There have been times when I’ve been out at a business lunch and run into a network executive at the same restaurant. They are with a fellow exec or a show-runner (usually the head writer) or even an actor, and they suddenly say something like, “Hey, what was that cool project you pitched me about the astronaut stuck on that dead planet?” At that moment, I’m eternally grateful to have the logline for the project memorized so I can bring it out to entice them—believe me, they definitely don’t want to hear me stumble through a long-winded plot summary during lunch. I think that’s one reason I love loglines so much: aside from their marketability they take away the panic that can come when someone puts you on the spot.
Many people are under the impression that a logline is like a pitch, and in a sense it is. But it’s much shorter, very dynamic, and more powerful, as it only focuses on what makes the project special. Therefore, this “pitch” can be used in a multitude of places. For example, your new logline now gives you the perfect start to any query letter you may be writing to agents, editors, or publishers in the process of getting your work seen. It tells them what kind of a story they are in for, who the protagonist is, what that person wants, and what is at stake if they do not achieve their goal. Most importantly, it encourages the powers-that-be to keep reading the rest of your query letter, because you’ve already sold them on the fact that you have a unique and fresh concept to share.
It’s becoming increasingly vital to grab an agent’s attention fast. Literary agents field hundreds of queries every day, so if you can make yours stand out with the use of a fabulous logline at the top, you’re ahead of the game. And you’ve made their job easier at the same time, letting them know exactly what is exciting and special about what they are going to be reading from you.
A logline can also be used verbally, as I mentioned above, to excite any person who asks that ever-so-daunting question, “What’s your story/project about?” I include “project” because, realistically, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a feature film screenplay, a book, an article, a play, a TV pilot, or just an idea: a logline can be created in exactly the same way and is always your greatest marketing tool.
Recently, agents have been calling me on the phone and reading me loglines from pitch letters they’ve received. I absolutely love when they do that. First of all, it shows me that loglines work, and it shows respect for my time, because they are not babbling on about the plot. Instead, they are telling me cleanly and concisely what the project is about and why I might be interested. Secondly, their pitch emphasizes how loglines provide them with a terrific tool for selling me on producing their material for adaptation.
Speaking of pitching material, there’s a great difference for me now in a room with studio or network executives, as opposed to when I first started. In the beginning, I spent quite a bit of time setting up the underlying material, the character, and the story, trying to get them to see what I could see in it: the potential for a great feature film, television movie, or series. Sometimes I was successful and sometimes I was not. It was frustrating, to say the least, because I put a great deal of time and effort into each and every pitch. Then I remembered a good friend of mine telling me about her first day in a college class, Communication 101. There were two people drawn on the blackboard, one on the left and one on the right. Above each was a speech bubble. In the first, on the left, the bubble included a heart with an arrow through it. The speech bubble for the figure on the right was blank. At its core, communication (as it was explained to her) is trying to get the image in the first bubble to appear in the second bubble. So I knew that if I could somehow successfully get the vision I had for the project across to those in the room—so they had the same vision—I could make the sale. But how to do that? Loglines have become the perfect way to make that happen.
When I begin with a logline as the very start of my pitch, I’ve already gotten the exec onto my page, seeing my vision in its most unique and sellable form. Who could want for a better marketing tool than that? Today, it’s easier for me to approach a pitch, because I know I’m not going to see a bunch of blank faces or—God forbid—confusion in reaction to what I’m saying. Right away, I’m letting everyone know what journey they’ll be on, and I’ve gotten them excited because the tale sounds fresh and new. I can tell you, from when I was on the listening side of that desk, after numerous pitches day in, day out, executives are always excited to hear something new.
Before I ever set up a pitch, I get the logline ready to go, then call the exec and ask if they are searching for projects in the area in which they had expressed interest when we spoke previously. I ask this because mandates—what the studios and networks are looking for—change all the time. The Hollywood joke is that they change minute-by-minute, but in all truth, they do change quite frequently.
One day I was told that the Disney Channel was looking for ghost-based properties, but a week later, they told me that they no longer wanted ghost projects, that they had just had a new creative meeting and wanted witches instead. When the entertainment industry went through a period of consolidation, such as when ABC and Disney merged, it became harder to find places that were all looking for the same material, since the overall number of buyers decreased. The buyers that remained wanted to stand out in the marketplace by making sure their mandates didn’t match anyone else’s. Suddenly, there was only one place to take a project, instead of three or four. So now I use the logline as a barometer before I ever develop a full pitch (either alone or with a screenwriter). This saves both time and effort. I always try to tell the executive the logline on the phone to make sure that the story still fits their mandate. Otherwise there is no point wasting my time or a screenwriter’s time in crafting anything longer. A logline is an easy way to see if someone is interested in your particular story, and is a time-saver to boot. If the logline is received favorably, I work up a pitch, set a date, and it’s off to the races. I also start the in-room pitch with the logline. It serves to remind the listeners of my project, which is important because they’ve probably had a multitude of other properties pitched to them since my initial call, and I can’t just assume that they remember mine.
I’ve also used loglines with many of the agents who pitch me during Book Expo America, which I attend each year in New York. Upstairs, away from the crowded, Costco-sized booksellers’ space on the first floor of the Javits Convention Center, is the rights area, filled with tables helmed by most of the literary agencies on the East Coast. I usually spend at least a day or two table-hopping through appointments to find out about new books or proposals coming down the pike. Much of that time is taken up by listening to pitches from the agents about their content. I then get to ask for some clarification. Little do they know that the questions I pose are leading them toward a more concise pitch, because they are the exact ones I use to create a logline. I’ll ask the agents, for example, “Who is driving the story forward?” “What is the lead character trying to achieve?” “What are they worried about happening if they don’t get it?” “Would the story work just as well with an adult lead instead of a teen lead?” Answering these types of queries will help them for their next pitch with whoever has the appointment after mine. The questions are also incredibly beneficial to me, because they help me better understand the story and determine if I think it has the hook needed to set it up as an adaptation project. And if so, I now also have much of the information I need to create a nice logline for the work.
I’ve also used loglines with screenwriters I’m working with to help them more fully focus their pitches for the studios or networks. Occasionally, when they pitch me what they’ll be saying in the room, there may be some great elements, but much of the content seems to be either unclear or missing something. The only way to fix it, as far as I’m concerned, is to talk about the logline with them. For many screenwriters, learning how to generate a logline as a way to focus their pitch is something new, but usually they end up adopting it for their other projects as
well.
I have a children’s project with a talented screenwriter who has only done television projects to date, but our upcoming pitch is for a big theatrical feature film with an animation component. We’ll be pitching it to Sony Pictures Animation, among others. When I asked the writer what the logline would be, she gave me this:
Two orphan sisters discover that fairy tales are real when they have to rescue their long-lost aunt from a giant and save a town their family is sworn to protect.
While that’s not a bad first logline, it was clear to me that the world of the story is just too small; it feels very TV. If this story is going to end up on the big screen, the stakes have to be raised, big-time. It could no longer be a story about two little girls and their aunt in a fairy-tale town. The whole world needed to be at risk, because feature films are usually looked at in terms of big screen equals big world creation and big stakes. After the screenwriter and I discussed the story at length and tossed around some ideas about what elements could be changed, here’s the rough draft we created as a jumping-off point:
Two orphan sisters have to stop giants determined to escape the confines of their fairy-tale land and unleash destruction on the world.
There’s a pretty big difference from the original, and the screenwriter was able to go back and apply these new, higher stakes to her pitch. Suddenly, everything mattered more, and the story she told was more focused because she knew what the ultimate goal was: stop the giants from destroying the world. That’s a big idea and therefore definitely feels right for a feature film rather than television. What I love about this logline-based approach is that it’s quite possible the exec in the room would have said something vague like “I liked the pitch but I think the story needs to feel bigger,” and we would have left without a sale, wondering what exactly he meant. Instead, we’ve gotten right to the heart of it by employing logline creation techniques, and can now go into the pitch knowing we’ve already taken care of the “up the stakes” issue ahead of time. Hopefully, it will result in setting up the property at the studio.
If you think about it, in much of life, loglines are already in use. The television series Shark Tank has up-and-coming inventors start their product pitches to the sharks with a solid logline. Most news anchors preview their coming stories with a logline before the commercial break so that the viewer will be intrigued and want to tune back in afterward. Even successful Twitter campaigns, at only 140 characters, are essentially great examples of top-notch loglines. At home, a good bedtime story starts with what is essentially a logline, as does any terrific story told at a dinner party. At work, a pitch to your boss usually starts with a good logline, as does a salacious recap of a favorite show around the water cooler in the break room. If you look around, you’ll find that loglines are used absolutely everywhere, so the value of gaining the skill set to create a perfect logline is truly ineffable.
Recently, in an online article for CNN, I was touted as “the Book Whisperer” of Hollywood. I think a more accurate assessment would have been if they had described me as “the Logline Whisperer,” because none of the multitudes of book projects I’ve been lucky enough to set up would have happened without the first step being the creation of a tight and powerful logline.
Chapter 17
Fiction vs. Nonfiction/Memoir
NOW THAT WE’VE BROKEN DOWN THE LOGLINE INTO ITS most basic elements, I think it’s important to discuss fiction versus nonfiction, since it’s something I get asked about quite a bit by writers when they approach me after one of my seminars. They want to know if these principles can be applied only to imaginary material or if they work just as well with true stories. To date I’ve set up five memoir projects and have three more currently out in the marketplace, so the answer is that loglines absolutely work just as well in the nonfiction arena.
I think that the toughest thing about nonfiction is that true story and memoir writers are too close to their material. Many times, this results in a “can’t see the forest for the trees” scenario. It’s the same thing that happens when a film is written and directed by the same person. Rarely does this result in a great feature film. Don’t get me wrong, there are a handful of folks (like Kenneth Branagh, for example) who do this quite well, but for the most part, this lack of perspective ends up being a disaster. The tough part is that when you are that close to your material, it’s hard to see what’s needed in order to sell it. I try to always have the writer look at the work dispassionately, as if someone else wrote it, as if they are telling someone else’s story, to sort of give them “new eyes” that aren’t clouded by their own experiences. If they can do that, then they can focus on the anchors of the logline in a way that will garner them the results they desire.
At one of my many speaking engagements, a gentleman asked me about a logline for his fitness work. I asked him what made his work different from the thousands of other fitness books out there, and he told me that he was revolutionizing fitness training for senior citizens. I asked him specifically how he was accomplishing that and he talked about the idea of not treating them as “breakables” but as older humans who therefore had had a lifetime of fitness experience under their belts already. I loved how unique that sounded, and after playing around with those elements for a while, I told him that his logline should be something like this:
From the creator of the new “Unbreakable” training method, a revolutionary guide to senior fitness.
See how cool that sounds? As you can see, for a nonfiction work, the same principles apply with regard to highlighting what makes it most unique. Even someone with 50 fitness books on their shelf may now pick this one up for themselves or for a beloved grandparent.
Memoirs can present a particular challenge, since they sometimes lack the inherent drama found in most fictional works, and yet the fact that they are true stories is exactly what makes them highly sellable. The ability to promote a project based on the idea that this event or that person is real is honestly invaluable. So how do you tackle this issue, when you have true personal stories but without the “umph” found in most fictional dramatic material? Following are some examples of projects I’ve developed based on actual people and events. I’ve highlighted my different approaches to generating loglines for each of them.
The first property tells the true story of an American contractor who, through a series of circumstances, spent almost a year as a prisoner in Iraq. It’s the story of his kidnapping, captivity, and rescue, and is a powerful tale, to be sure, but what makes it different from any other POW story in the marketplace already? How could I make it sound like a standout? There are literally thousands of POW tales. So, as I would with any fiction-based material, I ultimately had to focus on the specifics of what made it unique. I determined that it was the perspective-changing scope of the circumstances that made this a standout property. Here’s the rough logline:
In this true story, a contractor spends 311 days imprisoned in a four-foot high concrete cell underground before becoming one of the only US hostages ever rescued from Iraq.
It’s the new and different information given, that the contractor was in a tiny box underground for 311 days and is one of the only people who ever survived such incarceration, which makes this story truly exceptional and therefore highly marketable. The fact that it’s a true story is definitely a selling tool, but by emphasizing these dramatic circumstances I pushed the elements that make the story unique. There may be many other stories about POWs in Iraq, but none of them will have the exact same circumstances as this gentleman. That is why I keep pushing the idea of being specific when you write a logline, because it is those very details that make the story different and special.
The second property, which I initially set up with Scott Stuber at NBC and is now with Mike Medavoy, tells of a lawyer/law professor with a sociopathic mind and the ability to mimic those around her in order to put on a façade of emotions she never actually feels. (I mentioned this project earlier.) As groundbreaking a
s this work is, and despite the fact that the woman herself is an unbelievably charismatic and dynamic person, the toughest thing about this piece was figuring out a way to overcome the fact that most folks who hear “sociopath” think of crazed killers. So the focus became not so much on the fact that she was a lawyer/law professor/sociopath, but how to tap into the black humor of the piece so that she could be a likable lawyer sociopath. After all, if you can’t root for the protagonist, you don’t have a show, and you certainly can’t make a sale. Here’s the rough logline:
A sociopath attorney’s success is due to her emotionless approach to life, but when it kills her promotion, she has to do the unthinkable—learn how to be a nice person.
Likability is one of the most important elements for a property to sell, and the word “sociopath”—its best selling tool—also became this story’s biggest liability. So it was important to focus the logline on the dark comedy inherent in the text so that particular marketing hurdle could be quickly and easily overcome. Ironically, the purpose of the book was to redefine the idea of what a sociopath is, and yet it was that exact misconception which initially made it so hard to sell for adaptation.
Another property I really struggled with was the life story of a woman who ran three strip clubs in New York City. While it is unusual for a female to be in the successful position of general manager in that highly male-dominated industry (and Bishop-Lyons Entertainment was simultaneously working on a reality show to prove it), I just didn’t feel that was enough to sell the property. But I was stumped. It seemed like that element was truly all there was to the story. So what was missing?
Sell Your Story in Single Sentence Page 9
