A French village and pacifist priest must work with a bloodthirsty resistance group to fight invading Nazi’s and save 5000 Jews from extermination using only their Protestant values, an amateur forger and a one-legged female spy. *True Holocaust Story*
nouveaustudiosLogliner
A French village and pacifist priest must work with a bloodthirsty resistance group to fight invading Nazi’s and save 5000 Jews from extermination using only their Protestant values, an amateur forger and a one-legged female spy. *True Holocaust Story*
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Take the shortest most compelling line through the story. Drop things like the resistance religious beliefs. Pacifist is not needed Priest is good enough.
A priest struggles with his belief work with French resistance to save 5000 Jews.
The story is interesting, but even though it has a diverse ensemble cast, I think it would be better to frame the struggle around one central character as the protagonist. ?And to identify where the story takes place. ?So either, something like:
The true story of how a pacifist [French, Polish, Italian or???] priest risked his life to save 5,000 Jews from the Nazi death camps by rallying the support of a violent resistance group, an amateur forger and a one-legged female spy.
Or better:
The true story of how a one-legged female spy helped to ?save 5,000 Jews from Nazi death camps.
Better because the one-legged spy ?is by far the strongest hook. ?You could but I don’t think you would have to name her nationality because more important is the fact that she was one-legged. ??And the logline is short and to the point. ?
Dare I say it fulfills the definition of a ‘ high concept’ story: 1] A unique character 2] whose objective goal can be stated in fewer than 20 words, and in the age of the internet 3] it can be stated as a tweet with characters to spare. ?A three-fer.?
And that is why the concept gets my vote.
>>>should I just focus on using the most compelling character to get my script through the door?
I’m face a similar predicament in the script I’m currently writing based on the true story of how women finally got the vote in the USA. ?In terms of historical fact, my protagonist was not the leading character in the struggle. ?Many feminist historians consider her a marginal character, a damned nuisance who set the movement back; they believe women got the vote in spite of her militant tactics, not because of them.
But she is f-a-r and away the most interesting character, the most colorful and controversial, the bravest and most daring. ?She defied the conventions and stereotypes of her sex, broke all the rules was willing to risk her life for what she believed in. ?And Hollywood loves characters who defy conventions and stereotypes, who breaks the rules, who are willing to risk losing everything for a worthy cause. ?So I see her as a no-brainer, slam-dunk choice for the protagonist.
Notice, that I framed my logline for your concept with the female as someone who “helped to save”. ?I didn’t say she organized and ran the rescue effort. ?I presume it was the priest. ?And other colorful and diverse characters played an important role. ?But ?surely ?she played a pivotal role, did she not?
There’s not enough space in a logline ?and its counterproductive, to list all the characters. ?Even in a truly ensemble story, I think a logline should try to feature the most interesting character, the one most likely to hook interest in the script.
And what hooked my interest in your script was not the pacifist priest, nor the amateur forger, but the one-legged female spy.
One other reason I opt for the one-legged female as the main character is that there are a number of stories of Catholic priests who came to the rescue of Jews during World War 2. ?So a Catholic priest risking his life to do the right thing, while a noble action, was not unique.
But how many stories are there of one-legged female spies who came to the rescue of Jews? ?Again, she’s unique.. She stands out from crowd.
fwiw and best wishes with your script
>>>doesn?t matter that it is a true story,
I beg to differ. That it’s a true story is a value-added factor; it makes the story more credible, more marketable. ?So I think it ought to be part of the logline.
But I, too, don’t see a value-added factor in shoe horning the forger into the logline. ?Nor the resistance group. ?So both can be dropped.?
So if you’re pitching your story with dual protagonists than maybe something like:
The true story one-legged female spy and pacifist priest who teamed up to save 5000 Jews from the death camps in occupied France.
( 23 words, ?129 characters , equivalent to ?a .92 tweet* versus 34 words, ?195 characters or 1.39 tweets* in the revised version.)
I don’t think “wage a clandestine war” is necessary. It seems to me that it obvious and implicit.
*Note: I started measuring loglines in terms of tweets — character length as well as word length — ?when my survey of over 700 loglines revealed that not only was the average word length was truly about 25 words, but the average character length was about 140 characters, the length of a tweet. (And yesterday, a President was inaugurated in the US of A who showed just how successful selling something in 140 character tweets could be. ?In the age of the internet, for better or worse, less is truly more.)
There is a saying with a logline “Sell don’t Tell”.
If you remove “using” onwards you have a pretty good logline. You are selling a story that would make a read want to read more. You have mystery without confusion.
I would remove pacifist from in front of priest as they all take a vow to do no harm. I think it is s but like saying a wet fish. But it’s your call.