When a naively sentimental clown doctor is approached by an 8 year old cancer patient in the hospital a bond is made and he must find a way to make the boy smile and learn to not get attached himself.

Nir Shelter,

My “Doh!” on the term “clown doctor”. When I see the word “doctor” I automatically think of a medical doctor who has to go through all the training, residency, etc.

I occasionally ask for more information than would be revealed in a logline in order to understand the bigger picture of the story and, hopefully, offer more useful suggestions.

Clarification: My intent was not meant to be personal but merely to offer an illustration that differentiates between subjective need and objective goal and between means and ends.

We are all protagonists in our own life plots. I think it safe to assume that the objective goal of our participation here is NOT to write a logline that elicits unanimous positive feedback as an in end in itself. FADE OUT… CREDIT SCROLL. Rather our efforts here are merely a means to an end, a minor goal on the way to the mega goal: write a script good enough to be made into a movie.

My personal minor objective goal is not to acknowledge and accept the fact that I haven’t been able to write a good logline for the stories I am working on. Or to criticize others’ loglines in order to inflate my ego. (That’s my character flaw!) Rather, my minor objective goal is to learn how to write a good logline, a means to achieving the mega goal of a marketable script.

I hope that clarifies the issue.

I have no problem with his subjective need being to accept his son’s death. The way modern plotting is supposed to work, the protagonist can’t prevail against the antagonist and reach the objective goal until he constructively deals with his subjective need. But my understanding is that while the objective goal should be explicitly stated in a logline the solution to the subjective need should not. Rather it should be implied in the character flaw.

So whereas you characterize your protagonist as a “guilt-ridden clown doctor”, I would suggest a “clown doctor grieving the death of his son”. As in “On the verge of being fired by a callous medical doctor, a clown doctor grieving the death of his son must…”

Well, must what? Here is where I’m uncertain because of my lack of knowledge on the subject. Maybe something like:

On the verge of being fired by a callous medical doctor, a clown doctor grieving the death of his son has 2 weeks to give a terminally ill 8 year old boy the gift of laughter.

The only thing I am fairly certain of is that it feels better to say “give the gift of laughter” than “make… laugh” even if the phrase takes up more words in the logline. I suggest it casts the protagonist’s goal in a more altruistic light. It seems to me that ultimately the story is not about what the clown doctor can make other people do in relation to his ego or character flaw. It’s about what he can give.

>>is this an interesting premise in your mind and a compelling dilemma?

Oh yes. This is a movie I want to see. Which is why I’m camping on your doorstep on this logline. 🙂

Furtherless, how is it legally possible for a doctor to be fired for not making patients laugh? How can that technically be deemed incompetence or negligence? A comedian hired to make patients laugh and failing to do so, okay. But a licensed, board certified doctor?

I’ve met doctors with the bedside levity of mafia button men — but that was never grounds for a negligence suit; it never stopped them from practicing because of incompetence.

>>must accept his own son?s death

What is your objective goal in posting another logline to this story? Is it to “accept” that fact that your earlier ideas weren’t satisfactory? Or is your objective goal to write a logline that ignites enthusiasm, gives you the impetus and focus to write the script?

Shouldn’t an objective goal always be forward looking to a desire future, not backward to a regretted past?

Of course, working through the grieving process of his dead son is a valid subjective need. But why is he guilt ridden? Grieving over the loss doesn’t necessarily entail guilt.

So he can’t make kids laugh. So he get’s fired. So what? What are the dramatic consequences that follow from that? What’s the worse thing that will happen to him, that he will do as a result? Why should we in the audience worry about his losing his job?

What does “let go of the past” mean? Why not use “acceptance”?

What about making the MC an actor who does gigs as a comic in hospitals while struggling with his own loss and suicidal impulses?

Nir Shelter:

The theme of your story, how one ought to act and react in the presence of suffering, is an important one. However, my own response to your specific treatment of that theme is ambivalent, and colored by a strong personal bias.

Let me say up front that I detested “Patch Adams”. Not that I question the intuitive wisdom in the old saw that laughter is the best medicine. [See “Anatomy of an Illness” by Norman Cousins] But I don’t think it is a panacea for whatever ails the human spirit, let alone the human body. And as with any other medicine, the results are contingent on it being prescribed prudently, for the correct malady, in the the right dose, at the right time, for the appropriate duration.

In regards to your character: does the doctor really think that making the kid laugh will cure his cancer? Why does the doctor persist in trying to manipulate the kid? What problem is the doctor really struggling with?

You suggest his character flaw is “naive sentimentality”. But I would suggest shifting the focus of the flaw to another aspect you mentioned: his inability to work through the grieving process.

I presume you are aware of the 5 stages of K?bler-Ross model: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Might his efforts at manipulation (dammit kid, smile!) be a pathetic, desperate compensation for being stuck in the pit of his own despair– depression?

Maybe he needs a healthy dose of the medicine he’s trying to cram down the kid’s throat. Physician heal thyself.

Not with feigned laughter, or manipulated laughter, but honest, spontaneous laughter arising from accepting life as a mixed bag of tragedy AND comedy. Accepting that they are inseparable. Accepting that he must embrace both rather than try to avoid or deny the former or attempt to separate it from the latter.

Just as at the great Dionysian festival in ancient Greece, poets were required to submit 4 plays for the drama competition: 3 tragedies and a comedy. The audience was subjected to three doses of woe and suffering — and then sent home with the balm of comic relief . Not one, but 2 prescriptions of dramatic catharsis: tears and laughter. (Something most scholars who obsess about what the heck Aristotle meant by catharsis seem to overlook, focusing as they do only on tragedy.)

And that, I submit, is a more efficacious intuitive wisdom.

Patch Adams was something of a pre-sold concept as it was based upon a true character. Some may view this a faux-copy-cat of the real person.

It seems to me he shouldn’t be a naively sentimental comical doctor. Not knowingly, anyway. At the start of the story, he should come across as the opposite. His character arc would be to open up emotionally, to develop a sense of compassionate humor, perchance, in spite of, in defiance of all the suffering and death he is witness to.

And I also think that rather than have a casual introduction of doctor and kid, have a causal one. Such as (for example) the doctor meets the kid when he is called upon to consult on the case because the kid has a rare form of cancer that is the doctor’s specialty.

And the doctor’s objective goal would not be to make the kid smile. His objective goal would be to save the kid’s life. The smiling would be a bonus, an emotional payoff in the “B” story, the development of the relationship between doctor and patient, the emotional growth and bonding between them.

fwiw.