Dorothy and her partners in crime - Scarecrow, Lion and Tin-Man - in "The Wizard Of Oz"
For those of you not on Twitter, I wouldn’t want you to miss out on all the fun…
Every now and then, there’s a hashtag game that really captures the Twitter-sphere’s imagination and creates a few laughs into the bargain. This weekend in London #ExplainAFilmPlotBadly was the number one trending topic over two days. It was inspired by a logline seen in a TV schedule listing:
"Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again."
That's one way of looking at things! Behind the humour is a skill all new screenwriters struggle to hone: crafting the dreaded logline. In short, the ability to encapsulate an entire movie in a sentence or two. Of course, for any given film there is no one right answer. The "official" logline you read in a film's marketing material has been chosen by the producers to anchor your expectations as to the sort of emotional ride you're going to go on when you watch the film.
I was interested to see the same films come up over and over again – Star Wars, Harry Potter, Titanic - evidence (perhaps) of how much impact certain films have had on the collective psyche.
See if you can guess the films that inspired the “bad” loglines below. Don’t be surprised to see the same film cropping up more than once. The answers are at the end – no cheating now.
MY ATTEMPTS (KT Parker @lunaperla)
a) A woman goes to the dark side of the moon and back, having a secret George Clooney fantasy along the way.
b) Height-impaired creatures on a see-food diet trek across New Zealand in real time.
c) Enterprising producer/director makes aging actor's out-takes into action film with *action-cut-repeat* theme.
d) Girl has the best dessert ever while on a road trip across the US with cynical boy.
(I still want whatever she had...)
e) The guy who plays Eames steals the show. Also, the music is awesome.
f) Annoying Italian teaches his son to always look on the bright side of life in a Nazi concentration camp.
g) In a world where there are 999 males of various near-humanoid species to every female there are lots of battles.
h) Ms Bullock is Maj. Tom floating in a most peculiar way until oxygen kicks in & she becomes the Woman Who Fell 2 Earth
Now that you’ve got the general idea how the game works, here are tweets by other writers that had me sniggering.
Janet Leigh in the legendary shower scene from Hitchcock's "Psycho"
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