Alternate version:
A con artist hustles a family into spending Christmas with him, but his masquerade is threatened when his real family moves in next door.
Intention: to live a real life.
obstacle: his real life.
I thought I?d try this out.
I?m trying to put more conflict into the original idea. (Otherwise I might keep the original longline and have his ex wife as a complication/obstacle.)
Perhaps it begins with him trying to get back into the lives of his ex wife and daughter. They ignore him.
He finds this surrogate family – all whilst pretending to be someone else. Then his real family moves in next door. Perhaps the new man is a cop (who is onto him?)
Perhaps he begs his ex wife to join in on the charade. And then one lie leads to another…
Perhaps it’s better like this…
A con artist spends Christmas with a family he grows to love, but his masquerade is threatened when he finds out his real family lives next door.
“Moves in” is doing too much I think.
Also, I kept in masquerade (it’s doing double time here) so you know he’s hustled them or ya’ know seduced them into it. He is pretending to be someone else but I don’t have time to put it in there.
This is the one I’m considering going with:
A lone wolf con artist seduces a woman by pretending to be someone else, but must first spend Christmas with her family, whom he grows to love.
It’s simple and basically the film. But I want to lean in on the conflict. Regardless, I think his ex-wife and daughter are definitely a complication to deal with. His real life bleeding into the false one (that he wishes was real).
Not only that, I thought the setup/opening hook we’ve got him trying to call his estranged ex-wife and daughter – who don’t want to talk to him.
This leads him to seducing a woman (and basically her family) and getting invited to spend the holidays with them.
Would the ex-wife really be moving house over Christmas? The time period seems very confused – how long did you envisage the film covering?
It would be great if you could keep updated versions of your loglines within the initial post so readers/commenters can see the evolution of the logline and the related comments.
Any ideas with this or should I stick with the original?