SWS:

Good questions and points. Crank is a slang term for meth (another term is “ice”), but as you noted to avoid confusion, I used theterm meth. The use of which is a plague of Biblical proportions in many areas rural America including the Ozarks.

You make a valid point by suggesting to amp up the stakes by specifically including the family in the logline. I opted not to in my first iteration to see if I could hit the mark of 25 words or less.

Since it is also important to include the ticking clock to amp up the logline with urgency as well as stakes, a revised version of your logline could be:

When her meth-making father skips bond, a impoverished 17-year-old Ozark girl has one week to find him or lose the family house, her younger siblings, and mentally-ill mother.
(28 words)

Here’s my more fully-fleshed out version:

When her meth-making father skips bail and disappears, an Ozark teenager has one week to find him and save her dirt poor family from be evicted and broken up.
(29 words)

I added “and disappears” because technically “skip bail” only means he’s failed to appear in court. He could be at home or around and about in contact with his family. ?(Okay, I confess, I’m kind of OCD on distinctions like that.)?Anyway, the dramatic problem is created by the fact that he’s skipped bail AND disappeared, The family doesn’t know where he is, what has become of him.

And I shifted “dirt poor” to describe the whole family, not just the teenager even though it can be inferred that if the teenager is dirt poor then so is the family.

Nor does my version include details about the family members. One has to make trade offs in composing loglines, detail for the sake of economy and word flow, and that’s the trade off I choose to make.

Now then. Both of these versions are more than 25 words long. Should we worry about that? I’m glad that I asked.

When I first read about the 25 word rule for loglines several years ago, I wanted to know where it came from. Why 25 words, not 24 or 26 or some other number? It seemed to be an arbitrary rule of thumb based. So I began to build a database of loglines for movies in order to see if there was a statistical basis for the 25 word rule. And here are the results for the 725 I have collected so far:

[img]https://loglines.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Logline_survey-102016.jpg[/img]

As you can see, my analysis suggests there appears to be a sound statistical basis for the 25 word rule. More than 1/2 of the loglines in my sample — 58.2% — are 25 words or less in length. For the numbers wonks reading this, both the mean and median average is 24 words. ?The mode average, however, is 29 words which segues to my next observation:

More than 1/4 of loglines fell between 26 to 30 words, and another 1/10th between 31-35 words. ?Combined that comes to more than 1/3 of the loglines are between 26 and 35 words in length.

However, no logline exceeds 40 words in length.

So, here’s ?my personal rule of thumb for evaluating logline word lengths in this precinct:

25 words or less is the ideal. ?Mission accomplished.?
26-30 words is acceptable. Not worth sweating about.
31-35 words is tolerable. Sweat a little. Can the logline be shortened?
36-40 words is borderline. Sweat profusely. Odds are the logline can be shortened.
More than 40 words is fatal. ?The logline is DOA in terms of getting read in the industry. It?must be shortened.?

fwiw?