Title: Tip of the Iceberg
Paul ClarkeSamurai
After brutal injuries from a notorious torturer leave a man with no memory, his only hope of regaining his identity is to help the FBI hunt his captor?s, before they can finish the job.
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You don’t need an apostrophe. I don’t see how he could be of any help to the FBI without his memories. Do they come back? Are they maybe fragmented? It’s interesting but it needs a tad bit more focus.
There’s a mystery behind the man needing to team up with the FBI to regain his memories and that feels like your hook, which isn’t stated in your logline. If the goal is just to find the captors before they come back and finish the job, it’s not intriguing enough. There’re also a couple of repetitive elements: torturer implies “brutal injuries” and “man with no memory” is repeated with “regaining his identity”. It does beg the question: if the man has no memories, how can he help the FBI?
When an amnesiac [ex-FBI? ex-CIA?] is tortured and left for dead, he teams up with the FBI to track down his captors before they [hook?].
Sounds like a story I’d be interested in seeing, but the logline does need a little tightening and shortening. You have a good selection of colorful descriptive words, so that’s a plus. The protag, however, is only described as “a man”. I’d start with him:
“When a (adjective) man is kidnapped, tortured and left with severe amnesia, he must re-discover his identity and prevent the torturer from returning to finish the job.”
Notorious is redundant, as there really IS no other type of “torturer”. Helping the FBI is part of the story, but probably not necessary in the logline. The “memory” plays an important role is describing the protag. You want it to be ironic. What kind of expert might he be to make memory THE most important asset? If he were a wedding planner, or a side-show memory expert act in Vegas, that would make it a comedy. I just completed a screenplay were the mob’s accountant had photographic memory. Why was that important? Because the accountant was called “No Books” and therefore the accountants life was essentially always in jeopardy for what this person knew.
In any event, it’s a very entertaining concept. Make sure the genre is clear from the logline.
Thanks Sharkeatingman, good stuff. Have you seen the latest Jason Statham action flick Safe? It’s about the Triads who like things old fashioned, they don’t like computers because they leave a trail. So they import a genius young girl from China with a photographic memory to run their books. Sounds similar to yours.
As for the mans description or his profession. He doesn’t have any at all. He’d completely a blank slate. Which is a risky thing to attempt in a script. Any time he lacks drive or direction the story is driven by the super determined young female FBI agent who’s helping him.
As for the notorious part. Yea, it wasn’t how I wanted it. It needs to more of a mythical torturer. Someone with a legend like Kaiser Soze. Something to hook in the audience.
And the genre is Psychological Thriller.
As with all loglines, I’m having real trouble knowing what info to leave in and what to cut. My next attempt I hope to have it more concise.
The idea is that if he was being tortured he must know something important, so they help him to get his memory. And the only person who knows his identity are the people responsible, so he decides to try and help. It’s in their best interest to work together. But I just can’t see anyway of including that in the logline.
Loglines ARE tough- that’s why a site like this is important, helpful- and popular. The way I do it is I write everything that the story is about in a long sentence, then either delete words that are extraneous, or find shorter and more colorful ways to say certain phrases in less words. For example, “a friendly but lonely guy who lost all of his memory” would be a ” jovial sap with amnesia”; four words replacing eleven in, what I think, is a more colorful and concise way.