New Practice Loglines

[pstudios]

:bounce: I got the general idea for this from an excercise I'm doing in a book I'm working with.

I've taken a small list of some existing films and am trying to write new loglines for each of them.

Seems to be easier said than done, but it's good practice, so I'm going to try it.

This is kind of informal and has no deadline. I'm working on it now.

Here's the list of movies I picked:

Shawshank
American Beauty
Godfather
Mafioso The Father and the Son
One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest
Goodfellas
M.A.S.H.

Look forward to seeing how I could have improved after I get this done.

Boy I don't feel up for this challange, but maybe that will change, as I get to work on this over the weekend.:eek:

Hope we all get a lot out of this!

Jennifer

[pstudios]

:o
Okay here’s my bad attempt at this logline challenge.

Shawshank - When a financial consultant ends up in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, he must play the system and befriend a brutal warden to get out alive.

American Beauty - An unsatisfied middle aged man is motivated to let his hair down and live. Now someone is jealous and wants to kill him.

Mafioso - An ethical son of a notorious crime boss must protect his family from crazy gangsters after they kill his father.

One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest - A rebellious inmate finds himself in a mental hospital and ends up battling an evil institution to save himself and his friends.

Goodfellas - A wanna be gangster works his way up in the ranks. When he slips, he must get himself and his family out before crazy gangsters kill them.

M.A.S.H. - When a rebellious medical Doctor and his partner show up at a military camp, they use crazy antics to challenge the conventional system and survive.

Haven’t done one 4 Godfather yet.

Comments appreciated. I think U could improve on my versions!

So go to it!

[Joe Unidos]

There are more important things than loglines...

Shawshank --Based on the novella "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" by Stephen King.

Godfather --Based on the Book "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo.

One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest --Based on the book "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey

Goodfellas --Based on the Book "Wiseguy" By Nicholas Pileggi.

M.A.S.H. --Based on the book "Mash: A Novel About Three Army Doctors" by Richard Hooker.

[dpaterso]

Taking a crazy guess here Joe, the "exercise" is to come up with loglines as if you'd written these screenplays as specs, not adapted them from successful novellas and novels.

Anyways, for the hell of it, quiet day:

Shawshank Redemption - An innocent man is sentenced to life in prison and must somehow survive the brutal system that tries to grind him down.

American Beauty - A midlife crisis salesman rebels when he's thrown on the career scrapheap, further alienating his dissatisfied wife and their teen daughter.

The Godfather - The beleaguered head of an Italian-American crime family must turn control of his threatened empire over to his innocent younger son.

Mafioso The Father and the Son - sorry, don't know this one.

One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest - A petty criminal gets himself thrown into the loony bin as a cushy option and foments revolt among the fun-starved inmates.

Goodfellas - The true story of an up-and-coming hood whose increasingly violent exploits paint a terrifying picture of the modern American gangster.

M.A.S.H. - Two doctors bring their own brand of anarchy to the Korean War, ticking off their superiors as they find zany humor amid the horrors of war.

-Derek
My Web Page - sci-fi, fantasy, horror, cyborgs, AIs, dragons, vampyres. (http://hometown.aol.co.uk/DPaterson57)
You mean, you'll put down your rock, and I'll put down my sword, and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people?

[pstudios]

:) Thanx Derek!

You got it!

[Joe Unidos]

Taking a crazy guess here Joe, the "exercise" is to come up with loglines as if you'd written these screenplays as specs, not adapted them from successful novellas and novels.

True, but I was hinting at the larger point that crafting spec loglines for material that did not (and, it could certainly be argued, would not) sell from a queried logline is not a productive exercise except in appreciating what type of material does not traditionally sell as a spec. That is, it doesn't matter what logline you come up with for "American Beauty" --no one is going to ask to read it from a query letter from an unknown.

:)

[dpaterso]

OK, forget dramas, only go for shamefully commercial claptrap, got it. :)

Hey wait -- claptrap's my genre!

-Derek
My Web Page - sci-fi, fantasy, horror, cyborgs, AIs, dragons, vampyres. (http://hometown.aol.co.uk/DPaterson57)
Those of you lucky enough to have your lives, take them with you. However, leave the limbs you've lost. They belong to me now. Except you, Sophie! You stay right where you are!

[TDWoj]

True, but I was hinting at the larger point that crafting spec loglines for material that did not (and, it could certainly be argued, would not) sell from a queried logline is not a productive exercise except in appreciating what type of material does not traditionally sell as a spec. That is, it doesn't matter what logline you come up with for "American Beauty" --no one is going to ask to read it from a query letter from an unknown.

:)


So what you're saying is, it's useless to learn how to write loglines since the person trying to learn how to do it would never sell anything as a spec anyway because they're unknown.

See, this is again going back to the dismissive attitude towards newbies who are trying to learn screenwriting skills.

Pstudios is sharing her attempts to complete an exercise in learning how to write loglines by writing loglines for existing films. The exercise - and I repeat this intentionally, for emphasis - is to learn to write loglines; your comment suggests pstudios shouldn't even try because as an unknown she will never sell a spec script anyway, so what's the point....

<boggle>

[Joe Unidos]

Not at all. What I suggest is that attempting to write loglines for movies that were sold on the strength of successful (but potentially not easily-summarized) existing properties is not nearly the effective exercise that trying to write loglines for movies that were bought on spec would be. In fact, practicing one's logline-writing by crafting loglines for material that actually sold on spec would also be a wonderful exercise for a new writer to learn what actually sells as a spec. In researching the business to even begin to assemble the list with which to practice, the new writer would repeatedly reinforce to themselves the type of material that grabs someone based only on a logline.

It's very simple: the spec market is a completely different animal. Only certain stories lend themselves to catchy loglines. The issue is not crafting a logline for a script that was successful, but crafting a script that can be successful as a logline. That's the double-edged sword of spec-writing. If the material is not already successful or if you do not have a reputation that earns you a cold read or at least a pitch, then you have to sell the story with one sentence via your logline. Like it or not, the value of the finished script is meaningless if the story doesn't beg to be read.