First off, I know that most of the people who read this blog are from the film score world, not the aspiring-screenwriting world—and that’s fine.
For the past month I’ve done a weekly “talk show” with my friend Charlie Vignola about screenwriting.
This is mostly because it’s for fun for us; we truly want to give people free, useful advice—as opposed to the “hope industry” of contests, coverage sites and courses that are profit-driven and man, some of these “instructors” couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag.
We’re going to start analyzing loglines on our show, to help the writers understand how their submissions would be received by actual working professionals (Charlie spent 30 years working for Jerry Bruckheimer). No snark, no competition, no prizes—just honest feedback that hopefully will help everybody...including us!
What’s a logline? It’s NOT a poster tagline (“In space, no one can hear you scream”) but rather the one- or two-sentence capsule summary that industry professionals use to determine if they even want to read the script, a la—
A QUIET PLACE: In a decimated near-future a lone family must try to survive ferocious alien creatures who hunt using acute hearing.
We’ve been a little nervous about this, because when you start receiving people’s ideas, you run the risk of them popping up years later to sue you, “Hey, that was my idea!”
This is a pretty big topic and we’ll address it on the show. For a bunch of reasons, we don’t think it’s a real problem that anybody’s idea will be stolen—but of course, people are protective, and if you don’t feel comfortable with submitting to us...don’t!
We’re working on getting a legal release form created, but in the meantime, our workaround is that if the submission is posted publicly—on Twitter or reddit—well, all we’ve done is commented upon something that’s publicly available.
This will probably start slow but I think it’ll actually catch on pretty quick. Writers are usually extremely focused on getting their work heard and read!