Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a psychiatrist and his sickly wife travel to their country cabin for a quiet Thanksgiving weekend, they will have to deal with an unexpected visit from one of his patients, who claims his dead twin brother is after him for revenge.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Dani Feito
Details: 113 pages
(note: I strongly encourage you to read this script before reading the review. This is a spoiler-heavy screenplay).
A funny thing happened when I went through the loglines on the 2024 Black List to see what to review today. There isn’t a single logline on that list that’s better than the top 75 loglines in the Blood & Ink Showdown.
My bar for loglines has risen considerably after this month. And everything on the Black List is just so tame in comparison to what we were able to generate for the Blood & Ink Contest. So, good on you guys.
The reason behind my decision to read this script is that I like these setups. I like when people are in a remote area and you throw some potentially dangerous x-factor character into the mix. I love the psychological games that are played in those early parts of the screenplay, before all has been revealed. I like that you can take advantage of dramatic irony, choosing which information to share with the reader before sharing it with the characters. They’re just fun setups to play with and fun setups to read.
But this is the Black List! And as I was just telling a couple of writers the other day, the industry only pays attention to the top 5 scripts on the list these days. I’m the only one in town who really pays attention to anything past the top 10. And I do that because there are still a handful of gems in those bottom 60 and it’s fun to discover them.
Case in point: There is a swimming pool.
Extra Scriptshadow points to those who know that reference.
Is today’s script the next “there is a swimming pool?” Let’s find out.
Dr. Howard Lacey, 50s, is a psychiatrist who’s recently ventured into podcasting to detail some of his patients’ woes. Specializing in twins, his latest series focuses on David, who had a twin brother with cerebral palsy. Later in life, his brother would die in an accidental fire in his home and David has always felt guilty about it.
Howard is looking forward to Thanksgiving with his wife, Karen, who’s recovering from open heart surgery after a heart attack. The two head up to their remote cabin in the mountains and share a meal with their neighbors, George and Megan.
Afterwards, Howard gets a call. His patient, David, is outside the house! He claims that his brother is trying to kill him. Karen is terrified and begins hyperventilating but Howard insists he can de-escalate the situation, letting David in.
David insists his brother is in the house. Karen is deteriorating quickly. Howard gets into a scuffle with David. And the next thing we know, David has Howard on the floor and strangles him to death. He then turns to Karen, insisting that she is his dead twin, and comes to kill her but it doesn’t matter. She has a heart attack and dies.
(Spoilers start now)
As soon as she dies, Howard stands up. He’s… fine? Not only is he fine but David starts speaking in a British accent? Ah, it turns out that this was planned out months ago. David is a completely constructed person. He never had a twin. It was all a lie to lead up to this moment. Howard’s business is crumbling. He’s in financial duress. And his wife (along with all her annoying medical expenses) was bleeding him dry. So he needed her 5 million dollar life insurance policy.
Howard and David rejoice. Howard goes to get David’s share of the money and when he comes back, shoots David. He was never going to give this punk a dime. He then orchestrates a pretend freaked out phone call to the police, and soon they’re there. But there is now a problem. It turns out that Karen is still breathing!
They take Karen to the hospital as Howard tries to figure out what to do. That’s when he’s confronted by Amanda. Amanda is David’s ACTUAL twin! And she wants the money that was owed to David. When the hospital only agrees to release Karen back to Howard if there is a nurse present, Howard and Amanda concoct a plan where she’ll be the nurse and the two will scare Karen to death (as Amanda will pretend to be David’s original ghost twin) so she’ll have her final heart attack. Will this plan work? You tell me!
When screenwriter Dani Feito went to the Twist Store on La Brea and Olympic to buy herself a prime twist for her screenplay, the store must’ve been offering a deal. Cause instead of picking up just one, she bought half a dozen!
Does it all work?
No.
You can’t possibly make a script work with that many twists. But, is the script entertaining?
Welllllllllll… let me put it this way: It sure as hell tries to be.
Everything leading up to that first twist is great. I mean it really is. I thought I might be giving out an “impressive” rating, which doesn’t come often for Black List scripts these days.
But a big question lingered: How does a script with 80 pages left to go get better after a world-beater of a twist? I didn’t see how it was possible. And I turned out to be right.
Every 20 pages of Twin Soul gets sillier than the previous 20 pages.
The first issue was the hospital. We were neck-deep in conflict and suspense and excitement for those first 30 pages. Everything before that twist was built up at the perfect pace. Now, all of a sudden, we’re waiting around? Doing nothing?
Feito has to abide by some level of real-world believability in regards to the hospital and police allowing Karen to come back home. So, we have to wait 24-48 hours for her to be released from the hospital. And, when that happened, all the momentum and energy seeped out of the story like air out of a cheap balloon.
Then David’s real twin, Amanda, shows up, and I knew the script was cooked. It feels way too forced. And then when the two come up with a plan to work together to kill Karen, whereby Amanda is going to be pretend to be the nurse – any hope that the script could rebound melted away like ice cream on a hot summer day.
Why didn’t this work?
Because the writer already established a very clever first act. I wouldn’t say it was perfect in the sense that you could believe Howard would get away with it. But it was definitely plausible. He thought of everything and was very careful about even the smallest of details.
Meanwhile, once the wife comes back to the house and he and Amanda are planning to kill her again, Howard literally does two-dozen sloppy things that any cop would easily catch. In retrospect, it destroyed that genius opening. Because all of that meticulous planning was erased by the sloppiest murder plan ever.
How could this have been fixed?
For one, the script can’t be 113 pages. It needs to be 100. More pages just means more areas to screw up in a script like this. Keep it lean. Have the shocking murder twist happen at the midpoint as opposed to the end of the first act. Now, you only have 50 pages to fill instead of 80. You’re in a much more manageable place structurally.
I would get rid of the stupid female twin character and bring in a real mandatory nurse for Karen, as was originally suggested by the hospital. That nurse is the only thing standing in the way between Howard being able to kill his wife or not. You could add some ticking time bomb whereby Karen’s mom, who lives across the country, is showing up in two days to help her daughter recover. So, he’s only got two days to kill her. And this nurse character gives you one more opportunity for a final twist (she could have her own agenda).
In other words, keep it simple. Where these scripts suffer is when writers try to add too many variables. The more variables, the more sloppy things are, the more the writer has to keep track of. And because it’s impossible to keep track of everything, you inevitably create a ton of plot holes.
There were so many good things in the first 30 pages of this script. But with how spectacularly the plot falls apart after that, I unfortunately can’t recommend it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Cleverness in screenwriting demands precision. There’s no tolerance for sloppiness, not even a trace. When you promise the audience intelligence, you’re committing to a script without holes. In fact, you want the opposite: every creative choice must be meticulously crafted and purposeful. That level of care clearly wasn’t maintained in Twin Soul beyond the first act. Which is too bad. Because boy what a first act it was.
Pitched as “Home Alone on acid.”
Genre: Magical Realism
Premise: An eleven-year-old boy left alone while his parents vacation stumbles upon a surreal late-night TV broadcast of lizard musicians, leading him into a strange adventure through Chicago’s hidden corners where he runs into a bizarre guy known as The Chicken Man.
About: Recently, Benny Safdie debuted his The Rock film, The Smashing Machine, at the Venice Film Festival, where Safdie took home the ‘Best Director’ trophy. The two must have had a great time working together because, just yesterday, they announced that they were making another movie. This is the first time Safdie is using material other than his own for a film. Lizard Music was published in 1976 by Daniel Pinkwater. It is considered a cult classic in children’s literature, combining a basic story about a kid home alone with a tone that embraces the drug-fueled craze of America’s wildest decade.
Writer: Daniel Pinkwater
Details: about 170 pages
Believe it or not, I do appreciate good directing. It’s not all about the screenwriting for me.
But there really aren’t many interesting directors left. Marvel has turned the profession into a glorified TV director gig, where you’re a hired hand that makes sure you get all the required shots for the day. Try to impose your artistic vision and you get canceled faster than Roseanne.
So thank god young talent like Benny Safdie is still out there. One half of the former brother directing team that made Good Time and Uncut Gems, Benny is the more celebrity-obsessed of the two, eagerly accepting any opportunity to get in the spotlight.
But he’s still talented as hell. I infamously gave his pilot script, The Curse, that he wrote with Nathan Fielder, a “what the hell did I just read” rating. Then I saw the show and realized it was genius! In order to overcome screenwriting weaknesses that big, you have to be exceptionally talented. And this guy is the real deal.
11 year old Victor lives in the Chicago suburb of Mcdonaldsville with his parents and 17 year old sister, Leslie. His parents head off on a vacation, leaving Leslie to take care of Victor. But the second the parents are gone, Leslie tells Victor she’s going on a camping trip with her friends, leaving Victor all alone.
Victor starts off spending his time watching a lot of TV. In the 1970s, that’s basically all you did, and Victor is no exception. However, late one night, Victor is surprised to see that four lizards, in a band, are playing music on television. Their music is hypnotizing and Victor is sad when their set is over.
The next day, he decides to go to a nearby town called Hogboro on the bus. It’s on that bus that the Chicken Man shows up. The Chicken Man takes off his hat, which has a chicken underneath it of course, which then starts doing all these tricks. Later, Vince sees the Chicken Man in town and the Chicken Man opens his hand which has in it, A LIZARD!
Victor freaks out and books it home. He is now convinced that the Chicken Man and the late night TV lizard band are connected somehow. But how? He has to know. So he does some investigation and gets in touch with Chicken Man (who has like a dozen different names), and the two meet at the Hogboro Zoo.
Chicken Man explains that the Lizards are from another planet, or more like, another existence. And that there music is, like, important or something, man. Because Victor is now obsessed with the Lizard Group, he gets Chicken Man to help him figure out where they are. He must meet them! As he is sure that the Lizard Group will have all of life’s answers, or at least a few to get him through the rest of the summer.
Lizard Music is a terrible book yet I have no doubt that Benny Safdie will turn it into a great movie. This reminds me very much of what Spike Jonez did with Where The Wild Things Are. It’s going to be a kids book adaptation but with some dark adult gravy slathered over it.
So, what’s my problem with this? My problem is that Lizard Music was clearly written in one draft. It’s got that “I’m coming up with all of this on the fly” feel to it. You can almost feel the writer realizing story developments as they come.
One of the easy ways to identify this is when writers repeat locations right away. For example, Victor is talking to Chicken Man at the zoo and convinces Chicken Man to have a meeting with him. He asks Chicken Man when and where their meeting should be and the Chicken Man says, “We’ll do it tomorrow at the zoo.” Well, we’re already at the zoo. Why wouldn’t we just have the meeting now?
If the Chicken Man is busy now, then, it makes more sense to meet somewhere else tomorrow. But, when you’re writing quickly, you don’t want to strain yourself. Your brain doesn’t give you great options. It knows the characters have to meet somewhere, it knows we’re at the zoo. So let’s have them meet at this same zoo! It’s lazy and it’s usually something you fix in rewrites. But if you don’t rewrite, then you never fix it. And that’s what a lot of this book reads like.
There is a bonus to writing this way, though. First drafts, while often sloppy, tend to have the most energy of any draft you’re going to write. So even though there’s a lot of repetition and meandering, you can feel the writer’s excitement on the page. And the writer will often take more chances in the first draft, which can be more interesting than the safer edited options you use down the road.
So, there can actually be a strategy to only writing one draft. And I know that, back in the 70s, there was more of a freewheeling approach to writing. So I’m sure that worked its way into the writing of Lizard Man.
And while this freewheeling approach helped some of the sequences such as the bus ride when we first meet Chicken Man and see how weird he is, it hurts the book in so many others. There are countless scenes of Victor just sitting on his living room floor watching TV. Which is incredibly boring to read.
Another way I can tell when a writer hasn’t written many drafts is when the main character is a complete loner. We tend to think about what we WANT TO DO IN A STORY as writers so obsessively that we forget to ask what would really be happening in this person’s life. Writing a singular character all by himself is so much easier than trying to imagine a full life with friends and relationships. So you write the easy version.
You’re telling me Victor doesn’t have a single friend? Not one!? And this is the 70s. You couldn’t not have a friend if you tried. They were forced upon you!
If you know the primary things I get upset about in screenwriting, you know that laziness is up there near the top. If I feel that a writer just slapped together a story without a lot of thought, I get pissed.
So, then, why did this sell? It sold because Benny Safdie is a weirdo (in a good way). He likes weird stuff. This story is definitely strange. And it also has a bizarro character that actors would love to play, in the Chicken Man.
I would not try to replicate a story like this yourself. This is the definition of a random purchase. It’s unlikely anything like it will happen again.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Put a chastity belt on your logical mind when writing the first draft of any script that benefits from a strong imagination. If you’re writing The Wizard of Oz or Harry Potter or Lizard Music, you want to let yourself fly in that first draft because these types of scripts don’t do well when there’s restriction. But you do need to reel in the stuff that’s too crazy in future drafts. You have to ground the core journey so that the story feels like it has an actual purpose and isn’t just a trippy writing experiment.
ANNOUNCEMENT – I HAVE DECIDED THAT ALL MAYBES IN TODAY’S POST ARE OFFICIALLY ***IN*** THE BLOOD & INK SHOWDOWN. CONGRATS!
(The following article is a follow-up to the Blood & Ink Contest. If you would like to learn more about the contest, you can go here)
First of all, I have to point out that this weekend was the biggest worldwide opening for a horror movie ever (The Conjuring). Oh, and three of the biggest movie surprise successes of the year – Weapons, Sinners, and Final Destination – were all horror films. We are coming up with this contest at the PERFECT time. Cause, for the next year, studios are going to rabidly pursue horror concepts. So, good for us for being timely.
Now, I want everyone to give yourselves a hand. We worked effing HARD this month. This was not easy. But I believe all the effort was worth it. We’ve found nearly 100 legit good horror movie ideas. And that’s something that never would’ve happened had we not done the Blood and Ink pitches.
I think all of us have learned just how valuable putting your ideas out there for feedback is. Most writers base their script choices on gut, which is unreliable. But here, if you had a bad idea, there were crickets. So, you knew that you had to come up with something better. And I saw that. I saw writers come back stronger after some early duds.
And I think we all learned that the fastest way to logline death is a vague logline. Especially when it gets vague at the end. There’s nothing more frustrating and I feel that all of you will move forward not making that mistake anymore.
Another thing you learn from seeing so many pitches is that a lot of people have similar ideas to you, which is an indication that you’re not digging deep enough when generating ideas. You’re not trying to come up with something truly original. So, hopefully, I’ve motivated you to look deeper and challenge your imagination when coming up with ideas.
Another thing I loved about this experience was the emergence of posters to help your pitch. That’s been a fun surprise. There were several instances where the poster specifically helped push the logline over the top. Grendl’s satanic building poster, for example. It totally helped me see the tone of that movie. Maybe we’ll do a posters-only showdown at some point. That could be fun.
Okay, let’s get down to business. First, I want to highlight our four classic commenters and who they voted in.
Jaco – ACHILLES by Joseph Jay Carroll Jr. – “When a German chemical weapon reanimates fallen soldiers as savage zombies, an immune messenger dog named Achilles becomes the Allies’ last hope, carrying the only known antidote across No Man’s Land to his handler’s camp.”
Scott – THE DEMONOLOGIST by Grant David – “A young priest joins a veteran exorcist as his apprentice, only to discover his mentor doesn’t exorcise demons out of people – he’s putting demons inside them.”
Poe – HELL AND BACK by Nolan Moore – When literal horned devils emerge from the tunnels of a West Virginia coal-mining town and abduct a handful of locals, a cynical WW1 veteran turned sheriff and the newly arrived reverend must lead a group of miners into hell to rescue their loved ones.
Brenkilco – #POSSESSED by Stefen X – After her deliberate attempt to become possessed for likes is actually successful, a fame-hungry influencer fights to rid herself of a manipulative demon who forces her to create increasingly horrific content that grows her audience for its pièce de résistance – her live death.
And now, we have our final leg of the competition. A lot of pitches almost made it into the big leagues with “maybes” but couldn’t quite get there. Therefore, I am posting my ten favorite “maybe” concepts and I’m asking you to vote for your favorite (from these ten) in the comments. Do this by simply writing in the TITLE of your favorite entry. The top THREE vote-getters will make it into the Blood & Ink Showdown. Here are my ten favorites.
Title: Relapse
Logline: A fading actor desperate to cure his addiction turns to a spiritual healer’s ancient ritual for a cure. The ritual awakens an entity that brutally punishes the ones he cares about every time he relapses, growing stronger with each slip – forcing him to fight the addiction and the entity before its too late.
Title: Dark Ice
Logline: On the anniversary of a tragic accident at the lake, six townspeople are found eerily sealed beneath its ice. A grief-stricken ranger must uncover the deadly force behind the entombments before it claims more lives.
Title: Chit Chat
Logline: After returning to the office from an uneventful weekend, a lonely Londoner fields increasingly aggressive small talk from everyone around him. As he escapes to the streets of London, the crowd and their furor grows as they attack him for answers to life’s smallest questions.
Title: Something Old
Logline: When a commitment-shy cop finally proposes with his grandmother’s engagement ring, the ritualistic killings that plagued his small town and claimed his grandfather start up again, while his fiancée acts more like Grandma every day.
Title: Karoshi: The Drive
Logline: People are working themselves to death – taxi drivers drive for days then crash, roofers work until falling to their deaths, an author writes a whole novel before dying at his keyboard. And then the cynical cop investigating these incidents realizes he can’t sleep or rest either. Growing ever more tired, weak and confused he must break the curse before it kills him too…
Title: The Zakim
Logline: A group of motorists become trapped when a monster intended to be the ultimate killing machine gets loose on Boston’s Zakim Bridge and the military won’t let anyone off until the beast feeds.
Title: My Demon Best Friend
Logline: A drug addicted prostitute on the brink of death from an overdose instead finds salvation and a new life when she gets possessed by a low-level but resourceful demon looking for redemption, and together they set out to reunite her with her family while battling her former pimp and his gang, and a high-ranking demon lord trying to claim her soul.
Title: Anyone
Logline: After a good Samaritan saves a recluse from a series of attacks by random people, she must uncover why strangers are compelled to murder him before she succumbs to the deadly urge herself.
Title: The Subtle Samurai
Logline: An oligarch motoryacht smuggling weapons becomes adrift in the Pacific Ocean before finding refuge on a deserted island. The heavily booby-trapped island of torture is the hunting ground for one dedicated Japanese soldier, who has spent 50 years preparing for this invasion.
Title: Everyone’s Watching
Logline: When a glamorous influencer family moves to a small coastal town, buys businesses, and starts their own church, a neighboring couple soon realizes that behind the charm lies cruelty, exploitation, and ruthless control — and resisting could cost them everything.
Start voting! (voting ends at 10:00 pm Pacific Time tonight)
A couple of final reminders. If you got into the Blood & Ink Showdown in ANY way, please e-mail me at [email protected] with the subject line “INK.” I need your e-mail because I’m putting the Blood & Ink writers on a special mailing list, which will provide news, updates, info, and future deadlines, on the competition. So definitely e-mail me!
And I’m going to announce your first Mini-Showdown RIGHT NOW. This is for Blood and Ink writers only. We’re having a First Scene Showdown for your scripts on Friday September 26th. Deadline is Thursday September 25th. I’ll give you more information as we get closer. This showdown is NOT mandatory. I just want to get you guys writing. :)
ALL PITCHING IS NOW CLOSED!
I have a direct line to, arguably, the biggest person in horror in all of Hollywood. This person has been in the trades relentlessly lately. And he trusts my taste implicitly. If I send him a script that I say I love, he’ll start reading it within 10 minutes.
This was the impetus for this contest. I want to send this guy a great horror script. But I thought, “How do I find a great horror script?” A truly great horror script from an amateur writer hits my desk once every four years. I wanted to speed up that process.
The answer came quickly. Increase the number of good movie ideas that are being sent my way. Which means get the writer BEFORE they’ve written the script instead of after. And have them keep pitching ideas until we find an awesome one. That strategy has nabbed us 80 really freaking good movie ideas so far. And my plan is for this weekend to make it an even 100.
If you want to know more details about my plan, here’s the initial post.
But now, it’s time to start pitching again.
How does this work?
You pitch your horror logline down in the comments. Include your title and subgenre (i.e. horror comedy, horror thriller, etc.) and I will tell you whether the idea is good enough to advance to the official competition, in which case, you will write the entire script.
Here are the responses I will leave after your pitch and what they mean.
No – Doesn’t make the cut.
Maybe – No but you can improve the logline and pitch again immediately.
Strong Maybe – You’re in.
Yes – You’re in plus special treatment.
You get FIVE logline pitches this weekend.
If you’re worried that I’m too hard to please, consistent commenters, Brenkilco, Jaco, Poe, Scott Crawford, and Arthur all have a “YES” vote, so they can save you.
You can also get in if your concept GETS UPVOTED 15 TIMES.
So, I encourage everyone here to be constantly screening the newest entries and upvoting any concept you like. It could literally change a writer’s life. And this supersedes a “no.” So, even if I “no” a concept, it can still advance with 15 upvotes.
A few final thoughts.
There are no more “soft maybes.”
You get to campaign for your logline ONE TIME. So if you’re close to getting 15 votes, feel free to link to your logline comment and make your pitch for why you deserve to be voted in.
Finally, there’s one more way to get in. On Monday, I’m going to be posting my 10 favorite ‘maybe’ loglines that were pitched over the past month. You guys will vote for your favorites. The top THREE vote-getters will make it into the official competition. So you want to at least leave this weekend with a ‘maybe.’
Here are a few recent logline articles I have written to help you out –
LOGLINE ARTICLE 1
LOGLINE ARTICLE 2
BONUS ARTICLE 3
Between sleep and weekend activities, there will be periods where I can’t moderate or rule on your entries. So be patient!
I’m excited to see what you guys are going to pitch me this weekend. Go at it!
P.S. If you are already in with a ‘strong maybe’ or a ‘yes,’ PLEASE E-MAIL ME with the subject line, “INK,” along with TITLE and LOGLINE in the message body. Everybody who’s a part of this contest will be placed on a special newsletter so I can keep you updated on important announcements. If you’re not on that newsletter, you will miss a lot of very important information. E-mail me at: [email protected]
P.P.S. If you want to have more of a conversation about your logline pitches, rather than just a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ or you want to pitch your ideas in private, you can order my logline service. It’s $25 for a logline analysis (along with a yes or no) and $50 for unlimited e-mails where we workshop a weak logline into something that is potentially contest worthy. There are no guarantees, though. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. If you want to use this service, e-mail me at [email protected].
As we gear up for the final weekend of horror pitches (starting tomorrow!), I wanted to broach the most common question I’ve been asked during this submission process. And that question is, “Should I reveal my big twist in the logline?”
In order to answer this question, a question I’ve been asked so many times over the years I’ve lost count, you have to understand what the purpose of a logline is. Because I don’t think enough writers know. I think they believe that a logline is like a trailer or a poster. You would never reveal your movie’s big twist in the trailer or the poster, so why would you reveal it in the logline?
The answer is that a logline has a different objective, and that objective is to place a movie idea in front of someone who has the power to make a movie so they can make a quick decision on whether that’s a movie they would want to make. If it sounds like something they’d want to make, they’ll request the script. They’ll then read the script and make a final decision on whether to make the movie or not.
Even if you’re not sending a logline to someone who’s directly responsible for greenlighting a movie, you are still sending it to someone who will be thinking in those terms. So, if you’re sending it to an agent, he will be looking at the logline through the producer’s point of view.
What does this mean in terms of what you should include in your logline? Well, what it means is that industry people are not reading scripts to enjoy them. Yes, everybody loves to read a good script. But they’re not reading scripts for the same reasons that moviegoers go see movies. To them, they’re reading the script for business reasons. They’re reading the script in hopes of finding something that can make them money so they can keep their jobs.
This is why, when you’re writing a logline, you want to include as much relevant information as you can.
Another relevant piece to this puzzle is that you’re competing against a ton of other loglines. This is something I think too many writers forget. They’re so wrapped up in all the time and energy they’ve put into their script that they think just conveying that they’ve written the screenplay should be enough for people to be interested.
But the reality is, since you’re competing with so many other loglines, it is essential that your logline stand out. Which brings us back to the original question. “Should I reveal my big twist in the logline?” Well, knowing what you know now, what do you think?
Chances are that if you have a big twist in your script, it’s the biggest selling point of the script. Therefore, if you don’t include it, you are not including the thing that has the best chance at making your logline stand out from the competition. “But Carson,” you say, “Then, when they read the script, it won’t be as enjoyable because they’ll already know the twist.”
Again, the job of a logline and a screenplay is not to entertain the person as much as it is to get them to make the movie. And smart producers can identify a great twist even if they hear about it ahead of time.
Of course, we can have the discussion about how powerfully a twist will hit someone in the moment as opposed to ahead of time. But here’s the problem. If your twist is the main selling point of your script and you don’t mention it in the logline, the producer won’t request the script. So they never get to the point where they can experience the twist while reading the screenplay.
Now, just like any discussion about art, there is nuance. So, let’s get into the nuanced part of this conversation. We’ll start with what I call the “climax holy shit twist.” Think The Sixth Sense. Primal Fear. The Others. Saw. And The Usual Suspects. For scripts like this, you don’t want to include the twist in your logline. This is because the twist happens so late in the story and is so big, that you are literally destroying the reading experience by revealing it. So, if you have a twist like this, don’t include it in your logline.
But, what if you’ve written a script like The Matrix? That has a giant twist in it as well. Except that giant twist comes at the end of the first act, when we discover that Neo has been living in a fake constructed reality. In that case, you will DEFINITELY include the twist in the logline.
In fact, here’s a rule you can bank on 99% of the time. If you have a big twist that happens up to and including the midpoint of your script, you should include it in your logline. So, yes, that means that, if you’ve written From Dusk Till Dawn, where there’s a major twist at the midpoint, you would include that in your logline.
Some of you may call that blasphemous. “No! That must be preserved for the reading experience!” (Spoilers). Well let me ask you this. What does the logline look like without the big twist of the vampires? It’s just a bunch of random crazy shit happening. You could spend weeks obsessively trying to craft the perfect logline for that, but it’s not going to have anywhere close to the same request rate as the version of the logline that includes the twist of vampires.
Are there exceptions to this?
Yes, there is, actually.
The HUGE concept.
If you have a concept that is gigantic, it can override the need to expose the twist. And this goes back to my original explanation. A logline is meant to convey to a producer whether that movie could make money for them. Therefore, if you have a really giant idea, a la Jurassic Park, that’s enough to convince the producer that they can make a movie out of this. So the objective of the logline has been fulfilled.
But before you go off and start coming up with huge concepts with big twists so you can write loglines that don’t have to include those twists, it’s important to keep in mind that this combination is pretty rare. Mainly because if you have a giant concept, you don’t need a big twist. So that will be a very unique situation.
Let’s say, in spite of all of this, you’re still on the fence. You think that your script is different. You’re worried that if you reveal the twist in the logline that it will destroy the reading experience. I have good news for you. It won’t. In fact, it sometimes makes your script better.
Knowing what’s coming creates a fourth-wall breaking form of dramatic irony, which is when we, the reader, know more than the characters. In that sense, it can be exciting to know what our characters are in for!
If you have any doubt about this, look no further than how many times you’ve watched your favorite movie. Why do you keep watching it even though you know exactly what’s going to happen? It is this form of dramatic irony that still makes the movie entertaining. I know that Marty McFly is going to end up in his mother’s room, who’s going to fall for him, and he’s going to freak the hell out and look for any way to escape, and I can’t wait for the characters to catch up to me.
Finally – and this is something I hope you’ve learned over the last three pitch weekends – the more vague your logline is, the less effective it is. Every time a writer has tried to hide the cool things from their logline, that logline has failed. So, in almost every situation, if you’re debating whether to include the cool part in your logline, you should definitely choose to put it in your logline. It actually shocks me that writers would choose the opposite. A logline’s job is to sell the script. Obviously, then, you want to put your best, most detailed, most comprehensive logline forward!
Hopefully, this has charged a few of you up. If you have a logline that you think is on the “twist” fence and want professional advice, I can give you a logline consultation. They’re 25 bucks. E-mail me at [email protected] if you’re interested.
And speaking of twists, everyone should go watch “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish” on Netflix. It’s got a whopper of a twist (what I would call a “holy shit twist”). Don’t look anything up online. Lots of spoilers out there. Just go watch it.
