So as most of you surely know, longtime GITS reader Jeff Messerman approached me several weeks ago about starting a peer review adjunct to the blog, which has resulted in The GITS Club. When I drafted this post on Sunday afternoon, there were currently 117 members and a lot more activity and interest than either Jeff or I imagined would happen this quickly (less than a month online).

One of the things Jeff and I have discussed is to spotlight something from TGC here on the blog every other week or so (hopefully more frequently once my work schedule settles down a bit). So for the inaugural post, we’re spotlighting this logline called “I.O.Lou”:

Desperate for cash to save his family home, a slacker sets out to collect on all his childhood IOUs from his now adult debtors.

TGC members responded very favorably to the idea. Here’s an observation from brianhaas:

That’s one of the better loglines I’ve seen on screenwriting message boards. You have the main conflict (losing the home), you’ve got the protagonist’s goal and you’ve got how he hopes to achieve it. Nice.

The creator of the logline is Terrance Ellis and here’s some background on him:

Not to sound cliché, but I’ve been writing all my life; mostly the inner toils of my mind and emotions (aka poetry), definitely nothing to book a nationwide signing tour on.

In 2003 with my wife’s encouragement, I self-published book of my poetry. She believed in my enough for us to uproot from Chicago and move out to Los Angeles to pursue writing for the silver screen.

While in Chicago, I took a screenwriting course taught by Dan Decker, author of “Anatomy of a Screenplay”. The class was a blast. I’ve written four crappy feature scripts and have started & stopped countless others. I’m currently developing a few of what I feel are my best ideas and plan on writing and actually finishing them.

I work at one of the major studios in town and feel that it gives me good access to the business of filmmaking. My goal, at this point, is to execute upon my ideas and complete more scripts. I’m not to focused on anything after that because my biggest obstacle is not getting past “FADE IN”.

GITS Club has become a great resource for me. It’s good to interact with other aspirants and receive their thoughts on my ideas.

I was never huge on forums or anything like that, but I became such a fan of Scott’s GITS site, that I jumped at a chance to be a part of the forum. Thanks for everything that you guys do.

What I propose to do is start a thread with this post for GITS readers to weigh in with their initial reactions about the logline. So please go to comments and provide your feedback.

But I also have this in mind: What if I take you through my process of how I build up a story from the core story concept? I figure that, along with comments of GITS readers, will help Terrance. And hopefully, there may be some lessons to be learned in how to develop a story.

So here’s my first step: I dredge through my memory banks to see how similar / different the idea is to pre-existing movies. The closest thing I could come up with for “I.O.Lou” is the TV series “My Name is Earl,” starring Jason Lee. Here’s that series premise:

A ne’er do well wins $100,000 in the lottery and decides to right all the wrongs from his past with his newfound realization.

There are two similar elements: (1) Slacker Protagonist; (2) Protagonist seeks out people from his past to even out things. Only per the latter, whereas Earl is trying to make up for mistakes he made in the past, the “I.O.Lou” P is trying to get paid up for loans he made in the past, so in essence a reverse dynamic – the former seeking to give, the latter seeking to take.

There have been a number of movies about adult characters reconnecting with childhood acquaintances including Big Bully: “A writer returns to his hometown where he faces the childhood nemesis whose life he ultimately ruined, only the bully wants to relive their painful past by torturing him once again.”

More important there are some projects in development — middle-age guys go back to relive their summer camp days; former members of a high school football team reunite to take on their former rivals — which traffic with that similar narrative element. So at first blush, there doesn’t seem to be a project that is too close to “I.O.Lou” — thereby squashing the idea — and there are a number of ‘similar but different’ projects, which is actually a good thing because of how timid the studios are at stepping out of their comfort zone.

So join me in comments – to post your reactions to the logline and any other movie associations (ala Big Bully and “My Name Is Earl”) to help steer the discussion.

Tomorrow: I ask a few big questions to continue to determine the viability of the story concept. After that, we’ll move into story development proper.