Logline conceit: grab them by the balls.

Jon, here are some 'reflections' by Max Millimeter: Hollywood Movie Producer Extraordinaire precisely to your point:

Okay, here’s the deal with loglines… if this thing really is recording. 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. It’s like baseball. You’re the pitcher, right? Get it, you’re pitching me, right? And I’m the batter. So I go through all that crap a batter does, you know, rubbing my hands together, messing with the bat, tugging at my crotch, the whole nine yards. Finally I step into the box. I’m looking at you, okay. You see me looking at you, but for all you know, I may be in Amgen city. Whaddya do? I’ll tell ya’ what you do. You give me the high heat, right at my goddammed chin. Up and in, one hundred miles an hour, go head hunting with a bullet. Boom! I hit the dirt, okay. Now you got my fucking attention! Amgen? I don’t give a rat’s ass about my stocks or that shitty script or even if this damn recorder is working or not. All I care about at that precise moment is you just knocked me on my fat ass with a goddammed dot. That’s what a killer logline does. You gotta bring the high heat. You gotta make every damn word count. You gotta have a story concept that’s gonna go like a pill right at my chrome dome, you hear me? That’s why I have the six-word rule. You got six words… count ‘em… one, two, three, four, five, six… six words in your logline to get my attention. If six words in your logline don’t come right at me, high and hard, and knock me on my keister, then you ain’t getting my attention. And your story? That’s a big fat Pasadena. Now the loglines the Desk Jockey gave me yesterday, there were a few I made it all the way to the end. They were kinda maybe interesting, we’ll see. But a lot of ‘em… well… no use beating around the bush. They stunk. I mean this with all due respect ‘coz I know how goddammed hard it is to come up with a good story. But the thing is, we’re talking movies. Over a hundred years, Hollywood’s been making movies, stories that make you go, wow. That get in your heart, get in your soul. How you can be just walking down the street one day, and bam! Suddenly outta nowhere, you’re seeing that scene from a movie you saw twenty years ago. You see the faces, you hear the dialogue, you remember it like yesterday. I mean, you can’t even remember what you had for breakfast this morning, and here you are reliving this scene from something you saw in a two-bit theater when you were a snot-nosed kid. Movies can do that, it’s like magic. There’s nothing… nothing like movies. A good movie, when you see it, you forget about anything else, it grabs your attention and won’t let you go. You see where I’m going with this? The story idea is the key to the whole thing. It’s the guts of the movie, it’s a fastball that comes in high and hard, and knocks a person on their ass. And you know where this is most important? Marketing. Computers and online and social damn media, that idea just whips out of all that noise and goes right at your head. Bang! You’re laid out. Wow, I gotta go see that movie! That’s your story idea, that’s your logline, it’s the high hard one, it’s the dot coming right at my head, up and in. You got six words. Six. To knock me off my feet. You do that? You got my fucking attention. And maybe I’ll even forget worrying about if this goddammed recorder is working or not.

Grab by the balls. Knock off their feet. Loglines should do something to get a person's attention.

Excellent. Thanks for that.

Thanks! This is very helpful.