How To Create A Logline That Sells
Sell Your Story In 40 Words
Beyond the cast and director, the biggest selling point to an audience for a movie is the logline. A logline is a short summary of a television program, film, or book that shows the story’s central conflict, event and character — ideally with an emotional hook for the audience.
For my recently completed thriller screenplay, one of the hardest parts was taking a 91-page story and consolidating the entire thing into a single-sentence statement to hook the interest of an agency, production company and audience. How do you capture essence of you story into a smaller version?
3 Enticing Examples
As someone who never attended film school, I have looked to films and screenplays as my self-made curriculum. Here are some famous loglines from different genres, each one with a character, event and conflict:
The Godfather: The aging patriarch [character] of an organized crime dynasty transfers control [event] of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son [conflict].
Gone Girl: With his wife’s disappearance [event] having become the focus of an intense media circus, a man [character] sees the spotlight turned on him when it’s suspected that he may not be innocent [conflict].
