The first Logline Showdown winning script of the year!
Genre: Dramedy
Winning Logline: An ambitious journalist for a cheap tabloid returns to his hometown where he’s forced to cross previously burned bridges with friends and family while investigating claims of a giant frog creature terrorizing the town.
About: Thanks again to Scott for doing all the hard work tallying votes for January Logline Showdown. Frog Boy pulled in 24 and a half votes, which was 32% of the vote, besting The Rhythm Police at number 2, which received 17 and a half votes (23%).
Writer: Zach Jansen
Details: 101 pages
For a while there, I didn’t know who was going to win. Rhythm Police was getting a lot of love. That would’ve been fun to review. But you know what? I thought The Glades (3rd place – 16 votes) was going to win the weekend when I put the loglines out. That one felt the most like a movie to me. But I’m kinda glad you guys went with something unique. That gives me hope that not every movie produced going forward is going to have iron man suits in it. Let’s see how the first winning logline of the year turned out…
20-something James works in the big city. Well, if you can call “Cleveland” a proper city. They do have the only lake in the United States that catches on fire. Sorry, Midwestern in-joke there.
James works at one of those tabloid papers that need to fit aliens into every headline. Personally, I don’t know why that’s considered “tabloid.” Aliens are real. It’s been proven on Twitter. Duh. Sorry, I’m getting distracted again.
After pissing off the city mayor, James’ boss wants to get him out of town and, by pure chance, there’s a story that would be perfect for their paper in James’ hometown – One of the city’s workers was recently attacked by a giant frog.
James hems and haws because he hates his small podunk town but agrees to go there when his boss threatens to fire him if he doesn’t. Immediately upon arrival, James runs into all the usual suspects – the reformed town bully, the angry ex-girlfriend, the father he can’t stand. But James is a professional. He’s not here for drama. He wants to solve the Frog Boy case. Or, more precisely, he wants to prove it’s nonsense.
Upon doing some research, James learns that the Frog Boy sightings date back decades, specifically around the town’s central lake. Could this frog boy phenomenon be true?? And then there’s the bigger question in all of this: Is anything true? James became a skeptic all the way back when he was a kid and decided there was no God. Which is why he and his religious father don’t talk anymore. James finally teams up with his ex to get the definitive answer on the frog. But what he ultimately finds just may ribbet his whole reality.
It took me a long time to understand why investigations were perfect storytelling vessels. The goal is built right there into the premise! Your main character’s activity is built right into the premise! This is why they can make 50,000 TV shows about cops. It’s because the cops always have an investigation, and those investigations effortlessly power stories.
But where the real fun in investigatory storytelling comes from is when you go off-road. You don’t just give us another murder to investigate. You have some fun with the investigative format. Which is why this logline was chosen. It gives us an investigation we don’t typically get to see. It’s different.
But even if you have a powerful engine pushing your story along, you still need some exciting sights and stops along the way. I didn’t see enough of those in Frog Boy.
One of the most common mistakes I see in screenwriting is assuming too much familiarity on the reader’s end. You think they know what’s going on but you haven’t given them enough information for them to understand the scene. Here’s an early example of that in Frog Boy…
Jansen assumes we know that the boss character is thinking about sending him to his hometown for this frog story. But I don’t know this boss character. I don’t know what he knows about the frog story. I don’t know that he knows James lives in Loveland. I didn’t even know James lived in Loveland at this point in the story.
So when we come into the scene with the boss asking James where he lives, we’re confused. The only indication of what’s going on occurs in a parenthetical (“realizes”). But I didn’t catch the meaning of that at first. I had to re-read the scene to understand it.
All of this could’ve been cleared up by simply being in the room with the boss as he’s looking at the frog story online before James walks in. Now we know why he’s called James in and we can enjoy the process of the boss yanking him around.
Too often, we writers assume the reader knows more than they do. They don’t know anything UNLESS YOU TELL THEM. Keep that in mind every time you write a scene, ESPECIALLY early on in the script when you hold TONS MORE information about your story than the reader. Those first 30 pages are when they need you holding their hand the most.
There were also some mistakes made on the dialogue end. Dialogue isn’t always about the words being said. It’s about the situation you create around the words to give them the most impact. In the middle of the screenplay, James goes to jail. He has no other choice than to call his father, whom he despises, to get him to bail him out.
The dad comes, bails him out, and on the car ride home, the dad starts making demands. “I want you to stay at home while you’re here instead of at the hotel.” But the demands hold no weight because the dad HAS ALREADY BAILED JAMES OUT.
This conversation would’ve had a lot more impact had the dad visited James while he was still behind bars and made the demands THERE. Now, the demands actually hold weight because James has to decide which is worse, staying in jail or staying with his dad. These are little things but they add up. They make a difference. There were several more scenes in the script where there was zero conflict or zero stakes so the conversations just sat there.
What the script does get right is its tone. It’s a fun little screenplay. It’s a fun investigation. It’s got charm. Some of the scenes of James investigating the loonier people in town made me giggle. Here’s an early exchange between James and his former bully from school.
The script had this dependable spine that always had you smiling, which stemmed from its quirky investigatory center. And it even had some character relationship depth. I thought the stuff with James and his dad about faith, which tied into the frog storyline nicely, was solid.
I would even react positively to anyone who asked me what I thought about the script. I would say, “It was cute.” That’s positive, right? But I just had this conversation with a writer the other day, who also had a cute script. I reminded him, “Cute is better than average. Cute is a lot better than ugly. But cute isn’t hot.” In the ultra-competitive world of screenwriting, cute gets you a smile. Hot gets you a date.
How do you make Frog Boy hot? The best way to make a script like this hot is to make it darker, weirder, or funnier. “Funnier” can be tough because it’s hard to write a consistently LOL script. But you can always make creative choices that are darker and weirder. You have a Frog Boy. You can push that into some risky areas.
But, in fairness to Jansen, I don’t think he’s interested in that. He wants this to be light. And movies like this *do* get made. This reminds me of a lot of films such as Welcome to Mooseport or Swing Vote. I think I imagined something a little wilder, though, something weirder. Which is why I can’t quite recommend the script. But it was right on the cusp of “worth the read.”
Script link: Frog Boy
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Show and Tell. When it comes to your hero’s flaw, you want to use a two-pronged approach. The first thing you want to do is SHOW the flaw. So if your hero runs away whenever things get tough, write a scene where we see him run away when things get tough. Then, what I encourage screenwriters to do, is to add a flaw “tell” somewhere in the script. For a variety of reasons, readers may not pick up on the flaw when you showed it. So you can tell it to the reader as well, just to make sure everyone gets it. Here, we have our “tell” moment when James is talking to someone from town to get information on the story.
The problem in Frog Boy is that we never got the SHOW. We only get the TELL. And when you do that, the reader always feels it less. So make sure you first show us and only then, later, tell us.
