Loglines and Pitches...

...are harder than one would think.

**NOTE: I meant to post this last Wednesday, but didn't realize it was only saved to "drafts" and not actually "posted"...so here it is, a week late...

Without ever consciously thinking about it, I've always been asked to pitch my movies--I just never knew how. If I excitedly tell a friend: "I'm making this awesome kung-fu action movie, it's gonna be...awesome!" (as I did often in my last couple years of high school) they DID always have the same question: "What's it about?"

And then I would, without exception, break into a 5-minute ramble about the film, describing individual scenes from the film in excruciating detail until the poor questioner's eyes would glaze over. I'd usually finish with: "Trust me, it's gonna be awesome."

Which brings me to this week's reading/assignment. I was asked to do a "real" pitch for my film, but before that I read a bit of "Save The Cat" by Blake Snyder. The first chapter: "What Is It?" basically re-pounded into my head the importance of being able to describe my film in not three, not two, but ONE sentence.

How the hell do you do that?? It's kind of tragic actually, for a screenwriter--to have to compress all these thousands of scattered thoughts and ideas that coalesce to form a story into...one sentence. But as Snyder points out, creating a logline isn't only practical (our society has an attention span of about 5 seconds) it's vital for the writer him/herself to be able to understand what, at its core, their screenplay is really all about. Because if it's just a bunch of strung-together sequences that add up to no real meaning...that's not really a film worth making. It's certainly not going to be a film worth watching.

Alright, now all I gotta do is narrow my gay-Armenian-college-graduate-homophobia-culture-clash-love-story screenplay into 1 sentence! Damn you Blake Snyder.