Thanks JB.

Page 6.

1. Same as on page 5.  Does she need to use the characters name?

2. You need not worry Miss Rogan.  Does this take place in the 50's and is Megan now a black cook for a wealthy white family?  Sorry, that's just the character that I would imagine would speak that way. 

3. Over descriptive.  We don't need to know every single button she presses and twists, etc.  Just say the makes some adjustments.  The actor isn't going to know what button is what they are just going to press some things and act their part.

4. "and, I trust you."  Bam.  Great 3 word sentence ender there.  If you wanted to make her next line even more suspenseful.  "What I don't trust is this dot."

I'm writing to you from the great beyond as I'm pretty sure now I died of heartache after reviewing your critique of my first 5 pages:(

I'm in heaven with Patrick Swayze AND his character from 'Ghost', Sam Wheat. They're 2 seperate people up here. He taught me how to type as a newly christened Casper (Vincent Schiavelli's still too angry to teach me).

I asked William Shakespeare if he could help me with a rewrite so I could get back to you T&J, but I can't understand a god damn word he's saying. I think he said yes he'd help. It's a mystery, and I want it solved. I've got Columbo assigned to that one. I hope he can remember what I asked him to do.

By the way, Sam Wheat likes your first 10 from 'The Odds of Winning'. Although Patrick doesn't. I, love your dialogue. I hope I can get my script to pop like that on a rewrite. If I could only get Shakespeare to make more sense. Maybe if I punch him in the face, it will knock his prose into the 21st century. But the question is: will he start to sound like Eminem or Mamet?       

You can now.  I added you to the 10PTTer group, which expands your permissions.

Let me know when you sober up.  Then it's my turn to get hammered and try to figure out what you meant above. 

Ah, okay.  Rereading my intro to that 10PTT:


Seems I declined to do another round of edits because I'd done that earlier pass for you, T&J, for the Nicholl.

I totally know what you're saying about setting up the rules early PP. I did consider letting everything out of the bag early - It's a time machine that takes one to an alternate reality powered by a processor made fusing her dead premie babies placental stem cells with a computer processing chip. But I really DON'T want to give away everything at first if I can help it.

Thanks for the edit privilege.

It makes sense when T&J says the stakes aren't high enough early. Maybe I could up the stakes and give that "glimpse" without giving away everything about the world at first. I really want my character to discover with the audience exactly what her machine does as the script progresses.

I just realised the button thing doesn't pay off right because they are supposed to be given to her from her mom. But I don't say the mom's dead until after the button's lead her into the field. So the audience really has no reason to think the buttons are special because the mom's dead and the buttons came from her. You don't learn the mom's actually dead until page 20-21.

:-)  No ambiguity left for me to exploit.

There's no sense of opposing forces in that logline.

You have your protag Megan.
You have your hint at the climax/resolution -- but do we need to go that far?

Don't include names in loglines unless it's important for context.  Here it isn't.

No need for 'brilliant' unless it pays off in the logline.  For example:


Brilliant earns its place in that one.  Back to your logline.


Stripped bare, a logline is a protagonist, an antagonist, a conflict.

The less you need to reveal about your story, the more powerful your logline is.  What I mean is, if your logline is powerful then you won't need to reveal much of the story to get folks excited.  A really strong premise will let you sketch up to the Act One turning point only and still your reader will be enthralled.  It's like spinning up a flywheel with a jolt of electricity: the jolt is sudden and strong and enough to give that flywheel a huge momentum of its own, momentum that transfers to the reader's imagination.  You don't need to tell them any more because they're already concocting for themselves a dozen exciting ways the story might go.

Consider:


Protag: P.I.
Antag: his hallucinations plus an actual hitman
Conflict: contract on his life; schizophrenia

The moment that logline's over your mind races with flashes of scenes and situations.  You can't help it.  The premise is ripe with possibilities.

Let's reexamine yours:

Protag: brilliant scientist
Antag: ??
Conflict: a difficult personal dilemma/decision

Of these two loglines, if tasked with reading just one of these scripts, which do you pick?

Definitely the one to build on.

"When ... , she struggles" doesn't flow for me.  'When' gives me an 'ongoing' feel for 'travels' compared to a singular cause-and-effect feel.  Consider: "When I walk to the shops I struggle for breath."  Do you see the labored breathing begin during the walk or once I get to the shops?  For me it's the former, but in your LL we want it to be the latter.  A switch to 'After...' would give us that cause and effect link.

But we can moot that by shuffling the elements around.  So...


Now we have a different cause-and-effect problem: "... a scientist fights this and must choose that" -- suggests the scientist fights and at the fight's climactic moment must make a tough decision.  One logically leads to the other.  But "side effects of time travel" doesn't have any obvious cause-and-effect link to "choose who lives out of two people."

We can fix that by making the side effects explicit and concrete instead of undefined.  The risk is crossing the line where you've burdened your LL with too much detail.  I'm going to try anyway...


Okay.  Now we have our cause-and-effect and now we're getting a strong hint what this movie is about.  Let's look at the elements in the new logline.  Cut me some slack here: this does not track your story, DZ.  I'm shaping it to fit my needs.

* a scientist
* travels to an alternate timeline
* which is decaying as a result of the time travel
* giving her a chance to reconcile with her estranged mother
* and in THIS timeline she meets her true love
* but there's NO time left: this timeline's about to expire
* and she wants to save them both, bring them back to her timeline
* but the time-travel device can only accommodate two travelers...

To me, it's a no brainer she takes her true love and ditches Mommy Dearest, but let's not get distracted trying to fix the holes in my example.

Alrighty.

But wait... Is it clear enough that "choose who lives" involves escaping the decaying timeline via the time-travel device?  I think it's sufficiently implied you can only escape a decaying timeline by jumping to another timeline, but let's not take chances.  Let's dot the i's to make sure our reader gets the message we're sending:


Too much?  No longer 2 + 2 but 4?  Have we given the answer instead of simply posing a strongly suggestive question?  Decide for yourself.  What I like about this version is how it explicitly says SHE returns.  It leads you to believe that's how it plays out.  Of course that's how you think it ends, because I just wrote it that way!  BUT... does it explicitly say that she returns, or does it say she has to make a choice about who returns with her.  What if she CAN"T DECIDE and instead sends them both back and SHE STAYS.  Yes, kooky and corny, but I'm demonstrating how your logline can pose tantalizing questions.

Because the job of a logline is to MAKE YOUR READER GO CRAZY THINKING ABOUT WHAT COMES NEXT.  Crazy = excited, annoyed, frustrated, joyful.  For a script reader or development exec the emotions would be:

Excited: Holy crap, wait til I tell my friends about this. This is a movie I want to see!

Annoyed: Why didn't I think of it first and beat this guy to a great idea!

Frustrated: I need the rest of the story pieces. Like NOW! Did the writer come up with a better story than the one I just extrapolated in my head?

Joyful: Wait til I tell my boss!  A rising tide floats all boats and I want my boat riding this one.

One more thing bothers me: the em-dashed phrase.  Such a phrase is generally okay at the end of your logline, where it can effect a tweak or twist to what's gone before.  But placed in the middle of a LL it can interrupt the flow.  Can we rearrange things to get rid of it or move it to the end?


I like that.  We've got a kicker at the end to nicely button the LL and leave the reader buzzing with possibilities.

THE NEW WORLD: a parallel timeline
PROTAG: a scientist
ANTAG: ??
CONFLICT/PROBLEM: This other reality is decaying fast and the time-travel device can only carry two people back

So we still don't have a decent antagonistic force (person or thing) to really ignite this logline.  Sure, you can fight "the effects of time travel" but almost always you PERSONIFY your antagonistic force.  Think of character Chigurh in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN -- he's a personification of life's darkest forces.

Obviously I've strayed significantly from your story, DZ.  But you can see how the machinery in my head cranks and turns as it searches for the best logline expression of a story.