1. Posted: April 25, 2019In:

    In 1977, a reformed ex-con, desperate to pay for his mother?s hospital bill, returns to his old life of drug dealing but soon learns the game has changed and the players are more ruthless than before.

    dpg Singularity

    thedarkhorse:I? think the setting is the story hook for the ex-con story.? It's the one element that sets your story apart from all the others about an ex-con (nothing new about that) falling back into the drug scene (where only a 1001 other movies have been there, done that).And if you're going toRead more

    thedarkhorse:

    I? think the setting is the story hook for the ex-con story.? It’s the one element that sets your story apart from all the others about an ex-con (nothing new about that) falling back into the drug scene (where only a 1001 other movies have been there, done that).

    And if you’re going to stipulate 1977 in the logline and script, there’s got to be a good reason.? Otherwise, the 1st question that will occur to a movie producer is: why not set it in the present?? Save a lot of money on production –not having to recreate period –cars, clothes, etc.

    Marketing loglines are about selling? the sizzle — not the steak.? And , imho,? the sizzle in this story is the historic Black Out.

    See less
    • 0
  2. Posted: April 25, 2019In:

    In 1977, a reformed ex-con, desperate to pay for his mother?s hospital bill, returns to his old life of drug dealing but soon learns the game has changed and the players are more ruthless than before.

    dpg Singularity

    darkhorse:FWIW:? your 1st iteration of a logline for your script did hook my interest.? And the element that did the trick was the? 1977 NYC Blackout.? I imagined most of the story would play out over the course of the Blackout.? That event, I thought, could lead to some interesting dramatic situatiRead more

    darkhorse:

    FWIW:? your 1st iteration of a logline for your script did hook my interest.? And the element that did the trick was the? 1977 NYC Blackout.? I imagined most of the story would play out over the course of the Blackout.? That event, I thought, could lead to some interesting dramatic situations.

    Now, I have the sense that the Blackout is a secondary event,? that occurs late in the story,? How prominently (like how many pages) is the Blackout featured in your finished script?

    ?

    See less
    • 0
  3. Posted: May 3, 2019In: ,

    A suicidal mercenary sets out to rescue the girl he was hired to protect, the girl who gave him a reason to live, after she’s kidnapped for ransom.

    dpg Singularity

    Aidan:I think it is debatable whether "Man on Fire" is composed of two different plots. It depends on how one defines and applies the term "plot".The Greek philosopher Aristotle in his classic treatise on tragedy, "The Poetics", established the first working definition of "plot", a definition that hRead more

    Aidan:

    I think it is debatable whether “Man on Fire” is composed of two different plots. It depends on how one defines and applies the term “plot”.

    The Greek philosopher Aristotle in his classic treatise on tragedy, “The Poetics”, established the first working definition of “plot”, a definition that has prevailed.? Aristotle defined a plot in terms of a unity of action (not of character). Of one action, “the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whose will be disjointed and disturbed.” (Chapter 8)

    And then we have the dramatic principle of “Chekhov’s gun”, named after Anton Chekhov, the great Russian dramatist. Chekhov wrote that if you introduce a gun in the 1st Act of your play, it’s got to be fired in the 2nd Act.? If you introduce a potential threat in the 1st half, you have to deliver on it in the 2nd half.

    “Man on Fire” opens with a title card about the plague of kidnappings for ransom in Mexico and then dramatizes it with a specific incident. Having planted the “gun” of kidnapping in the 1st Act, (which is why the protagonist has been hired), the film must fire it in the 2nd.

    Which it does: the girl is kidnapped. The protagonist has failed to achieve his objective goal, to protect the girl. End of that plot, right?

    Well, maybe not. This is not the forum to go into the weeds.? Suffice it to say that based upon my reading of “The Poetics”, the unity of action? in “Man on Fire” is the ongoing threat of kidnappings for ransom. The unity of action is provided by the bad guys, not the good guy.

    I submit that if one defines “unity of action” narrowly, solely in terms of whether the protagonist succeeds in achieving his initial objective goal, than logically it leads to a disjunctive conclusion that subverts the meaning of the term.

    FWIW

    See less
    • 0