Today’s post comes with a fun twist. One of the loglines is AI generated. See if you can guess which one!
Okay, it’s time for one of my favorite segments here at Scriptshadow – “Why Didn’t My Script Get Picked?”
Ever wonder why your script didn’t make the cut? You’re going to find out exactly why, as I provide you with 11 scripts that didn’t make this past Friday’s High Concept Showdown, as well as why they didn’t make it.
Just a reminder that, in the new year, I’ll be pitting five loglines against each other every month. You will decide which one wins, and, in the process, which script I review the following week. Therefore, just because you didn’t make High Concept Showdown, that doesn’t mean your submission is dead in the water. You can re-submit your high concept script, or any script for that matter, and will have a dozen shots next year to get that spotlight review.
Oh, and there’s a little TWIST to today’s post. I’m including an AI-generated logline. So here’s what I want you to do. I want everyone in the comments to vote for their FAVORITE logline here as well as the logline they think is AI generated. That’s fine if they’re one and the same. I’m going to be highly worried if an AI logline wins today’s post because that, of course, means, Skynet is coming. (P.S. – the AI script link is a dummy script. So make your votes and guesses BEFORE you download any the screenplays).
Enjoy!
Title: The Fire Inside
Genre: Sci-fi/Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Horror, Drama
Logline: After dead Confederate soldiers come back to life and attack during a Civil War battle, a Union soldier returns to his Georgia home looking for answers – and finding more questions.
Reason It Didn’t Get Picked: Whenever I see more than two genres under the genre designation, I get really worried. Because all of the scripts I read that do this are bad. And this entry has four, one of which is a dual-genre (sci-fi/fantasy). So actually, five. A movie just can’t hold five genres. So I already know it’s going be all over the place. As for the idea, it does have some ‘high concept’ DNA in it. Confederate soldiers coming back to life is good. But another logline-killer is the tapered-off vague ending that doesn’t really tell us anything. “…home looking for answers. – and finding more questions.” You need to tell us what actually happens. Not hint at questions and answers. There are going to be questions and answers in every script, hopefully.
Title: Southsiders
Genre: Adventure
Logline: After his treasure hunting father is arrested for a crime he says he didn’t commit, his twelve-year-old son and his friends search the South Side of Chicago to find Al Capone’s hidden fortune and clear his name… It’s in the vein of GOONIES, DOPE and NATIONAL TREASURE.
Reason It Didn’t Get Picked: This one almost made the cut. As a Chicagoan, I’ve always been convinced that Capone hid a bunch of his money in the suburban houses where all his cronies lived. The issue with this logline is that the first half doesn’t organically connect with the second half. A father is arrested for a crime. So, to clear his name, you have to find Al Capone’s treasure? How does that work? Does the Chicago DA give away free get-out-of-jail-free cards for anyone who finds Capone’s treasure? With the Goonies, the connection was more organic. The need to find the treasure was to stave off the foreclosures of their family homes so a country club can’t buy them out. Still, this one finished Top 10-15 for me. I’d be curious to hear what all of you think of it.
Title: ACTION REPLAY
Genre: Sci-fi/Action/Comedy
Logline: When the world’s Most Wanted Criminal hijacks a TIME MACHINE a lowly technician keeps sending himself back to save the day – but more and more of his past, present and future selves just keep adding to the chaos…
Reason It Didn’t Get Picked: This is a good example of the importance of getting feedback on your loglines. Cause, if you glance through this quickly, it feels high concept. It feels like a movie. But when you read through the logline with a detailed eye, it’s harder to understand. Before we get to that, though. Stop with the unnecessary capitalization. I don’t understand why writers do this. “Most Wanted Criminal” should not be capitalized. If I see unnecessary capitalization? That’s pretty much a guarantee I’m not reading the script. But, anyway, we’ve got a criminal who hijacks a time machine. And we’ve got a technician who wants to stop him. So he goes back in time to stop him, I guess. But… how can he go back in time to stop him if the criminal already took the time machine? It doesn’t quite make sense.
Title: Vampire in Silicon Valley
Genre: Comedy
Logline: In the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, a young and successful entrepreneur discovers that he is a vampire. As he struggles to maintain his humanity while navigating the cutthroat world of tech startups, he must keep his true identity hidden while dealing with the challenges of being a vampire in the modern age. With the help of his quirky and eccentric team, he must find a way to use his vampire powers to succeed in the competitive world of tech while also staying true to himself.
Reason It Didn’t Get Picked: I loved this title but there’s something about the way the logline is presented that tells me the screenplay is going to be extremely generic. The phrase, “quirky and eccentric team,” in particular, was a logline killer in my opinion. Writing loglines is a balance between getting the basic idea across, yet still peppering it with just the right amount of detail so it feels like the script is going to be unique in some way.
Title: Hollywood Ending
Genre: Horror-comedy
Logline: After a zombie outbreak at a swanky Hollywood party the lowly Caterers realize the biggest stars in the world are suddenly trying to eat them.
Reason It Didn’t Get Picked: This is what I’d refer to as an “almost idea.” It certainly has components of a high concept idea. But there’s something not clever enough about it. It just feels kind of surface-level. I don’t even think the right people are turning into zombies. It would probably be better if the stars were getting attacked. I think audiences would enjoy that more. Even still, I tend to resist movie ideas with giant stars playing themselves only because it’s so insanely hard to get huge actors to do this. And to get multiple movie stars to agree to it is even harder. Also, another unnecessary capitalization (Caterers)!
Title: LANDED
Genre: R rated Comedy
Logline: A freshman makes a promise not to use any cellphone during her first day at college, but when she must make a phone call, the result is a wild and unexpected adventure following a map to the campus’s few landlines.
Reason It Didn’t Get Picked: The reason I didn’t pick this one is pretty simple. I just didn’t see any stakes in the story. A big reason why that comedy, “Tag,” from several years back, was DOA at the box office, was because nobody cared if these guys kept tagging each other. There were no stakes. Same issue here. Who cares if someone needs to make a phone call or not? You might *stress on might* be able to make a short of that. But it’s not even like somebody stops her. This is a promise she made to herself. Okay, then, break your promise. Problem solved. I’m just not understanding this premise. Also, the title doesn’t match the plot.
Title: ‘Zero at the Bone’
Genre: Mystery Thriller
Logline: A troubled detective on leave is thrust into a secret Anarchist community seeking help to investigate the first ever murders behind their gate.
Reason It Didn’t Get Picked: We’ve got yet another unnecessary capitalization. This is becoming an epidemic. We’ve also got single quotes around the title. I don’t know why anybody does that. People, you have to understand that managers and agents and producers don’t have time. You give them an easy reason to say no, they’re going to take it. These are small things that you can fix with a little feedback. So many writers are shooting themselves in the foot, here. It’s frustrating to watch. As for the concept, there isn’t enough irony in it. Anarchists bring about anarchy. Therefore, it makes total sense that someone within that community would kill someone. Why not set the murder in an Orthodox Jewish community, where the murder rate is 1/1000th the rest of the country? Now you’ve got irony in your idea.
Title: Don’t Let The Fire Die
Genre: High Concept Horror
Logline: On a wilderness, glamping adventure, a dysfunctional man and his dysfunctional friends must fight to keep their fires lit as they are hunted by primeval predators that are afraid of fire.
Reason It Didn’t Get Picked: First of all, props to Morgan for ZERO unnecessary capitalization in his logline. Thank goodness. Couple of reasons this one didn’t make the cut. One, I didn’t know what glamping was. I had to look it up. That’s usually not a good thing since readers don’t want to do your work for you. They just want to know what they’re reading. So most won’t look that word up like I did. I don’t like the use of “dysfunctional” twice. That tells me the writer didn’t do a ton of work on the logline. Just say, “a dysfunctional group of friends.” But the biggest issue here is that there’s no cleverness or irony to the setup. They’re supposedly hunted by these special predators that are afraid of fire. Every predator is afraid of fire. The “strange attractor” in this idea isn’t strange enough, in my opinion.
Title: Time’s Past
Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
Logline:A special agent is brought on to a top secret programme where they use a device to turn back time in order to stop crime before it happens, but finds herself in a predicament when one criminal they are chasing seems to know about the device and a dark secret behind it
Reason It Didn’t Get Picked: If you’re keen, you’re starting to see what I see, just on a smaller scale. Which is that I get all these submissions that feel like they SHOULD be big, and yet they don’t have that clarity or that special attractor, or that irony, or that well-thought-out plot direction that truly elevates them into high concept territory. Turning back time to stop crime is a big fun sci-fi idea. But then the logline limps towards the finish line with this vagary regarding a criminal who knows a dark secret behind the device. Nobody cares about that. They care about the fun part. Not the much smaller detail of a ‘dark secret.’ And, if the dark secret is really cool, it needs to be in the logline. You’re trying to get people to read your script here. Tell them what your movie is about. Don’t be cryptic.
Title: Southern Belle
Genre: Action / Comedy
Logline: A government assassin uses her undercover identity as a beauty queen to travel the South until she bumps into a rival assassin… who turns out to be her mother.
Reason It Didn’t Get Picked: This idea just felt dated to me, that’s all. It felt like a script that could’ve been written in 1998. Does that mean you can’t draw inspiration from older movies, like Miss Congeniality? No. But the line between a fresh take on an old idea and just plain dated is blurry. So it’s a risk. Also, the addition of the mother feels like a slightly different movie. I’m not convinced it was needed.
Title: TIS THE SEASON
Genre: Christmas action thriller
Logline: An ex-CIA agent temporarily paralyzes Santa Claus after mistaking him for assassins breaking into his house. When the real assassins show up, the agent must get Santa to safety, evade the assassins . . . and deliver a f*ck ton of toys. It’s The Santa Clause meets My Spy meets Guardians of the Galaxy.
Reason It Didn’t Get Picked: I’m not a fan of violent Christmas movies. I say this to remind every writer here that there’s an element of subjectivity with every script you send out there. Obviously, Violent Night did really well this past weekend. So there’s a market out there for this kind of idea. But it’s just not for me. Which is why you never want to label your script good or bad based on a single opinion. Get a bunch of opinions. That’s where you find if you’ve got something good or not.
Title: Immaculate Nation
Genre: Sci-Fi/Action
Logline: In a nation of clones, where natural reproduction is punishable by death, a disgraced Enforcer from the Reproductive Crimes Bureau falls for a woman leading a free-breeding revolution.
Reason It Didn’t Get Picked: Something about this idea feels too familiar to me. It feels like a garden-variety Young Adult Sci-Fi Setup circa 2010. It feels too similar to Handmaid’s Tale. And cloning is a fairly dated sci-fi concept. From 1997-2005, every single spec had clones. So whenever I see that word, I feel immediate resistance. For me, at least, there isn’t that singular variable in this idea that really helps the concept stand out.
Look, movie ideas are hard. They’re like pop songs. They seem so easy when you hear them. But there’s real art and craftsmanship to constructing an exciting well-thought-out movie concept. It’s why I tell people, get logline reactions from your friends BEFORE you write your script, not after. I know screenwriters are all stubborn and are going to write what they wanna write at the end of the day. And I get that. I’m like that too. But, at the very least, you can identify if you’ve got a true stinker on your hands before it’s too late.
If you’re interested in getting a logline consultation from me, they’re $25 and they include a 150-200 word analysis, a 1-10 rating for both concept and logline construction, and a logline rewrite. If you want a more involved process where we discuss in depth what you’re trying to do with the logline and how to get the most out of it – I offer that as well. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and we’ll get started right away!
