A fame-obsessed actress with more ambition than talent uses the craft to hide her involvement in her fianc?’s murder.
Sarah Kate YoungPenpusher
A fame-obsessed actress with more ambition than talent uses the craft to hide her involvement in her fianc?’s murder.
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The hook seems to be that an ambitious actress must give the performance of her life to save her life — and her career –from the consequences of a murder in which she is implicated.
So,?you want to do a story with an anti-hero protagonist. Okay, but you still need ?to have an element in the story — and logline — ?that represents a socially acceptable motive (for example, one that affirms a family value) that an audience can accept and empathize with.
Like in “Breaking Bad”. ? Walter White’s motivation was to provide for his family after his death. ?He himself had no expectation of benefiting from his crimes. ?He was doing the wrong thing for the right reason, for the sake of his family, not himself.
It seems to me the story needs a right reason for her to do the wrong thing.?
Also, initially, Walter White is a decent guy. There may have been nothing about him to admire, but you could still like him because neither was there anything about him to ?dislike. ?His ?character and plight ?was one an audience could identify with. ?In contrast, your proposed anti-hero fame is characterized as obsessed with fame — not exactly an endearing or sympathetic?trait from the git-go.
fwiw
OrdinaryDreams:
Yes, but…
Chicago was pre-tested and pre-sold as a successful musical play. ?I would argue that the hook that sold the project as a movie was the music, the spectacle of song and dance set pieces, ?not the plot, the box office receipts as a Broadway musical. (And it’s pedigree going back to the legendary Bob Fosse.)
Stories adapted from another medium, a book or play or musical or comics or graphic novel, are sold by a different set of criteria. ?That other medium pre-sells the concept. ?If it’s a best-selling book, a smash play, Hollywood ?is hooked. ?Even if it never makes it to the silver screen, most likely there will usually be a sale of the movie rights.
Ditto if the project comes from someone already established in the business. As was the case with Vince Gilligan, the author of “Breaking Bad”. ?I seriously doubt he needed a stinkin’ logline to get his pilot script read. ?He already had the credentials, an established track record, and industry contacts to get his script read without a logline.
But wannabes with no track record, no contacts are selling their scripts as cold calls. And that is what the conventional logline ?is designed for, cold calls.
I agree with DPG that a beginner has a check box that needs to be filled in order to be successful. Which ?is why a good strategy to employ is probably to write a script for something that is familiar, that checks those boxes, and then once established branch out, break the mold.
Take the MCU. The first film ,Iron Man(2008) was a fairly by the numbers superhero origin story. Because even though it’s hard to believe now, but that film was a risk for Marvel. But Iron Man’s plot is radically different from Captain America: Civil War, which breaks the MCU mold in multiple ways.