Killer loglines, premises, and what-ifs

[Pitchpatch]

In this topic post the loglines, ideas, and what-ifs other creative minds beat you to -- ideas that fire your imagination and make you groan with writer envy.

[Pitchpatch]

ANOTHER EARTH (Sundance)

Simple idea leads to tricky questions... after you suspend your knowledge of cosmology and physics.





Reminds me a little of Soderbergh's SOLARIS, a movie that for me did a great job blending the existential/personal with the cosmic.  (My all time fav in that arena is Aronofsky's THE FOUNTAIN.)

[Sibo]

This reminds me very much of a Gerry Anderson flick from the late 60's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelg%C3%A4nger_%281969_film%29

[Pitchpatch]

The Wikipedia article is a good read.

Launched from the EUROSEC Space Centre in Portugal, Kane and Ross are connected to "Heart Lung Kidney" machines that maintain them in stasis for a six-week round trip onboard their Phoenix spacecraft.

Bwahaha, what? Put in stasis for a six-week trip?  I'll assume stasis was mandated for reasons other than a need to conserve toilet paper.

For broadcasts in the United Kingdom, Doppelgänger has appeared under the Journey to the Far Side of the Sun title and has been formatted accordingly.[1] Transmissions have often included an inverted picture due to a mistake made in transferring an original master print to videotape.[1] Prior to a screening in the 1980s, a telecine operator viewed the print and, being unfamiliar with the plot, concluded that the parallel Earth sequences had been reversed in error.[5] An additional "flop-over" edit restored the image to normal, which became the standard for all broadcasts but compromised the plot: if Doppelgänger is screened with this modification, the viewer is led to conclude that the parallel Ross has landed on the "normal" Earth after the Dove disaster.[5]

 

[Pitchpatch]

When times of financial crisis leaves a new couple with nothing left to lose, they set off on a crime spree, slipping into a romance as hot as the Arizona desert they blaze through.  Dom and Stella are in love, on the run and in their 60s.

-- WILDFLOWERS by Jim Stansberry and Annika Tuneld

Great logline, and a satisfying one.  A languid build up while it establishes a Bonnie-and-Clyde vibe, then at the end it smashes expectations with the reveal.  The figurative language -- often hard to justify in a logline -- matches and facilitates the structure.

All that in two sentences. A logline of 47 words isn't indulgent when the words combine like this.

[Pitchpatch]

WANTED: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You'll get paid when we return. Must bring own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I've only done this once before.

This magazine advertisement spawned the movie SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED.  The ad is real.  It appeared on page 92 of the Sept/Oct 1997 issue of Backwoods Home Magazine.

It also happens to be a killer logline, thanks to that freaky last sentence hitting like a blast of frigid air.  That, folks, is how you button a logline.