The greater the need, the higher the stakes, the more riveting your script.
Let’s say you’re thinking of having your hero dye her hair bright red in Act Two. A new coiffure will be a nice visual change.
So is that a good story idea or not?
It depends. If your Hero is simply changing her hair color on a whim, there’s no burning necessity. It will just slow things down.
But in The Pelican Brief, Darby (Julia Roberts) stops to dye her hair while she’s hiding out alone in a New Orleans hotel room. Killers are closing in. She’s desperately trying to conceal her identity in order to escape. And being by herself in the hotel room is all the more bitterly painful because just an hour ago Darby witnessed the man she loves being blown to pieces by a car bomb.
In this case the hero changing her hair color is an urgent action fueled by incredibly high stakes. She must change her appearance and vanish into the crowd or die.
Big stakes raise the temperature of everything and we can’t pull our eyes away from people who are experiencing ever higher levels of emotional heat.
TYPES OF HIGH STAKES
Since having something important at stake draws an audience ever more deeply into your story, we need to know the various kinds of stakes that make the hero’s desire for change as gripping as possible. Here’s the list:
1. LIFE OR DEATH.
List finished.
What’s at stake for the hero must be on the level of nothing less than life or death. Only the highest motivation will drive the lead forward through all the insurmountable obstacles to come and keep viewers riveted to the very end.
But aren’t there lots of films where the possibility that the hero might get killed isn’t even a consideration? Like in most comedies?
Of course. And in dramatic writing there are two subcategories of life or death stakes.
1. LIFE OR DEATH STAKES, TYPE A
The literal kind.
Here, if the hero fails, he’s burnt toast. Finito.
This represents perhaps 80% of all commercial motion pictures produced by Hollywood.
Look at any of the big studios’ summer release schedules. You’ll see very few films where the possible outcome for the hero is anything less than to stay alive or get dead.
2. LIFE OR DEATH STAKES, TYPE B
The metaphorical kind.
When someone experiences a soul-wrenching defeat or loss from which they never fully recover, we often speak of that person as having “died inside.” Or that they’re among “the walking dead.” Even though they continue to breathe and work and eat, we recognize such a person as a mere shell of their former self.
Besides physical death there can be a death of the spirit.
Anyone who has ever fought for the ultimate prize of true love knows that quest, too, is a matter of life or death.
Serendipity is a romantic comedy about Jonathan (John Cusack) and Sara (Kate Beckinsale), who meet, spend a few gloriously romantic hours together, and feel the lightening bolt strike. But Sara sets up a test for Jonathan in order to see if fate really intends them for each other. Unfair Injury strikes and causes Jonathan to blow Sara’s test. They are parted.
Years later, both are within hours of marrying someone less worthy. Separately, Jonathan and Sara sense they might be marrying the wrong person because maybe, just maybe, destiny’s True Intended for them was lost years before.
In the desperate few hours before matrimony, each takes off on a mad hunt for the other.
What charm Serendipity possesses grows out of the way the filmmakers play off of the metaphorical life or death stakes built into a there’s-only-one-true-love-for-me philosophy: either lovers recognize their preordained perfect match at the instant they meet, or the chance for ultimate happiness vanishes forever.
And the fact that Sara and Jonathan are both only hours away from marriage to the wrong people raises these emotional life or death stakes to the maximum wattage.
There are hundreds of movies with impending weddings in them because that’s where some of the highest emotional stakes in life can be found. Theoretically, at least, weddings create a permanent union. So the looming stakes of personal fulfillment or eternal loss rise to a level of spiritual life or death.
In the middle of the romantic comedy Working Girl, hero Tess McGill goes to a blue collar bar in the low-rent New Jersey neighborhood where she has always lived, to attend a wedding shower for her best friend, Cyn (Joan Cusack). Tess was born into this working-class world, but she’s now scheming to become a successful business executive.
Tess arrives at Cyn’s wedding shower in a tailored suit with her hair and makeup strictly high class — looking very different from her home-front friends. As the whole party watches, Tess’s boyfriend Mick (Alec Baldwin), a commercial fisherman, gets down on one knee and asks Tess to marry him — even though just two days earlier Tess caught him in bed with another woman. Put on the spot, Tess answers with a tepid “maybe.”
Storming away from the bar, Mick rails that Tess made a fool out of him. Tess retorts, “I’m not steak. You can’t order me.” Mick declares that until she gets her priorities straight, they’re through. He huffs off.
Now Tess walks down to the Hudson River and gazes out across night waters to the glowing lights of Manhattan on the far side. It’s crystal clear she no longer belongs in this working-class world. She can’t go home again.
Those twinkling lights of New York City are now Tess’s only hope to become the free and self-possessed person she longs to be.
The stakes of Tess’s upcoming business deal have just become — metaphorical life or death. The highest stakes possible.
I’ve read scores of screenplays by newcomers with plots involving heroes who are working toward a job promotion, just like Tess McGill. But often what’s missing is that if the hero doesn’t get the desired promotion, nothing will change. Life will go on as before and there’s no price to be paid if the hero doesn’t succeed.
Recently I read an otherwise well-written script – except it was built around this plot: a handsome, brilliant, rich young man works as a mid-level executive in his mother’s huge corporation. He maneuvers for a promotion but does not get it. With pique the hero quits his mom’s company and sets up a business in direct competition against his mother. Helped by his very rich friends, right away the hero bags a big deal and his company grows larger than mom’s. The end.
What was at stake for this hero?
Absolutely nothing.
When he doesn’t get his promotion from mama he’s still rich, still handsome, and still heir to a vast fortune. Even when he leaves his mom’s company he remains the apple of mama’s eye, still in a privileged position and helped by everyone.
Events take place in this story, but there’s no change, nothing to lose, no issue of deep importance at stake for the hero aside from his own ego.
Compare that to the setup in Legally Blonde. Here the hero Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) also hails from a rather privileged background. But Elle is deeply in love with Warner — who dumps her when he heads off to attend Harvard Law School. Shattered, Elle decides that the only way to land her man again is to get into Harvard Law herself and prove to Warner just how classy she can be.
Everyone sees Elle as an air-headed blonde without a chance in Hades of making it into Harvard Law. But through smarts and hard work, she does get in. Then when Elle follows