Thanks for the link. I knew what the blacklist was, but this is the first I'm seeing one as it's coming out.
Now maybe I'm 1 part green to this industry and 2 parts a cynic, but lord do alot of those just sound blasé/uninspired and mucho regurgitated. Maybe cause I primarily write comedy or derivatives of, I did see a couple in that vein that perked my interest, but little else.
The Ricky Stanicky (which i guess Franco is doing?) and Are We Officially Dating? tickled me with their concepts, and the Last son of Isaac Lemay or whatever could be interesting if it's not too linear and campy.
I'm very new to loglines and how to write one that effectively does what it's intended to, but this one screams "what..."
I mean is that it? Is that supposed to get it done? Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but that's just empty in the purest way.
What you have to understand is that, while everyone touts the value of loglines as such around here, spec scripts by established writers with agents don't get sold on "official" loglines like this one.
While a logline like the one you site might pop up in a cover letter or in the blacklist, the way the project gets read and marketed consists of an agent calling up execs at various companies and studios -- people that he knows and people who are, as a rule, already familiar with the work of the writer or writers in question and the agent gives a brief pitch of the script and sort of "pre-sells" it over the phone.
So that by the time the script arrives with the cover letter attached the logline is really just something to tickle the exec in question -- to sort of remind him of the conversation in which the agent already told him what the project was about.
Plus, the script will generally get covered internally and whoever covers it is going to write his own logline on the cover sheet of the coverage -- and that's the logline that everybody at any given company is going to be reading anyway - not the writer's logline or the agent's logline.
So on some level what matters is -- has the agent made the script sound appealing to the exec? Are the writers in question hot? That is, do they have a movie about to come out that has positive buzz, or has a movie of theirs recently come out that's been very successful?
If either of those things is true the logline could read, "A loaf of bread bakes slowly in an oven for two hours" and everybody will at least want to take a look at it.
NMS
