Word Cloud Logline Challenge!
Last December we ran the Black List 2012 Word Cloud Logline Challenge which was hugely popular, witness these posts here and here. Come this December, we’ll probably do the same thing. But I thought why not give folks another chance to flex their logline muscles. So below is a Word Cloud using the loglines for all of the spec scripts that have sold thus far in 2013.
The challenge: Come up with an entertaining logline using some of the key words in this Word Cloud.
Prize: Five lucky winners will win free enrollment in not just one, but two of my Core classes:
November 4: Core VII: Theme
November 18: Core VIII: Time
Here is the Word Cloud [click on it for a larger view]:
Who decides the winner: None other than Max Millimeter: Hollywood Movie Producer Extraordinaire. If you don’t know who Max is and what his tastes in movies are, you can go here to read the comments he made in selecting the winners of last year’s Black List 2012 Word Cloud Logline Challenge.
My advice to you: Make your loglines entertaining. Max has a really short attention span. In fact, he has informed me he is sponsoring a special category for this competition: The Six Word Logline Award! Here is an excerpt of something Max taped at his Laurel Canyon home that I posted here:
Okay, here’s the deal with loglines… if this thing really is recording. There is nothing more important than getting my fucking attention. And by ‘my,’ I mean everybody who’s anybody in Hollywood. We’re all of us so damn busy. Think L.A. is laid back? Wrong! It’s breakfasts, calls, meetings, lunch, meetings, more calls, drinks, screenings, even more goddammed calls. Like when you look at me, and you think you see me, you don’t see shit. ‘Coz while on the outside, it may look like I’m looking at you, inside my mind’s a blur, okay? I mean I can sit there with my eyes wide open locked on you, nodding my head, smiling every so often like I’m hanging on your every word, and the whole time, my mind is off in West Covina somewhere, thinking about that shitty draft a writer just turned in or how my Amgen stock is doing or whether a goddammed recorder can actually record without a goddammed tape.
So get my attention. That’s the name of the game. And when it comes to loglines, that should be the name of your game.
It’s like baseball. You’re the pitcher, right? Get it, you’re pitching me, right? And I’m the batter. So I go through all that crap a batter does, you know, rubbing my hands together, messing with the bat, tugging at my crotch, the whole nine yards. Finally I step into the box. I’m looking at you, okay. You see me looking at you, but for all you know, I may be in Amgen city.
Whaddya do? I’ll tell ya’ what you do. You give me the high heat, right at my goddammed chin. Up and in, one hundred miles an hour, go head hunting with a bullet. Boom! I hit the dirt, okay. Now you got my fucking attention! Amgen? I don’t give a rat’s ass about my stocks or that shitty script or even if this damn recorder is working or not. All I care about at that precise moment is you just knocked me on my fat ass with a goddammed dot.
That’s what a killer logline does. You gotta bring the high heat. You gotta make every damn word count. You gotta have a story concept that’s gonna go like a pill right at my chrome dome, you hear me?
That’s why I have the six-word rule. You got six words… count ‘em… one, two, three, four, five, six… six words in your logline to get my attention. If six words in your logline don’t come right at me, high and hard, and knock me on my keister, then you ain’t getting my attention. And your story? That’s a big fat Pasadena.
Now the loglines the Desk Jockey gave me yesterday, there were a few I made it all the way to the end. They were kinda maybe interesting, we’ll see. But a lot of ‘em… well… no use beating around the bush. They stunk. I mean this with all due respect ‘coz I know how goddammed hard it is to come up with a good story.
But the thing is, we’re talking movies. Over a hundred years, Hollywood’s been making movies, stories that make you go, wow. That get in your heart, get in your soul. How you can be just walking down the street one day, and bam! Suddenly outta nowhere, you’re seeing that scene from a movie you saw twenty years ago. You see the faces, you hear the dialogue, you remember it like yesterday. I mean, you can’t even remember what you had for breakfast this morning, and here you are reliving this scene from something you saw in a two-bit theater when you were a snot-nosed kid. Movies can do that, it’s like magic. There’s nothing… nothing like movies. A good movie, when you see it, you forget about anything else, it grabs your attention and won’t let you go.
You see where I’m going with this? The story idea is the key to the whole thing. It’s the guts of the movie, it’s a fastball that comes in high and hard, and knocks a person on their ass. And you know where this is most important? Marketing. Computers and online and social damn media, that idea just whips out of all that noise and goes right at your head. Bang! You’re laid out. Wow, I gotta go see that movie!
That’s your story idea, that’s your logline, it’s the high hard one, it’s the dot coming right at my head, up and in.
You got six words. Six. To knock me off my feet. You do that? You got my fucking attention.
And maybe I’ll even forget worrying about if this goddammed recorder is working or not.
Here’s a six word logline for K-9: Renegade cop. New partner. Police dog.
So that’s one angle: Six words. But remember, last year there was The Max Millimeter Kitchen Sink Award:
When teenager Sam Ross discovers she might not be the President’s daughter after all, she sets out on an unlikely journey to find out who her real father is, chased by her successful family, the secret service, corrupt government officials, struggling cops, high ex-cons, her dead boss, three escaped farm animals, an old drug lord, a team of criminals, a sheriff’s wife and Adolf Hitler, Jr., all the while really desperate to lose her virginity to her black astronaut boyfriend and achieving her dangerous dream of teaching American English to dying students at a ruthless Texas party school. — Teddy Pasternak
So short, long, wild, serious, whatever loglines you can come up with using the words in the Word Cloud above. You have until Friday, September 27th at midnight Pacific Daylight Time to enter. You can expect announcement of the winners on Sunday, September 29.
Good luck!
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