This posting is a spillover of some random thoughts generated by another thread of discussion. I?m posting it separately so as not to take the focus of that thread off the logline being discussed.

This is the shortest in my collection. At 9 words and 48 characters, it?s one I?ve pondered and puttered with more than any other logline.

Why?

Because it breaks all the rules. It has no inciting incident, no objective goal. And it?s a spoiler; it gives away the ending.

And yet it did the job a logline is supposed to do. The screenwriter, Scott Neustadter, says that this is the logline he used to sell the script.

It worked even though the logline was a cold call. That is, AFAIK, at the time Neustadter had no track record as a script writer, no contacts in the industry. The logline had to sell the script on the strength of its hook. Which is a clever twist on the love story. It?s ?high concept?.

Not only does it get away with breaking the rules, I have come to conclude that it must break the rules. Why?

Because the conventional rules apply to the ?A? story, you know, the one with an objective goal. But ?500 Days of Summer? is more about the ?B? story, the relationship between the two characters, less about the ?A? story, any objective goal they are pursuing. (The boy does have an objective goal, but it?s almost incidental.) Most of the humor and dramatic tension are in the ?B? story, not the ?A? story.

The ?B? story is simply more interesting and more important important than the ?A? story.

This has got me to thinking that a different set of guidelines may be appropriate for scripts where the focus, the hook, the ?sizzle? is in the ?B? story, not the ?A? story. (But I?m still brooding over what they might be.)

Once again, I offer my standard caveat: this is an outlier, an exception. ?I think that 95% of the time the standard guidelines apply.?

fwiw