When summer comes and there is no more football to take up his time, a suddenly outed jock must adopt the ‘Gay Best Friend!!’ identity so he get a girlfriend so his parents won?t suspect he is gay.
DanielSturmanLogliner
When summer comes and there is no more football to take up his time, a suddenly outed jock must adopt the ‘Gay Best Friend!!’ identity so he get a girlfriend so his parents won?t suspect he is gay.
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This version of the logline still suffers from most of the problems of the previous version. It doesn’t introduce any real stakes, it describes a plot that relies on outdated tropes. Once again, what’s stopping him from just asking a girl out if that’s what he wants? Why does it matter that his parents don’t find out he’s gay??
I suggest referring back to the previous thread.
I agree with DK. some parents are perfectly okay with their son or daughter coming out, some are not. Stakes would be something like; If his older brother had come out two years early and his parents had disowned him… now we know what the stakes are for the lead character if he comes out to his parent.
DanielSturman:
I get it that even under the best of circumstances, it is not easy for a teenage boy (or girl) to come out to anyone as to their true sexual orientation. ?Even to the most open-minded parents. ? ?(What teenager wants to talk to their parents about anything??relating to sex?)
However, you’re playing the situation for dramatic effect. ?And the warp and woof of drama is tension, conflict, suspense, amped up, magnified, intensified. ?And stakes, the possibility of a nightmare scenario for the protagonist, the worst possible outcome.
Earlier in the week, I spent a day among the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. ?The Amish are a deeply religious, very conservative, tightly knit community where young men are expected to start courting, marry, and begin having kids while they still in their teens. ?If your character was faced with that predicament in that social context, ?the tension, the conflict, the stakes would be about as high as they can possibly be.
The tension and stakes would be so high I don’t see how it could be played for comedy. ? ?But that’s how you want to play out your scenario. Okay, but even in comedy, there has to be real conflict, real stakes for your character.
So what conflict will arise, what’s the worst thing that can happen to him — or that he fears will happen — if they find out? ?What is he worried about — and by extension, what is the audience supposed to be worried about? ?What is the nature of his dramatic problem?
fwiw.
“Coming of age stories do not have such monstrous stakes.”
It’s your story, you can do whatever you want with it. Coming of age stories do not set what the stakes of the story are.?What about Harry Potter? Star Wars? There are many coming of age stories that are mixed with other genres?that inherently bring monstrous stakes to them.
Of course, you’re free to take or not take any of the suggestions given to you. If you don’t want your story be like my version, that’s of course your choice.
I’m not saying that you have to have stakes such as he’ll be killed our something, but like dpg said, there needs to be conflict, something the audience can hang onto.
The point of my posts is, the logline doesn’t in any way say?why?there’s conflict. It gives no indication at all why the protagonist would be so afraid of telling his parents that he goes and gets a girlfriend to fool them. That may be a common occurrence among homosexual teens, they’ll try to ‘fit in’ and act straight even when they know. But stories aren’t about common occurrences. They’re about escapism, about extreme scenarios that only get worse. That creates drama.
I recently watched “The Edge of Seventeen” starring Hailee Steinfeld and Woody Harrelson. Most teenagers likely go through a number of the scenarios played out in the film, including myself. Yet the situations are taken to the extreme, piled on and on and cranked up to 11. The story is relatable yet, for most people, it has just enough to turn it into entertainment and not a retelling of their life with different people.
Basically it boils down to: What happens if the parents find out? That’s what the logline needs to outright say or heavily imply. It can be implied by giving the parents a description, such as homophobic or extremely conservative.
That doesn’t even answer the question of: Why does he need to adopt this persona rather than just asking a girl out?
And, besides all of that, what’s the hook? What separates this story from all of the other stories like this?
I also don’t see how today this would present high enough stakes to justify a film. If the boy lived in a religious/very conservative community it maybe could work, but other wise it wouldn’t. It also sounds a bit cliche, seems to be something we’ve seen many times before on TV and the likes.