There is a general rule of thumb in Hollywood that the best – or at least most popular – films can be boiled down to a single sentence.
A logline is a brief summary of the main events of a movie, squeezed into a few words. The term came into use in the old days of Hollywood when the studios ruled the industry. Because each studio stored so many scripts in their vaults, all awaiting the magical greenlight, they needed a quick way to identify the plot of each script. The log line would be printed on the script’s spine, so filmmakers in search of a new script could simply browse the stacks and declare their interest in ‘the one where the guy gets the girl and everything turns out rosy after a period of seemingly inescapable peril’.

However, log lines are not always as simple as you might expect, with many writers playing with them over the years. You may easily guess that ‘Die Hard on a bus’ is a logline for Speed. Or even that ‘A schizophrenic masochist tries to bring the world to an end’ indicates Fight Club. But can you identify the film from this logline, famously coined by American humorist Richard Polito: ‘A young girl in a strange land kills the first person she meets, then teams up with three strange loners to kill again’. Got it? No? It’s The Wizard Of Oz. Or how about, ‘An out-of-town visitor enlists the help of a small boy to call his family’? E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial. For more bizarre loglines, check out this site.