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." this is definitely a wild combo. not sure what that looks like and can't say it fits with the pizza delivery boy safeguarded by an FBI agent (neither of those scenarios exist in your comps) and the girl of his dreams angle feels like a hat on a hat, at least in this case.
What about just PITCHING yourself? Look at this script I wrote; it is a blockbuster, it is a franchise.... WHY? Because I wrote it knowing this is what people are thinking and wanting to see right now.
Telling a story starting at tween age and going up to capture those kids to be fans over years as actors grow up, so do they. But also put 30-60 old people in there to capture them. Make a story that blurs fiction and nonfiction. So, based on some type of science/reality. IDK, like DOG movies where they talk or the star.
I don't like that; I have not watched one since Turner and Hooch. BUT I understand just because I don't like them doesn't mean millions of people do. I can come up with and write a dog-talking movie right now in 5 mins, all in my head, but easily.
A 4- to 8-year-old kid can talk to animals; his sibling used to be able to talk to the pet dog but forgot. One of the parents dies, and the older kid has to step up and be a parent/adult (why he forgot). The dog tells the little kid how to make the family better, but he can't do it because he's too young.
He keeps trying to get the older kid to remember we can all talk to animals, and he finally starts to hear the dog again, finds the girl dog, and everything is happy, blah, blah, blah... but the dog is old and is going to die; it dies but has puppies with the neighbor dog or whatnot, and the adults fall in love or whatever...
We get the most Famous DOG and CAT "influencers" to play those parts....... $$$$$$$
A fun exercise and good reminder of why it’s so damn difficult. I have over 100 ideas in my phone that at some point I thought it was worthwhile to write down. Maybe, maybe…one-ish fits the category of commercial.
Here’s three of those ideas that, although feel like could be scripts, they don't feel like commercial movies that would play in a theater.
1.) The story of Paris Hilton and her unknown assistant – Kim Kardashian.
2.) A civil rights leader/event’s story told through the perspective of a riot dog.
3.) What happens to an international spaceflight when WW3 breaks out below?
4.) Adding one more. I’m spring boarding from the Sherlock Holmes + werewolf example on the other page. What if there was a werewolf story about baby werewolves? Babies that turn into werewolves.
I actually think #4 might be the most commercial of the group, ha!
For me they don’t widen the door, like: dino themepark/zoo; groomsmen retrace their blacked out night to find the missing groom; Rodney Dangerfield goes back to school; Cowboys & Aliens; dumb blonde in ivy league law school; gladiator battles emperor for the crowd; Ryan Gosling as Ken in Barbie.
Good or bad as stories, those seem more like no-brainers as premises. But finding something like these feels almost like an almost impossible task!
Not sure if you're still reading the comments, but I can't get this one out of my head. Which is usually my sign to just write the damn thing. Andor with a time-traveling revolutionary and the daughter of a sugar baron.
Okay, I have one that I really can’t figure out what to do with…
Blackpill - Dark Satire
When a feminist philosophy grad student ghosts a virginal incel after an awkward one night stand, he kidnaps her to find out why.
This roughly incapsulates the story but doesn’t at all allude to the deep moral crisis or the role of a pivitol secondary character, the incels toxic masculine best friend who pushes him to moral collapse. I’ve been trying to figure this one out for a while. It doesn’t explain their initial attraction, and to me doesn’t show the philosophical battle of feminism vs manosphere that the two main characters engage in.
I cannot emphasize enough how not interested I am in a movie about a man who kidnaps a woman because she ghosted him and treats that as some sort of “battle between feminism and the manosphere.”
okay okay, this I get, which is exactly why I’ve been fighting to figure out how to frame it. The protagonist is the grad student, the antagonist is the incel and his toxic friend.
I should also add that this log line came from a former writing professor, and I’ve never really loved it, it just seems… off.
I don’t think that’s your problem, honestly. If anything, you should lean into the Bermuda Triangle of it all. Its mythology is probably the most compelling part of your pitch thus far,
Jeff, I know first-hand how frustrating it can be not to get traction with something that you've been working on for so long, and probably means so much to you. So I'm sorry if you're having that experience. In general, the reaction I'm having to your story pitch/logline is that it's too much a collection of genre elements without going into any one of them in detail, and especially in terms of a story engine with a relatable protagonist. Emotionally the focus is split. It's three movies: a father-son story, a rescue movie, and then what sounds like a James Bond villain doing something grandiose and comic book-like. Each one of those could be a movie, but it would need a kind of twist to make it stand out.
Entirely legitimate question and funny you mention it. Look for some changes to language on the Black List site inspired by my thinking through this over the last few days.
VOODOO MACBETH remains a tough one in my mind but to the point about boiling the pitch down to the most efficient fewest words: I think you might be better served by something like “Before Orson Welles made CITIZEN KANE, he staged MACBETH with an all Black cast. In Harlem.”
Might benefit from a single mention of whatever was going on in Welles’s life that made that putting on that show specifically difficult for him other than the obvious.
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.
"Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air meets Chinatown." this is definitely a wild combo. not sure what that looks like and can't say it fits with the pizza delivery boy safeguarded by an FBI agent (neither of those scenarios exist in your comps) and the girl of his dreams angle feels like a hat on a hat, at least in this case.
What about just PITCHING yourself? Look at this script I wrote; it is a blockbuster, it is a franchise.... WHY? Because I wrote it knowing this is what people are thinking and wanting to see right now.
Telling a story starting at tween age and going up to capture those kids to be fans over years as actors grow up, so do they. But also put 30-60 old people in there to capture them. Make a story that blurs fiction and nonfiction. So, based on some type of science/reality. IDK, like DOG movies where they talk or the star.
I don't like that; I have not watched one since Turner and Hooch. BUT I understand just because I don't like them doesn't mean millions of people do. I can come up with and write a dog-talking movie right now in 5 mins, all in my head, but easily.
A 4- to 8-year-old kid can talk to animals; his sibling used to be able to talk to the pet dog but forgot. One of the parents dies, and the older kid has to step up and be a parent/adult (why he forgot). The dog tells the little kid how to make the family better, but he can't do it because he's too young.
He keeps trying to get the older kid to remember we can all talk to animals, and he finally starts to hear the dog again, finds the girl dog, and everything is happy, blah, blah, blah... but the dog is old and is going to die; it dies but has puppies with the neighbor dog or whatnot, and the adults fall in love or whatever...
We get the most Famous DOG and CAT "influencers" to play those parts....... $$$$$$$
A fun exercise and good reminder of why it’s so damn difficult. I have over 100 ideas in my phone that at some point I thought it was worthwhile to write down. Maybe, maybe…one-ish fits the category of commercial.
Here’s three of those ideas that, although feel like could be scripts, they don't feel like commercial movies that would play in a theater.
1.) The story of Paris Hilton and her unknown assistant – Kim Kardashian.
2.) A civil rights leader/event’s story told through the perspective of a riot dog.
3.) What happens to an international spaceflight when WW3 breaks out below?
4.) Adding one more. I’m spring boarding from the Sherlock Holmes + werewolf example on the other page. What if there was a werewolf story about baby werewolves? Babies that turn into werewolves.
I actually think #4 might be the most commercial of the group, ha!
For me they don’t widen the door, like: dino themepark/zoo; groomsmen retrace their blacked out night to find the missing groom; Rodney Dangerfield goes back to school; Cowboys & Aliens; dumb blonde in ivy league law school; gladiator battles emperor for the crowd; Ryan Gosling as Ken in Barbie.
Good or bad as stories, those seem more like no-brainers as premises. But finding something like these feels almost like an almost impossible task!
Not sure if you're still reading the comments, but I can't get this one out of my head. Which is usually my sign to just write the damn thing. Andor with a time-traveling revolutionary and the daughter of a sugar baron.
Okay, I have one that I really can’t figure out what to do with…
Blackpill - Dark Satire
When a feminist philosophy grad student ghosts a virginal incel after an awkward one night stand, he kidnaps her to find out why.
This roughly incapsulates the story but doesn’t at all allude to the deep moral crisis or the role of a pivitol secondary character, the incels toxic masculine best friend who pushes him to moral collapse. I’ve been trying to figure this one out for a while. It doesn’t explain their initial attraction, and to me doesn’t show the philosophical battle of feminism vs manosphere that the two main characters engage in.
I cannot emphasize enough how not interested I am in a movie about a man who kidnaps a woman because she ghosted him and treats that as some sort of “battle between feminism and the manosphere.”
Well, fair enough. It’s a satire and critique of male internet culture, not of feminism as the story itself is very pro-feminism.
That’s not coming through in how you’re talking about it at present.
okay okay, this I get, which is exactly why I’ve been fighting to figure out how to frame it. The protagonist is the grad student, the antagonist is the incel and his toxic friend.
I should also add that this log line came from a former writing professor, and I’ve never really loved it, it just seems… off.
I don’t think that’s your problem, honestly. If anything, you should lean into the Bermuda Triangle of it all. Its mythology is probably the most compelling part of your pitch thus far,
You never had me.
What about this is meant to inspire millions of people to see it?
Still no
Jeff, I know first-hand how frustrating it can be not to get traction with something that you've been working on for so long, and probably means so much to you. So I'm sorry if you're having that experience. In general, the reaction I'm having to your story pitch/logline is that it's too much a collection of genre elements without going into any one of them in detail, and especially in terms of a story engine with a relatable protagonist. Emotionally the focus is split. It's three movies: a father-son story, a rescue movie, and then what sounds like a James Bond villain doing something grandiose and comic book-like. Each one of those could be a movie, but it would need a kind of twist to make it stand out.
Entirely legitimate question and funny you mention it. Look for some changes to language on the Black List site inspired by my thinking through this over the last few days.
VOODOO MACBETH remains a tough one in my mind but to the point about boiling the pitch down to the most efficient fewest words: I think you might be better served by something like “Before Orson Welles made CITIZEN KANE, he staged MACBETH with an all Black cast. In Harlem.”
Might benefit from a single mention of whatever was going on in Welles’s life that made that putting on that show specifically difficult for him other than the obvious.