Early in his career Hitchcock said that his method of preparing a screenplay with his writers generally stripping the story down to the bare essentials which he would outline on a single page. The next step involved fleshing out that outline into a prose treatment of about 60 to 90 pages, from which the final screenplay with dialogue developed. Hitchcock said, if he was successful in the process, someone creating a synopsis from the finished film would have essentially the one-page synopsis he’d created at the beginning.
With that in mind, I thought we’d start an on-going thread on our Facebook page where I will pitch a logline for each Hitchcock film—a concise, one-line description of the movie including its essential hook—then we’ll discuss how successful Hitchcock and his writers were in carrying it out.
Some loglines will be as simple as “Acting in concert, birds start attacking people for no apparent reason” and others a bit less so, like today’s for Family Plot
:
:A bogus spiritualist and an amateur actor hope to con a wealthy woman out of $10,000 by locating her sole heir—a nephew given up for adoption under shady circumstances—but find they are in deep water as the nephew turns out to be a kidnapper who’d rather not be found.
Critique or defend the finished film, the story elements, the dialogue, the performances, or whatever you like. And if you’d like, write a logline of your own, I think it will be interesting to see just how many ways we all come up with to capture the essense of the same story.
Join the conversation and enjoy!
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