Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

by Blake Snyder

Because liking the person we go on a journey with is the single most important element in drawing us into the story.

I call it the “Save the Cat” scene. They don’t put it into movies anymore. And it’s basic. It’s the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something — like saving a cat — that defines who he is and makes us, the audience, like him.

It’s not that Hollywood is creatively bankrupt; the decision-makers just don’t think that you out there with your newspapers every Saturday really, deep down, want to try anything new.

Because if you can learn how to tell me “What is it?” better, faster, and with more creativity, you’ll keep me interested. And incidentally, by doing so before you start writing your script, you’ll make the story better, too.

The number one thing a good logline must have, the single most important element, is: irony.

A cop comes to L.A. to visit his estranged wife and her office building is taken over by terrorists

What Colby identified is the fact that a good logline must be emotionally intriguing, like an itch you have to scratch.

The second most important element that a good logline has is that you must be able to see a whole movie in it.

This is why “fish-out-of-water” stories are so popular: You can see the potential fireworks of one type of person being thrust into a world outside his ken. In that one set-up line a whole story blooms with possibilities.

One of the best titles of recent memory, and one I still marvel at, is Legally Blonde. When I think about all the bad titles it could have been — Barbie Goes To Harvard, Totally Law School, Airhead Apparent — to come up with one that nails the concept, without being so on the nose that it’s stupid, is an art unto itself. I am jealous of that title. A good sign!

If it doesn’t pass the Say What It Is Test, you don’t have your title. And you don’t have the one-two punch that makes a great logline.

a. I have no fear that anyone will steal my idea (and anyone who has that fear is an amateur) and… b. You find out more about your movie by talking to people one-on-one than having them read it. This is what I mean by “test marketing.”

There are a lot more strangers than friends buying tickets to movies. No matter who is encouraging you on the friend side of your life, it’s the strangers you really need to impress. What better way to find out what you’ve got than to actually go out and ask?

Think about every Alfred Hitchcock thriller ever made — Rear Window, North by Northwest, Vertigo and Psycho. Just mentioning these movies to a true fan evokes the pitch and the poster of each story. And check out those titles. All of them, across the board, certainly say what it is and they do so in a way that’s not on the nose or stupid (well, Psycho is potentially lame, but we’ll let him off the hook on that one — it’s Hitchcock, after all).

Irony. It must be in some way ironic and emotionally involving — a dramatic situation that is like an itch you have to scratch. A compelling mental picture. It must bloom in your mind when you hear it. A whole movie must be implied, often including a time frame. Audience and cost. It must demarcate the tone, the target audience, and the sense of cost, so buyers will know if it can make a profit. A killer title. The one-two punch of a good logline must include a great title, one that “says what it is” and does so in a clever way.