John August

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Writing loglines for a comedy

Pitches, QandA

questionmarkSo now I have 120 pages of the funniest damn stuff you’ve never seen and I have to describe it in three or four sentences. How do you convey the witty dialogue, the clever visual gags, the essence of the humor in a logline?

Whenever I write one it ends up sounding like it’s describing an action movie or drama. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

— Jeff in Maplewood

You aren’t going to be able to summarize the visual gags, puns and one-liners in a logline, so don’t try. Rather, you want to distill what’s funny about the idea of your movie. The best practice is to take existing movies and figure out how you’d boil them down if you had to write a logline.

None of these would classify as John’s Best Effort, but they get the point across:

* [Groundhog Day](http://imdb.com/title/tt0107048/combined) — Bill Murray gets stuck repeating the same day, again and again. Every day, he tries to do something different, but the next morning everything resets to the way it was.

* [Shrek](http://imdb.com/title/tt0126029/combined) — A grumpy ogre and his hyperactive donkey have to save a princess. The world is made up of all the different fairy tale characters, like the Three Little Pigs and the Gingerbread Man.

* [Clueless](http://imdb.com/title/tt0112697/maindetails) — An airheaded but ultimately well-meaning Beverly Hills teenager tries to “makeover her soul” in a riff on Jane Austen’s Emma.

Accept the fact that some movies aren’t so easily summarized. For instance, we never did come up with a logline for Go which sounded actually funny.

Note: Looking up the IMDb summaries for these examples proves that anonymous posters can do better than the pros. For Shrek:

A reclusive ogre and a chatterbox donkey go on a quest to rescue a princess for a tyrannical midget lord.

Damn. It’s the “tyrannical midget lord” that makes it funny.

Read lots of bad scripts

Film Industry, Psych 101

Screenwriter/blogger Bryan ‘Locke’ Naegele speaks the truth: it’s just as important to read bad writing as good.

The first reason to read bad scripts is to constantly expose yourself to what doesn’t work. Don’t learn from your own mistakes, learn from others. That’s my motto. That way yours are much more manageable because they’re fewer. You become hyper-aware of flat characters, shotty dialogue, predictability, clichés, etc.

I assume “shotty” is a cross between “shoddy” and “shitty.” I like it.

I worked as an intern-slash-reader at a little Paramount production company during my first semester of graduate school, and the contrast between the crappy scripts I read there and the great scripts I read for class was really illuminating. And encouraging on some level. I knew I could never write as well as Lawrence Kasdan, but I could easily write better than the schmucks I had to write coverage on.

So, take Bryan at his word.

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Theory #1

QandA, Recycled, Story and Plot

Why does it seem that there are maybe 6 templates for Hollywood movies? As
a writer you pick one of those, fill in the check boxes, and poof the next
movie of the week. Is it because of the money to be made, or a lack of talented
writers getting their scripts to the right people, or is it due to producers
and directors not getting the ‘picture’, or is it because those mentioned above
don’t really give a rats butt about the people going out to see a movie?

–Niall

While I can’t offer an apologia for everything that is wrong with the state
of film, I can suggest a few theories for this nagging sense of sameness you
feel about movies. As I started writing this column, it got so long that I
needed to break it into two pieces.

Before I start, I should stress that this isn’t a Hollywood-specific problem;
if you look at the combined film output of France or Germany or India you’re
going to find the same percentage of mindless retreads. Nor is this a recent
problem. To me, the only thing more torturous than the slow pace of most movies
in the 1940’s and 50’s is their utter predictability.

Theory 1: There really are only a few basic plots.

While I don’t support the kind of reductionism you see in a lot of film books,
which boil down the entire canon of Western literature into three or seven
or thirteen plots (Revenge, Fatal Love, etc.), the truth is that for any scenario
you create, there’s only a few ways it’s going to resolve. While there might
be many detours and diversions along the way, the course of your story is going
to end up at one of several possible outcomes.

For instance, let’s say you’re writing a movie about a young woman who is
looking for her father. All the details of the story – why she’s looking for
him, how long he’s been gone, the nature of their relationship, the setting,
the obstacles, the other characters involved – these details make the story
unique, and hopefully interesting. But from the minute the movie begins, we
know there’s only two possible outcomes: either she finds him, or she doesn’t.
"Aha!" you say. The only reason we know the two possible outcomes
is because we’ve been told she’s looking for her father. If we didn’t say that
at the start of the movie, it wouldn’t be so predictable. And you’re absolutely
right. But the movie would also be incredibly, annoyingly frustrating. The
next time you’re in a movie theater squirming around and checking your watch,
ask yourself, "Do I know what the main character is trying to do?" More
likely than not, you’ll answer no. That’s why the movie seems to be wandering
around aimlessly, because it hasn’t given you any sense of where you’re going,
or how to know when you get there.

Are there exceptions? Sort of. Last year’s BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and AMERICAN
BEAUTY both seemed to get by without the usual goal-driven plotting. But AMERICAN
BEAUTY actually went through a lot of changes in the editing room to give it
more set-up than it originally had: the opening was scrapped completely and
a voice-over was added from Kevin Spacey talking about his death, letting the
audience know from the start the movie was going to be about Lester’s transformation
and murder.

As far as BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, the movie was incredibly inventive, with good
characters and interesting themes. But I know I wasn’t the only one getting
restless by hour two, simply because I had no idea where it was going. I didn’t
need to know how the story would end, just that it would end. It became so arbitrary, it felt like you could cut it off at any point.
Of course, all this is only talking about the rough structure of movies, not
the details that make them unique and vibrant or hackneyed and cliché.
In the next column, I’ll talk about Theory 2: Audiences want hamburger.

(Originally posted in 2003.)