What is the function of a logline?

The 1-week online Screenwriting Master Class course I am currently teaching is called Story Summaries: From Loglines to Beat Sheets… and it has been an incredible experience. Writers from all around the world and with an amazingly diverse background, several of them working in the entertainment business, creating an almost instant community as we work our way through my lectures. The result: A vibrant online discussion, literally hundreds of forum posts about a variety of story summaries writers ought to be familiar with: Logline, Synopsis, Breakdown, Treatment, Scriptment, Beat Sheet.

As part of the class, we have a Logline Workshop where participants can post a logline from one of their stories, and get feedback from other writers, edit the logline, receive more comments, and so on. The dozens and dozens of posts in that forum spawned a question: What is the function of a logline?

Here is the response I posted to that question:

In relation to a rep or buyer, I would argue it’s this: To get them interested in your story. Not to tell them your story. And that’s where many loglines get lost, cramming in too much information.

Think of your logline as a hook. Give them something essential that creates interest on their part.

When Seth Lochhead sent out 500 email queries to reps and summarized Hanna this way — Young girl trained to be an assassin — that’s all he needed to get the right set of eyeballs interested. The rest is history.

I did stand-up comedy for two years just before I sold K-9 as a spec script. I’m sure there are a ton of lessons I could have learned had I continued gigging, but one lesson did learn was this: Always leave the audience wanting more.

I’ve always taken that approach to loglines. I’m not trying to tell the story with a logline. There are treatments, scriptments and the script itself to cover that. Rather a logline should simply hook the reader enough to leave them wanting more.

This is a recurring problem with the loglines I read: Too much content. Part of the issue is that Hollywood buyers have the attention span of gnats. That’s less a knock on them than a statement on how damn busy everyone is in the movie business. But part of the problem is the writer working with an unfocused, unwieldy story. This speaks to one of the primary values in working with loglines before a writer commits to FADE IN. Trying to wrangle a problematic story into a logline can surface the troublesome areas.

In either case, it pays to be concise. And you can be helped in that regard by reminding yourself what the function of a logline is: Not to tell the story, but to sell the story!

Thoughts?

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