” This clearly conveys what The Godfather is about without any trickery or vagueness. So I say it passes Blake Snyder’s logline test.
Let’s challenge ourselves further, though. What about Joker? That’s a good movie. But, on first glance, it wouldn’t pass the Blake Snyder logline test. There isn’t a clear goal in the movie. I’m not even sure there’s a clear point. It’s more about a man’s descent into madness and the things that come about due to that madness. It’s also sort of a “divided in two” movie where the first half of the film is about Arthur Fleck trying to make a living as a comedian and the second half is about him fighting back against the city and losing his mind. It’s not easy to write a logline where the direction of the film changes midway through.
We’re getting into a complicated area here that necessitates a nuanced discussion. But, generally speaking, character pieces are harder to confine to a logline because the journey happens inside the character as opposed to outside. And that never reads well in logline form. “A man with mental health problems attempts to deal with his demons in an increasingly violent New York City while trying to become a stand up comedian.” It’s okay. But notice the main thrust of the logline is “deals with his demons.” That’s an internal battle. The logline still lacks plot clarity, which, 99% of the time, means the script is going to wander. It just so happens that Todd Phillips is aware of this pitfall and made sure to troubleshoot it so that the script still worked.
Which is to say, YES, it’s possible to write a good script without having a good logline, but there are mitigating factors. It’s usually a character piece. The writer inherently understands the weakness of his narrative and gameplans a way to counter that weakness.
The writers who I deal with aren’t even aware that there’s a pitfall in their concept in the first place so, of course, they can’t troubleshoot it. Which results in a messy unfocused screenplay.
Which is a long way of me saying, “Yes, you should try to write a logline BEFORE you write your script. Because not only does doing so force you to learn what your script is really about (distilling anything down to its essence will achieve this). But you may be able to identify holes in the story that you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.
I received a logline recently that went something like this (I’m going to change some things around to protect the writer’s idea): “An older woman gets a call that the baby who was taken from her 30 years ago wants to meet her.” At first glance, this logline sounds like a movie. There’s definitely something interesting about your baby being stolen from you and never meeting them until they’re an adult. But where is the story? Or, a clearer way to put it: “And then what?” Does her daughter show up, say how much she missed her, and then leave? Where does the movie go? Cause all that you’ve given me is the first act.
Here’s a better logline. I’m writing this literally off the top of my head so I’ll be the first to admit it’s not perfect. But it’s an example of how figuring out the logline can help you discover what your movie is really about. “After an older woman is reunited with her daughter, who was stolen from her 30 years ago as a baby, she begins to suspect that the visitor is not who she says she is, and that her ultimate plan is to harm her.”
Let me reiterate. Not a movie that’s going to be made any time soon. But you can see more of a movie in this version than the previous version. We get the “and then what” part of the story that was missing from the initial logline. Too many writers start writing their screenplays without figuring out the “and then what” part. So when they get to that moment in the screenplay, it’s no coincidence why they run out of ideas.
Now, to answer the original writer’s question, just because you’re basing your movie on the logline you wrote ahead of time, that doesn’t mean you won’t discover a better movie along the way. And, if that happens, you should go back to your logline and write it again. And if your story improves again while you’re writing it, go change your logline again. And when you’re finally done, you’ll write the big final logline that reflects what the script became. This will be the logline you send out to people.
I know lots of screenwriters think loglines are evil. But they can help you write a good movie if you let them. The more vagaries your concept includes, the more you should turn to your logline as a way to figure out the script’s problems.
So go forth and write those loglines, my friends! And if you’re having trouble, I offer two services that can help. One is a quick-and-dirty rating and analysis of your logline that goes for $25. The other is a more involved process where we can e-mail back and forth, collectively working on your logline until we get it right. That’s $40. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “logline help.”
