Salt Line

Logline

A NOAA cartographer finds her brother’s tide charts are a smuggling map.

Synopsis

Elena Marquez redraws a drowned estuary and realizes the soundings in her brother’s last notebook match a route the Coast Guard stopped publishing. She follows the line south with a task-force liaison who already knows the name of the boat.

Comparable titles

Pitch shorthand: Frozen River meets No Country for Old Men

Median budget

$25M

Median worldwide gross

$85M

Median multiple

5.5x

3 of 3 comps report both

Newest comp

2015

Older than ten years

Title	Rating	Budget	Gross	Multiple
Frozen River 2008 Matched on border, native american reservation A financially strapped mother joins a Mohawk woman to smuggle illegal immigrants into the United States.	6.6 373 votes	$1.0M	$5.5M	5.5x
No Country for Old Men 2007 Matched on cartel, border Llewelyn Moss stumbles upon dead bodies, $2 million and a hoard of heroin in a Texas desert, but methodical killer Anton Chigurh comes looking for it, with local sheriff Ed Tom Bell hot on his trail. The roles of prey and predator blur as the violent pursuit of money and justice collide.	8.0 14k votes	$25M	$172M	6.9x
Sicario 2015 Matched on cartel, border An idealistic FBI agent is enlisted by a government task force to aid in the escalating war against drugs at the border area between the U.S. and Mexico.	7.4 10k votes	$30M	$85M	2.8x

Comps average 7.3 across about 8k TMDB votes. Budgets and grosses are TMDB figures and leave out marketing.

Breakdown

No structured draft on file. A breakdown appears once the writer uploads pages or writes them in Tycoon.

Pages on file

The story takes place in a Gulf estuary where the published charts stop at the reservation line. The protagonist is Elena Marquez, a NOAA cartographer tracing her brother’s last soundings. The liaison spreads the confiscated charts on the hood and asks which depth her brother would have trusted. Elena marks the channel that only shows at a negative tide.

No file attached.

Writer

Mara Ellison

Writes crime, horror, and performance stories. Staff writer on Harbor Desk for three seasons. A TMDB person id on a profile is a claim Tycoon stores. It is not an identity check.

No TMDB person id on the profile.