Dkpough1:

I think either of your formulations work. ?The inciting incident is clearly implicit in your 1st version. ?Also, the standard formula of “When X happens, Y must struggle…” is occasionally more wordy, ?like 26 words versus 20 in your example. ?All other things being equal, I tilt in favor of brevity over conformity to a standard formulation.

My primary sources for collecting loglines for existing movies are the trade papers (Variety, The Hollywood Reporter), the New York Times and IMDB. ?They’re all essentially blurbs, not loglines. ?The former is designed to sell the movie to viewers; the latter is designed to sell the movie idea and script to movie makers. So, yeah, I have to massage the material, sometimes a lot (particularly with IMDB). ?But it’s been a fabulous way to learn the art and craft.

I started collecting and analyzing loglines for existing movies because: ?1] I have nothing better to do with my time (obviously). 2] Being more analytical than creative (you noticed that, too?), I wondered how valid the 25-words-or-less rule was. ?Is 25 a number someone just pulled out of a hat ?and it became the “industry wisdom”? ?Or is there a sound statistical basis for it?

Although I’m guessing the 25 number was arrived at by intuition, sure enough when I did the math I arrived at ?similar number. ?After collecting a sample of 200 loglines, I came up with a statistical median average of 24 words with a standard deviation of about 6 words, skewed ?toward above the average.

And those numbers and distribution has remained fairly stable ever since. So the takeaway is that 25 words is, indeed, ?a valid number. ?(And none of the 700+ loglines exceed 40 words which is the basis for my red line. I’m not just pulling the number 40 out of a hat.)

fwiw