People get obsessed with writing their logline. And so they should. It’s a crucial selling aid. I’ve known of at least one long running UK TV show commissioned on a logline.
Imagine – a single sentence with that kind of power…?
Well, OK, what actually happened was the writer caught the attention of a producer with that single sentence. This one sentence switched on the producer’s imagination in a big way, which led to further discussions, which led to treatments, scripts, production – and over half a decade of regular prime time network broadcast.
This particular logline wasn’t one of those whizzbang high concept taglines that we are supposed to spend our time inventing. It wasn’t a new way of expressing dramatic truth in a radical way that no-one had ever invented before. It was far more homely.
Of course, the precise sentence that was used by the writer got changed every time the producer told the story, (and it’s a good story, so I heard him tell it more than once) but the essence is the writer said something like:
‘This show is about an English priest from a big city who gets posted to a little village in rural Catholic Ireland.”
When the show finally emerged it was called Ballykissangel. It ran for six seasons in one of the BBC’s prize slots, got huge figures, and was greatly loved by its audience.
But, as I mentioned, that’s not a logline you’d immediately recognise as hot.
In fact I imagine you might have read that and thought, “Boring”
I think its success comes down to something I’m always talking about, in fact something I mentioned in the very first newsletter you received from me.
It’s The Story That Counts
It comes down to the fact that drama is NOT primarily about the words you use. Drama is primarily about the story you have created behind the words.
That log line, for that producer, at that time, was like an unexploded bomb.
In a single flash it presented him with: a world, a hero, a clash of values, moral and cultural, obvious ideas for subsidiary characters, glossy onscreen landscapes that would sell round the world, hints of a leisurely comedic tone, and the knowledge that there would inevitably be a huge supply of story ideas.
The takeaway is clear. Your logline can be as flashy, as glitzy, as radical as you like, but if it doesn’t unwrap big, solid story potential in an instant, then it’s ultimately not doing its job.
If you take some think about what I’ve discussed here, you should find it a lot easier to come up with some loglines that compress a whole lot of drama. To get a guide to designing the story behind the logline you should take a look at the Screenwriting Goldmine Guide to Writing a Screenplay. It contains a load more great information in a concise, no-nonsense style, that means you spend much less time reading and more time writing your own brilliant first draft.