Episode #1 – The Idea and Logline

Let me state that writing is not what I do. It’s who I have always been. I started in elementary school and never stopped. I studied journalism at Ohio University and screenwriting at UCLA in what’s now the Professional Program. I’m an award-winning radio writer (House of Blues with Dan Aykroyd) and documentary filmmaker (Damnedest Finest Ruins). I have written two #1 national bestselling books; historical fiction (1906: A Novel) and true crime (Citizen Jane) and screenplays for both. My 35-year WGA career includes feature scripts for Motown, Warner Brothers, and Barry Levinson; and TV for David Wolper, Warner Brothers, Court TV, the FX Channel, Stan Lee, and many others.

I have lectured on the art and craft of screenwriting at film festivals, universities, and conferences; nowhere more so than at Cinequest, San Jose, in the Pitch Workshop, Storytelling Celebration and Screenwriting Competition, for over 20 years.  Cinequest is the only film festival I have found that honors the work of the screenwriter. When they asked me to share what I know in a more formal, written medium, I signed on immediately. 

The importance of Loglines and Pitches cannot be overstated. They are your introduction, your hook, your chance to make a first impression that says, “I’m serious and I know what I’m doing.”  And yet it’s the area where many writers fail badly. 

There are three steps in a creating a saleable screenplay (Film) or teleplay (TV).  

1. IDEA
2. ARCHITECTURE
3. VOICE

“You better know your song well before you start singing.” - Bob Dylan

The Idea is the foundation and building block of everything. A great Idea begins with a Logline/Premise and is expanded into a One-Page or Two-Page Pitch or Synopsis (the beginning of the Architecture or Structure). Deviation from this simple formula will bring a pestilence upon your career.

Loglines and Pitches provide two key elements to the entire writing process. We know they are selling tools. In an Elevator Pitch, you’re headed upward with Steven Spielberg who asks you for a good idea. Check which floor he pushes, as your 5th floor Pitch and 38th floor Pitch are vastly different. You must be able to do both.

Second and most important, your Logline is your diagnostic tool and roadmap. If you can’t produce a compelling Logline or Premise, either your Idea is flawed or you haven’t excavated deeply enough to perfect it. Once you have a rock-solid Logline/Premise, deviating from it means you have lost your way, or it needs revising to accommodate your (hopefully) brilliant new ideas. 

Writers Tip: When revising anything, start a new document by copying and pasting the previous one with the DATE and NUMBER of the revision. If you return to an earlier effort, you avoid recreating it. Open a document entitled LOGLINES/PREMISES for each project, with a revision number and date in front of each logline and each pitch. You can then choose the best, or combine elements from several, into your masterpiece. Woe be the writer who sends out the wrong draft of anything. I have 30 or 40 finished drafts of every screenplay and teleplay I have written, with dates and draft numbers on all.

Now. Loglines and Pitches identify the Spine of your story. The Big Picture.  The Premise. The word Plot can be evasive: think of the Plot as the Problem.

The Main Characters need two Problems. The Plot is the External Problem, and the Subplot is their internal, personal problem. Luke Skywalker must save the universe (Plot/External Problem) and find his father (Subplot/Internal Problem). Atticus Finch must defend an impoverished African American accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Mississippi (big Plot Problem) and win the respect of his children (the powerful Subplot Problem that is often overlooked in To Kill a Mockingbird.)

In his essay on the art of writing drama, the legendary playwright Arthur Miller states that, “I think now that the great thing is...the most accurate possible statement of the problem.” He then writes about creating interesting characters to wrestle with that great problem, and interesting hurtles for them to jump over in addressing it.  

The first thing one learns in journalism school is relevant to every form of writing and storytelling, including screenplays and teleplays. They call it the Five Questions. I call it the Six Questions. The questions are…

WHO. WHAT. WHERE. WHEN. HOW. & WHY.

WHO is not a first name. It’s not Bill or Susan or Bernie.  It’s an IDENTITY, sometimes an OCCUPATION. A soft-spoken Southern lawyer and widower of two small children. A brilliant high school chemistry teacher. A ruthless Wall Street stock market swindler.  An aging Holocaust survivor hunting Nazi criminals. An anthropologist with a penchant for harrowing adventures.  

WHAT happens that launches this story – the catalyst?  A knock on the door of Atticus Finch’s home. The killing of Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle. Walter White’s cancer diagnosis.  Walter White witnessing Jessie Pinkman escaping a drug bust by Walt’s DEA brother-in-law. A young Amish boy witnessing a murder in a Philadelphia bus station. A chance encounter in a bar or aboard a train or airplane. The arrival of a child or sibling previously unknown. Another name for it is THE CALL TO ACTION. Something must happen to send our heroes, or anti-heroes, on the journey.

WHAT is the thread of your story. WHAT HAPPENS that launches it, and WHAT HAPPENS as he/she continues? These are Arthur Miller’s hurdles. What are the victories, reverses, confrontations, doubts, complications, lessons learned or ignored, the final outcome, the shocking twists? We are in the business of “What happens next?”

“What happens next” is the question we need to ask in developing Plot (External) and Subplot (Internal). No one can teach talent. But we can identify the steps that unlock the talent and imagination we do have, and in the process expand both.

WHERE is important. A bar where everyone knows your name. The dispatch room of a Taxi company. The fringes of Hollywood success. Suburban Albuquerque, New Mexico. The world of teenage drugs and angst. A devastated world where the dead hunt the living.

WHEN is only relative if it’s the past or future. Dystopian Earth. Birmingham England post WWI. Casablanca, 1942. San Francisco, 1906. The idle rich of Victorian England. 1980s Washington, D.C. First Colony on Mars, 2075.  

HOW does our character respond to WHAT happens. Walter White uses his chemistry skills to cook meth. Luke Skywalker becomes a Jedi Knight. Atticus Finch appears in court to represent a black man. Neo enters the Matrix to free himself and the human race.

WHY is motivation. I break it into two categories. A character is wounded, incomplete, or both. Luke Skywalker is both wounded by the death of his aunt and uncle and incomplete in his knowledge of his father. Walter White is wounded by his cancer and family problems and incomplete in respect for his genius as a chemist, as we shall learn. That simple element – wounded AND incomplete – has created our most memorable characters.

Let’s look first at Loglines/Premises for TV, where 90% of the work lies. TV is also the salvation of quality drama, particularly anti-heroes. In drama it’s The Sopranos, Peaky Blinders, Breaking Bad, Euphoria, Game of Thrones. In comedy it’s Entourage, Ted Lasso, Margo’s Got Money Troubles. 

In Television your pitch for an original series is based on the Premise, a few Characters, and the world in which it takes place.  It’s not about pitching the Pilot plot or the minutiae. 

SITCOM LOGLINES/PREMISES:

TAXI: In the dispatch room of an urban cab company, a sarcastic, Napoleonic boss rules over his whacky drivers – an ex-boxer, ex-college professor, ex-beauty queen, failed actor, a Latvian mechanic with multiple personalities.  

TED LASSO: A whacky junior college football coach from Texas arrives in England to coach a struggling Premier League soccer team – a sport he knows nothing about - for a sexy, sophisticated female owner hoping to tank the team as revenge against her ex-husband. 

MARGO HAS MONEY TROUBLES: After getting pregnant with her callous college writing professor, Margo finds little support from her rehab-hopping ex-wrestler father Jinx, her whacky mother, and her bible quoting husband, and so becomes the Only Fans soft-core futuristic sex goddess Hungry Ghost to support herself and infant son.

TV DRAMA is the same – you’re pitching the premise and characters. 

THE AMERICANS: Based on Russia’s 1980s “Illegals” program, a husband-and-wife team of Russian-born spies in Washington, D.C. steal high-level U.S. secrets and carry out assassinations and sabotage. All while raising two unaware American-born children and jockeying with their friendly neighbor, an FBI agent tasked with hunting foreign spies.

JUSTIFIED: After a dangerous public shootout with a Miami drug dealer, gun-slinging, sharp-tongued U.S. Marshall RAYLAND “RAY” GIVENS is reassigned to a field office back in his home of rural Harlan County, Kentucky, where he battles a former best friend turned meth-dealing evangelist, pot-growing rednecks, buffoonish neo-Nazis, his ex-con father, two jilted ex-girlfriends, and a new boss who considers him a loose cannon. 

BREAKING BAD: WALTER WHITE, 40s, a brilliant high school chemistry teacher with a handicapped son, a pregnant wife, Stage 3 cancer, and bad medical insurance, turns to cooking methamphetamine with a slacker former student, turning himself into a pale, middle-aged “Scarface” Tony Montana, complete with meteoric rise and classic downfall.

LOGLINES/PREMISES FOR FEATURE FILMS

The marketplace for movies has shifted dramatically. Quality, quirky films (and television series) are now produced by streaming services. Networks like Hallmark and Lifetime are still making movies by the bucketload, featuring female leads and issues.

OPPENHEIMER: The true story of the conflicted physicist Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, who builds the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima while battling the press, politicians, and rivals over his previous interest in Communism and its devotees, including his previous lovers.

MATRIX: NEO, a brilliant, martial-arts adept HACKER, discovers that much of humanity has become a computer-generated reality trapped in an artificial world known as the MATRIX. With the help of his mysterious mentor MORPHEUS, he enters a rebellion to fight the AGENTS who protect and expand the dehumanization of the Matrix.

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE: JAMAL MALIK, 18, an orphan from the slums of Mumbai, becomes a national sensation as he answers every question on India’s “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” On the eve of final victory, he is arrested and tortured by police as a suspected cheater, wherein he deftly recalls an event from life on the streets as the source for all his answers. 

Now. If you have read this far, I hope you realize how valuable it is to understand your story and characters in a format as brief and concentrated at this. You must keep these elements front and center as you expand into the 1-Page or 2-Page Pitch or Synopsis, which is the bridge between Idea and Outline (Architecture).

I include a Logline on a 1-Page pitch as the first page of every project I submit. If they hate the Idea or execution — better here than later. But if you grab their interest, they’ll start turning your pages.

If my pals at Cinequest ask me to continue, I will next post 1-Page and 2-Page pitches that can sometimes make or break a sale. 

About the Writer:  Two of James Dalessandro’s films, the documentary “Damnedest, Finest Ruins,” and the feature “Citizen Jane,” which is based on his bestselling book and script, can be seen on YouTube.  The latter has been viewed by nearly 6 million people, with 98% positive reviews.  You can reach him, view the progress of his new animated series “WAY COOL WORLD” at www.waycoolworld.tv, which demonstrates the newest techniques in film and animation.     

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