Okay, here’s the deal with loglines. There is nothing more important than getting my fucking attention. And by ‘my,’ I mean everybody who’s anybody in Hollywood. We’re all of us so damn busy. Think L.A. is laid back? Wrong! It’s breakfasts, calls, meetings, lunch, meetings, more calls, drinks, screenings, even more goddammed calls. Like when you look at me, and you think you see me, you don’t see shit. ‘Coz while on the outside, it may look like I’m looking at you, inside my mind’s a blur, okay? I mean I can sit there with my eyes wide open locked on you, nodding my head, smiling every so often like I’m hanging on your every word, and the whole time, my mind is off in West Covina somewhere, thinking about that shitty draft a writer just turned in or how my Amgen stock is doing or whether a goddammed recorder can actually record without a goddammed tape.So get my attention. That’s the name of the game. And when it comes to loglines, that should be the name of your game.
Daniel Kunka - successful spec screenwriter:
As great as the 12 Rounds experience was – it got me into the guild, it got me health insurance – this town for a young screenwriter is about “what can you do for me now?” ...
And for a few years I tried to recreate the same thing that happened with 12 Rounds. I wrote two or three action-thrillers much in the Taken vein that just weren’t me. The scripts were fine scripts, but nobody cared. I got a lot of “this is great” reads and that was it. ...
It’s a lesson that was valuable to learn though. I wasn’t writing to my voice. I was writing to what I thought Hollywood wanted. And Hollywood, she’s a fickle mistress. So Agent Ox was my response to that. It was my return back to what the script Copies was that I had written all those years before. A big, fun, genre movie. It was still marketable, it was still trying to give Hollywood something that would hopefully sell, but it was my version of that, my voice, and not some watered-down other thing.
That decision really defined who I became as a writer. It had taken four years of college and maybe eight years after and I had a movie made and I still didn’t quite know until I started writing Ox. And that original idea of the script, it was so simple. I made a document called “High Concept Story Ideas” and just brain dumped a bunch of stuff down for two or three days, and the very last idea in this document were the six words “Human Spy on an Alien Planet” and I knew that was it.
I always joke in meetings now that those were the six words that changed my career and how I think about writing screenplays ...
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