THE MORAL CASE FOR "SELLING OUT" 2
A Meditation on the Nature of Water
Let me start with Thank You.
Sincerely.
For reading The Moral Case for “Selling Out”, for sharing it, and most of all for receiving it in the spirit in which I wrote it: as a love letter to movies and a plea that they survive this moment intact.
After it went live, I spent a few hours in the comments reading people’s movie ideas and offering notes and (well, let’s call it) tough love. To those who received it, again: thank you for taking it in the spirit in which it was given.
I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, but it also made one thing clear: a lot of people are confusing “logline” with “pitch.” That confusion is definitely costing you reads.
PLOT ≠ PITCH
Something you all need to know:
Nobody cares about your logline.
Even when they ask for your logline, they don’t want your logline.
What they want is your pitch. And a pitch is called a pitch because it’s a sales pitch.
If your logline functions like a pitch, congratulations: you’ve accidentally done it right. If it reads like a synopsis, it’s dead weight. And if you’re honest, you probably already know it is.
YES, THIS IS SALES
Fundamentally, your job when you’re talking about your script is to lead the horse to water and convince it to drink. You don’t have to explain the chemical composition of water and why it’s good for mammals. Unless that’s the fastest way to get the horse to drink. Usually it isn’t.
Put another way, your job is to throw off enough light and music from your on-the-page gathering that your friendly neighborhood cultural vampires show up talking about “Hey there. We heard tale of a party.”
I assume most people try to pitch their logline when they’re looking for reads because they’ve been told to. And beyond that I imagine there’s some safety in pitching plot. It feels like proof of substance, proof you’ve done the work.
Prove it on the page once you convince them to read it.
A SMALL, SHARP VOID
A pitch is a dare. A provocation. A hook. A collision of forces. A question that makes an already busy person lean forward and say “hold on, tell me more. I want to read that.”
In its optimal form, a pitch is the fewest words that create a small, sharp void in someone’s mind that they feel a desperate need to fill. Copywriters call it the curiosity gap. It’s not the story. It’s the reason someone reads the story. It’s whatever makes them ask: “Hold up. How does that work?” “What happens when those two forces collide?” “Who wins?” “Who loses?” “How does anyone survive that?!”
Do that, they’ll beg you to read your script instead of you begging them to read it.
TOUCHING THE VOID (A NON-EXHAUSTIVE LIST)
These are the ones that occurred to me as I was giving feedback. There are no doubt many more. Feel free to add your own in the comments. (Note: Some of the below examples are movies you know. Some are hypothetical. The point is the pattern.)
The What If (aka The Act One) - A single disruption that instantly forces the question “okay, well then what happens?”
What if all of the students of a small town third grade class went missing at the same time one night?
What if you woke up and discovered today is the same day forever and you’re the only one who knows?
What if your entire life was a TV show and you’re the only person not in on it?
What if two rival NHL players fell in love?
Central Conflict + (Venue and/or Stakes) - Two clear forces collide in a specific place and with specific consequences you can feel.
Blues people vs Irish vampires over one night in Mississippi
A young drummer vs a genius sadist at an elite conservatory
A cop vs a bomber on a bus that can’t drop below 50 mph without exploding
Suburbanites who are mad as hell about the economy and aren’t going to take it anymore vs cartel assassins. The Prize? Millions of dollars in cash buried in a cul-de-sac. (This one was inspired by a logline mentioned in the comments.)
Everything Old is New Again - A recognizable commercial engine, but with a protagonist swap that changes the moral temperature of the movie. This works especially well if something about the new protagonist makes it dramatically harder for them to accomplish their goal than the original protagonist. Same engine. Different protagonists. Different movie.
TAKEN with a retired hippie who definitely smoked too much pot in his heyday
CINDERELLA with a prostitute
“Putting my mom in THE MATRIX” - Daniel Kwan
KING LEAR with the founder of a major media company and his children
DIE HARD with the Bishop of Peru (Yes, I’m asking someone to write a Pope Leo XIV action movie.)
HOME ALONE with centenarian grandmother.
“A meets B” (but only under very specific conditions.) Two movies with seemingly opposing values or tones slammed together in a way that creates tension that the audience wants to resolve (the aforementioned “small, sharp void”), usually by asking questions: “What do you mean it’s this meets this? How is that even possible?”
Some folks are pitching entirely generic loglines followed by slightly more interesting A meets B propositions and expecting the latter to do all of the work. Others are using two movies that are basically cousins and expecting someone to care. “Bourne Identity meets Johnny English” doesn’t do much. Johnny English is just Bourne Identity plus British minus Memory Loss as a parody. You haven’t told me much about your movie idea by combining those two things.
My personal recommendation is to only use A meets B if you’re going to lead with it, and it’s strong enough that people’s first reaction is some form of “Okay well now you definitely have to tell me more.”
One I came up with while workshopping one of your ideas that I still can’t stop thinking about:
BIG NIGHT meets PANIC ROOM.
That’s a collision: Hospitality and violence. Taste and terror. Ritual and siege. You can imagine the set pieces. You can feel the ticking clock.
CONTROLLED HUMAN EXPOSURE STUDIES
The best part about testing your pitches is that you can do that effectively without a single industry person in sight. One of the very real challenges facing most aspiring professional screenwriters is that the screenplay is an unfamiliar form to most people. You can’t just hand your script out and expect to get feedback that’s at all helpful.
Your friends and family can, however, be extremely helpful in evaluating your movie ideas. They are, after all, part of the audience that you hope will buy tickets someday, and most people have seen enough movies in their lives to have a pretty good sense of what they’d watch and wouldn’t.
Pitch them your idea and ask for honest feedback. Do they ask follow-up questions without prompting? Do they smile/laugh/lean forward? Do they say some version of “oh shit! You might be cooking!”
Better, pitch your idea to your worst enemy. If their response is some version of “I still hate you, but damn, that’s a movie I want to see,” then you’re probably onto something. I know it sounds ridiculous, but in many ways, that’s the standard. Good enough is not good enough.
GOING FORWARD
I will try to keep pulling a few premises from the public comments each day because the public thread can be useful to everyone. I encourage everyone to hop in there and give feedback wherever you think yours might be valuable if you do it in a respectful and productive manner.
I’m also going to spin up a paid-subscriber chat where I’ll probably do this more consistently without it eating my life. See you there.
Franklin, I enjoyed (and agree with) your essay as well as the previous one. Having spent quite a number of years at this (and too much $) I think the biggest problem that writers face is the lack of truthful human behavior in their work. Characters are not real people, of course, but they have to be driven by real human behavior. When they aren't, the story quickly becomes melodrama and a terrible chore to read. This manifests in loglines/pitches that read like a Mad Libs of "concept-like" ideas but not really a concept. There's no heart, no humanity, and no clarity. It doesn't track. No relatability, as development execs like to say. We don't feel anything. if you don't feel anything, you don't want to even read it, let alone try to marshal millions of dollars to try to make it. And of course nobody would want to watch it. It's very hard to teach "truthful human behavior" because, of course, it's so subjective, and so personal. There's no real way to write a guide of what behavior is truthful or fake. It's a product of observation, empathy and life experience—humanity. But one that always comes to mind is the dumb scene in any high school script where the kid is chewed out by the preposterously mean principal. When in real life, most principals are more likely to be kind—they love education, and have decades of experience dealing with problem students. That's a scene that suddenly becomes real, because it comes from reality and goes to a truthful place. I get the sense that a lot of writers are trying to escape reality and their feelings, and not delve into them—probably a separate (though related) topic.
A good follow up, Franklin. I also love that you rebranded the logline from the cul de sac pitch. I enjoyed that one too. Here's a rewrite on a logline I pitched on the previous essay, per your suggestion:
In the summer of 1995, an adolescent pizza delivery driver is safeguarded by a hardboiled FBI agent after mistakenly witnessing a murder, but the duo are drug into the seedy underbelly of his hometown when the girl of his dreams, who’s mysteriously vanished, might be linked to everything.
Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air meets Chinatown.