When an irresponsible party girl’s father is framed by the mob, leaving her with an estranged 11-year-old to raise, she must fool social services to keep the child and outwit the mob to get her father out of prison.
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When an irresponsible party girl’s father is framed by the mob, leaving her with an estranged 11-year-old to raise, she must fool social services to keep the child and outwit the mob to get her father out of prison.
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“When an irresponsible party girl?s father is framed by the mob, leaving her with an estranged 11-year-old to raise, she must fool social services to keep the child and outwit the mob to get her father out of prison.”
An interesting premise but it has a few problems. First is the problem of credibility. In order to be able to grow in power and keep that power, the mob has have some pretty smart people. It strains disbelief that a young girl could just outwit them, especially without any resources or experience.
The second problem is that the logline presents two goals. The goal to outwit the mob and the goal to fool social services. The one that sounds more interesting the mob one, so use that logline space to flesh out that storyline more.
What kind of tone is this story? Each goal, to me, brings up two completely tonally different scenarios. The social services one I imagine a comedy type situation where the child have to use antics to keep the social worker from figuring them out. But the mob story I see a legal and crime drama.
I recommend that comedy would make it easier to suspend disbelief in both cases.
Here’s my example:?When her father is framed for murder by the mob, a reckless teenager must find evidence of his innocence. (19)
Good review, DK. Just to add, I think that people (myself included) feel that we must over inform about the story. An interesting party, in most of our cases — a producer with the power to purchase, reads our loglines to see if we are even in the genre they are looking for… and they are all very busy people with hundreds of stories to consider.
So why then do we try to make our story appeal to everyone even if it does not? In reality, we don’t want our say horror script in the hands of Spielberg — he doesn’t make those. It’s a waste of time.
My limited experience hooking has so far led me to believe that our premise had better be razor sharp at communicating our story. If it isn’t, interesting parties won’t even click on it to get to the next part — elevator hook/synopsis/actual script. And that’s what we want them to do.
An party girl must raise a young child while convincing the mob to break her father break out of prison.
I agree with ?Dkpough1. ?It’s hard to suspend disbelief on the elements of the premise. ?That a “irresponsible party girl” can immediately wise up to concurrently outwit the mob. ?And beat the legal system. And fool social services.
Oh, and also provide for and raise her younger sister.
The plot seems to be juggling too many balls. ?It’s probably better to simplify.
Agreed with the above.
What is going to be the main action she pursues? Raise the child on her own? Or, trick social services? OR, outsmart the mafia? Either one will do, but as mentioned above, the genre will change according to the choice.
Thanks everybody, superb advice. I’ll take it all on board!
Sorry, I meant to post that here! Thank you all, Great advice which I will work with!