A female bounty hunter holds a gangland bar hostage while awaiting the arrival of a fugitive killer but one of the hostages is hiding a deadly secret.

CraigD

Thanks for the comment. The protagonist’s action is actually ‘holds a gangland bar hostage’ and it’s pretty strong – one person against a bar full of gangsters. Also, the ‘deadly secret’ element is not about action – it creates intrigue.

dpg

I still feel a pitch is a seduction. Like a striptease. You get the action plot in the logline and then the synopsis introduces the Sci-Fi elements, etc. and that’s appealing to producers because the story gets beefier without the attendant switches in location and rising budget.

For me, the theme only becomes a subject when the script is under discussion and since you haven’t read the script it’s hard to see how we can discuss theme.

One producer whom I pitched to recently – using the action logline compared it to ‘The Hateful Eight’. There’s remotely no similarity apart from the single location and bounty hunters but that makes him feel comfortable because he’s found a label he understands. These are the harsh realities of the business. We’re basically dealing with Sales and Marketing people and the money people are worse.

It’s also important to remember that Sci-Fi is generally a high-budget genre and this puts people off. I don’t know how much experience you have of the industry as a writer but it is relevant to understand what they want from you when writing a logline for a project that’s actually going into the marketplace.

Also, producers are looking for do-able projects with marketable loglines. So, a writer has to consider the needs of the industry that he or she is pitching to – definitely the lower end in terms of budget and talent.