A preacher?s wife, grieving from the loss of her teenage son and struggling to hold her family together, forms an unlikely friendship with a young street hustler who helps her understand her lost son and survive alcoholic depression.

I agree with Nicholas about the ‘preacher’s wife’ thing and his point about the lack of clear outer goal. But, doing my own analysis from the starting point:

Firstly, a very clunky logline. Verbose and lacks focus on what the dramatic crux is supposed to be. (For instance, is the wife’s core struggle with the bottle or with her grief? With both is certainly possible, but that makes it hard to believe that a mere “street hustler” is going to successfully facilitate her ascension from her plight.)

Secondly, the logline should hint that the so-called “hustler” is more than just a common street hood. That could be as simple as an extra adjective or two when introducing him, such as “well-travelled”, “observant”, or “worldly wise”. Thus adding more credibility to the character. As well as making the character much more interesting to the reader.

Thirdly, the dramatic crux has to be made clear – what is the wife’s core struggle and what does she stand to lose? Having a hustler save her social respectability, for instance, is nicely ironic but lacks the gravitas of saving her marriage, sanity, or life happiness. The logline, as it stands, is unclear about what the wife must wrestle with.

In summary, this logline needs to be completely re-written and made sharper. There may well be interesting characters and situations in the script. But, if so, the logline fails to hint at them.

Steven Fernandez (Judge)