Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Logline Central - Abduction

Logline Central is an irregular segment that takes a deeper look at loglines of scripts or projects that have just been purchased, as listed on DoneDealPro.  
Right off the bat, this logline intrigued me. 


Title: Abduction
Logline: A young man discovers his own baby picture on a missing persons website.
Writer: Shawn Christensen
Price: High six-figures against seven
More: Spec, part of a bidding war. Based on an idea by Jeremy Bell. Gotham's Ellen Goldsmith-Vein & Lee Stollman, Vertigo's Roy Lee & Doug Davison and Tailor Made's Dan Lautner will produce. Gotham's Bell and Vertigo's Gabriel Mason will executive produce. Taylor Lautner will star.  
It's got "everything" a logline needs. [Note: everything placed in quotation marks there, because it's less traditional than loglines most writers are first taught to write. It doesn't have the second component, if you're abiding by the "When (event) happens, (protagonist) must (action)."] It has the inciting incident - the discovery of the baby picture on the website - the protagonist - the young man - and, most importantly, enough intrigue to pique a reader's attention.

The logline raises a number of questions, but all in a good way. What's his reaction to the discovery? What happens when he finds out more about his original parents? Are his parents for all these years really kidnappers? Does he have a happy life currently? Does he even want to upset his status quo by exploring the discovery more? How does this affect him?

I want to know all that and more, and because of that, I would certainly request the script if I was a VP of Acquisitions. (I'm not a Twi-hard Taylor Lautner fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm curious enough about the script to follow this one a bit closer, despite him.) And we'll see what Shawn Christensen does with the material. An imdb search didn't turn much up on his writing history other than a short and a feature that's still in development. He has one other project in development, which seems to have sold for an impressive $750K against $1.5 million, so he might be someone to watch out for.