Writing a logline: the one sentence before the screenplay
A logline is the sentence that sells your screenplay. What goes in, what doesn't, how to recognise a bad one, and why you write it first instead of last.
Before you write the first scene, you write one sentence. That one sentence is called a logline. It tells someone in fifteen seconds what your film is. Someone with neither time nor patience for more.
If the sentence doesn’t work, the screenplay usually doesn’t either. Not because a good sentence replaces the screenplay, but because a sentence that doesn’t grip is usually a story without a grip.
What a logline carries
Four parts, in this order:
- Who. The protagonist, not by name but as a function. “A pianist”, “a retired detective”, “two sisters”.
- What they want. The active goal of the character. Not “learns who she is”, but “wants to find her father”.
- What stands in the way. The antagonism. A person, a system, a time limit, an inner flaw.
- What’s at stake. The cost that makes it urgent. What happens if they fail?
That gives you a structure along the lines of: “When [Who] wants to do [What], [Who] has to fight [What], or else [Stakes].”
That’s a template, not a rule. But if after three tries you can’t find four parts, one of them is also missing from the story.
Three loglines, three films
Three examples without titles up front. Read them as loglines and see if you know the film.
“A wrongfully convicted banker enters prison and, over two decades, builds a friendship with a fellow inmate while secretly working on his escape.”
“In a post-apocalyptic desert, a runaway warrior helps five abducted women flee from a warlord, while a man with his own past becomes her accomplice.”
“A private detective investigates the death of a wealthy crime novelist and slowly sees through the mutual accusations of an entitled family.”
You recognise them: The Shawshank Redemption, Mad Max: Fury Road, Knives Out. None of them mentions title, director or genre. Each tells you the protagonist, the goal, the antagonist, the stakes. After one sentence you know whether you’d watch two hours of it.
Tells of a bad logline
If your logline gets stuck at one of these spots, the story behind it is usually thin:
- Three adjectives before the Who. “A young, ambitious, clever pianist.” The adjectives don’t help. A concrete activity does: “A pianist who hasn’t released anything in ten years.”
- No concrete goal. “Finds herself”, “has to grow up”, “learns to love”. That’s theme, not plot. What does the character do when she wakes up in the morning? Which phone call is she waiting for?
- Vague antagonists. “Has to fight her past.” What does that mean on screen? Who walks through the door? Which letter is in the mailbox?
- No stakes. “Tries to save the café.” OK, and if she doesn’t? Who goes under, who suffers? If failure costs nothing, there’s no pressure.
- “A journey”, “a road trip of self-discovery”, “a moving portrait”. Catchphrases from distributor blurbs, not loglines. Strike them and write what the character does.
Why first
Some screenwriting guides say you should write the logline at the end, once you know what’s in the screenplay. That works. It also leads to you eventually phrasing a sentence that fits the screenplay, instead of having a sentence at the start that you can align the screenplay to.
Another path: write the logline as early as possible. In ScriptZ as the first action line above the outline, then keep it visible. While you’re writing a scene, you can ask yourself: does what’s happening here serve the sentence at the top? If not, cut it - or adjust the sentence at the top, because the story has shifted. Both are valid answers. The invisible third one is “it stays, even though it belongs somewhere else” and it’s the most expensive.
Test
When your logline is done, read it to someone who doesn’t know the story. Don’t ask “do you like it”, ask: “Would you watch this?”
If the answer is “depends”, the logline isn’t there yet. If it’s “yes, can you tell me more?”, you have what you need.