A selfish weatherman has to live the same day over and over until he becomes a good man.

That's the whole logline, and I think it's the best one in the business.

Here's why. You can't say it without saying the arc. The only way out of the loop is for him to change, so the premise and the theme end up in the same sentence. You don't have to add anything. It's already in there.

The difference between an 8 and a 10

Most of our one-liners are an 8.

An 8 is a good situation with the character's change bolted on beside it. You can usually spot one because it needs a second sentence to tell you what the character learns. Something like: a workaholic lawyer gets stranded in a small town over Christmas, and she learns what really matters.

That second clause is doing the work the premise should be doing. The situation and the change are two separate things sitting next to each other, and you can feel the seam.

A 10 doesn't need the second sentence. The situation forces the change. Take the change away and the story can't end.

Groundhog Day has the other thing a 10 has, too, which is that it sounds like it already existed. You hear it once and it seems obvious, like somebody must have written it in 1950. Most of us wish we'd gotten there first.

Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis wrote it. Ramis directed.

Two more built the same way

Get Out. Written and directed by Jordan Peele. A Black man meets his white girlfriend's liberal family, and their warmth is the horror.

Look at what that does. The setting is the theme. You can't move that story to a different family in a different place without losing the thing it's about. The politeness isn't decoration around the scare. It is the scare.

The Truman Show. Andrew Niccol wrote it, Peter Weir directed. A man finds out his whole life is a television show.

The question underneath it, whether your life is actually your own, is also the plot. Answering it ends the movie. The minute Truman walks through the door, there's no story left, which is exactly why that's the last shot.

In all three, the premise forces the inner change. The story can't happen without it.

A thing I didn't know about the Groundhog Day draft

Rubin's original draft opened with Phil already inside the loop.

The ordinary day, the one you watch play out straight before the pattern starts, got added later.

And that's the whole craft lesson in one note. You can't repeat something the audience never saw plain the first time. The repetition only lands because you sat through the normal version and know exactly which beats are coming. Ned Ryerson doesn't work on day one. He works on day four.

So somebody figured out that the setup wasn't slack, it was the mechanism. That's the kind of fix that looks obvious in the finished film and is almost impossible to see in your own draft.

Run the test on yours

Go look at your own one-liner. Actually go get it, don't do this from memory, because from memory we all remember a better version than the one we wrote.

Then:

Can you say your premise without saying what your character has to become? If you can, the two aren't locked together yet.

What would your lead have to turn into for the situation to end?

Is that change the only way out, or just the nicest one?

That last question is the one that costs. Most of our stories have a back door. The character could also just leave town, or take the deal, or tell the truth early. If there's another way out, your audience will find it before you do, and they'll spend the third act wondering why nobody took it.

Close the door. Then the logline writes itself.

Groundhog Day written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis, directed by Ramis. Get Out written and directed by Jordan Peele. The Truman Show written by Andrew Niccol, directed by Peter Weir.