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Zack Stentz’s Stance on Script Stakes

I may not have previously expressed my appreciation for Zack Stentz (from the truly awesome Sarah Connor Chronicles show), so here we go.

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying his daily long tweetscussions© about screenwriting for a bit now.
They’re so cool that he should really compile them on his blog.
Since this isn’t the case (yet?), I shall do it for him. Rather, I’ll compile what I think is one of his better tweetologue© from this past month: the August 6 talk about stakes. And not the Buffy kind.

Turns out, scripts need to have stakes. Yeah, shocker. What’s relevant to us however, especially for television, is that stakes can’t be as high as a lot of modern block-busters (at least they are in appearance). You can’t save the planet every episode. In fact, one would think that the average action movie has the Earth/USA in jeopardy, constantly. Turns out, this isn’t quite right. You should dig a little bit deeper to find the real meat. That’s right, character stakes (aka TV’s bread and butter).
Zack goes over a few feature examples, specifically from both Thor (which he co-wrote) and the Star Trek reboot. It may not be much (only ten tweets), but it’s still pretty interesting.

And now, I’ll shut up and let the tweets talk:

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