I will take this beautiful logline and I will do my best to execute it.” If the screenwriting gods are kind… let’s say you’re in the shower rub a-dub-dubbing, and the heavens open up and suddenly the perfect logline comes down to you, please accept it! “Thank you, screenwriting gods. If you happen to have a great logline from the very start, there’s nothing wrong with using it.
#Logline structure movie#
As if the movie should be created to fit the marketing materials, instead of the other way around. So many screenwriters are taught that they must start with a logline and that only once they have their loglines perfected can they actually start to write the script. They’re often now marketed the opposite way. So, it’s important to understand that loglines started as a marketing tool, not as a writing tool. It was called that because the studios would send the line to be logged at TV Guide. So underneath the title, there would be a short description called a logline. You might have completely forgotten what it was. After all, this movie was in the theater a long time ago. People would pick up TV Guide, “let’s see what’s on at eight o’clock tonight on CBS.” They would look it up and voila! There’s the name of some movie that had been in the theater a long time ago.īut having just a title wasn’t enough. In order to figure out what was happening on television, there was basically one resource: a magazine called TV Guide. įirst, a quick bit of history, where do loglines come from?īack in the days before we had Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and DVRs and all this fancy stuff that we have now, we had this crazy thing called television.
#Logline structure how to#
If you want to learn how to write a logline, you first have to truly understand what a logline is, and that begins with understanding what a logline does. You’re probably not surprised that I disagree with this idea. If you browse the internet, there are 50,000 different formulas where people tell you this is how to write a logline, as if there was a simple rule that you simply had to follow that would make a one-size-fits-all logline that would work for any story. So is that the kind of logline you want to write? They don’t usually make you really feel anything. We see crappy ones all the time on Netflix and Amazon. It’s a short sentence that tells what a movie is about. Sure, we all technically know what a logline is. This week we’re going to be answering a really great question: how do you write a logline?īut before we start talking about how to write a logline, I think it’s pretty important to define what it actually is.
#Logline structure series#
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