BLEEDING KANSAS
A runaway slave and a sheriff must journey to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Gubernatorial candidate against the backdrop of Kansas? induction into statehood and whether or not it would be a slave or free state.
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A few questions – I’m assuming that the Gubernatorial candidate is against slavery? What happens if they don’t rescue his daughter? There’s two stories here – the kidnapping and the induction into statehood and I assume they are linked but this isn’t clear in the logline. Might be worth including the specific year or era of this – again I make the assumption that it’s around the Civil War,
Has the daughter been kidnapped to ensure the candidate votes against freedom for slaves? What are the stakes that both the runaway slave & sheriiff and the candidate face? You need something that ties these two strands together and tells us the consequences if the characters should fail.
I forgive me – I’m British – but I’d drop the ‘Gubernatorial’ as describe him as a prospective state governor, this is clearer.
Yes, it’s confusing. Who is the protagonist, the sheriff or the runaway slave?
And then there’s the matter of potentially inconvenient historical facts.
Pro-slavery partisans had lost the battle by 1858, when an anti-slavery constitution was drafted by the territorial legislature and approved by popular vote. Kansas finally entered the union as a state in 1861.
Until 1861–while Kansas was a territory — the governor was appointed by the President — not elected. That was the Federal law, the standard operating procedure for all territories at the time. So there would have been no gubernatorial candidate while the pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces battled, which seems to be the setting of the logline.
Good comments from both ZombiaJoel and dpg. My own take, from scratch, is:
Firstly, a seriously badly muddled and clunky logline. Majorly unclear are a number of ‘whys’: Why would the slave and the sheriff join together in this quest? And why would some daughter make any kind of difference to a big political event?
Secondly, some of the historical references in this logline are quite obscure (especially “Gubernatorial”). Even for a switched-on LA professional.
The description of the political backdrop towards the end of the logline is overly wordy and has the net affect of diluting the dramatic potential that a reader can easily discern out of this concept.
The lack of clear dramatic focus is this logline’s key failing. The script may well be gripping, but the logline smothers this quality by verbosely describing other, far less interesting, things.
A more focused approach would be something along the lines of “A sheriff and an esceaped slave must put aside their differences in order to save the daughter of a reformist politician. Her kidnapping by fanatics threatens to undo the modernisation of Kansas.” (Normally mentioning 4 distinct individuals in one logline would be over-doing it, but I can’t see any way to avoid that here.)
Steven Fernandez (Judge)