The hyperlink Tor Dollhouse posted to the Village Voice article is the god's-honest-bitter truth about the biz.
>> but putting it into rigid rules, especially something only a few lines long is kind of weird.
I'm not a slave to the one sentence rule as inviolable as long as the sentences are logically/dramatically linked. Nor a believer that there is one standard formulation for a logline )"When W happens, Y must X [before or else] Z").
But a 51 word logline for "Temporal Insanity" is the kiss of death in terms of getting Hollyweird suits to read the logline, let alone the script. Being a data wonk, I have been compiling and studying a list of loglines for movies that actually got produced. Of the 412 loglines collected so far, the average word length is 23 words. 67.1% of the 412 loglines are 25 words or less. The longest logline is 39 words.