Plants and Payoffs
Screenwriting Tricks for Authors
Movies are a great way to get familiar with the important narrative technique of Plants & Payoffs.
This is a storytelling trick that filmmakers are particularly aware of and deft at, and I very strongly encourage you novelists to start looking for this element in the movies you watch and books you read, to get good at using it in your own work.
I’ve been organizing the archived posts for subscribers here in this Table of Contents, to correspond with the chapters of the Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbooks. And I realized I never sent this expanded post on Plants and Payoffs. (Also see Stealing Hollywood, Chapter 34).
Plants and Payoffs are often developed at the rewrite stage, but it’s important to understand this important narrative concept right now, at whatever stage of writing you’re at, so your creative brain can be busy back there (wherever there is…) working on these for you!
Other names for this technique are Setup/Reveal, Plant/Reveal, Setup/Payoff, and sometimes FORESHADOWING (which can be a bit different, more subtle).
On the most basic level, a PLANT is showing the gun in the first act if you’re going to use it in the third act (this principle is known as “Chekov’s Gun”). But plants can be much more than that, and serve many different story functions.
As always, it’s easier to spot narrative tricks like this in movies, and because almost everyone has seen the movie, I always use the classic example of a plant from the first sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark: Indy freaking out about the snake on the plane. The PLANT is cleverly hidden because we think it’s just a comic moment — this big, bad hero just survived a maze of lethal booby traps and an entire tribe of warriors trying to kill him — and then he wimps out about a little old snake. (Also of course this is a phallic joke, just in case we didn’t notice Harrison Ford’s hotness.)
But the real PAYOFF comes way later when Salla slides the stone slab off the entrance to the tomb, and Indy shines the light down into the pit — to reveal a live mass of thousands of coiling snakes. It’s so much later in the film that we’ve completely forgotten that Indy has a pathological fear of snakes, but that’s what makes it all so funny. (Of course it’s also a suspense builder in this case: the descent into the tomb is that much more scary because we’re feeling Indy’s revulsion.)
Plants and payoffs are often painstakingly engineered and deliberately woven into the plotline for maximum effect.
It’s a big seductive game to play with your readers/audience, and an audience eats it up.
But again, they’re very, very often developed in rewrites, so don’t freak out if you haven’t been thinking about them! There’s plenty of time to weave them in. Once you’ve written your first draft, you can start looking for what your subconscious has already set up, and engineer the payoffs – or reverse engineer a set up to make a payoff play.
Plants and Payoffs: Examples
In the first sequence, Raiders of the Lost Ark also thematically SETS up the theme of world religions and the sacrilege that Indy is committing with his tomb raiding, which PAYS OFF hugely in the climax of the film - see full discussions here:
Any film of Spielberg’s is going to be filled with plants and payoffs, so you can’t go wrong having a Spielberg marathon to get familiar with the technique.
- In E.T., E.T. heals the potted marigolds early on, and then we see the marigolds slowly dying as E.T. gets sick. Then in the ALL IS LOST scene, when E.T. has died, and his body has been locked up in refrigerated capsule, the marigolds start to bloom again, and we realize E.T. is alive in there. Of course the reading of the “clap if you believe in fairies” scene of Peter Pan is a plant for the resurrection of E.T., too.
- In Poltergeist, the hideous toy clown and the twisted tree are set up as the children’s fears, which provide terrific scares when the house starts to come alive. The little funeral for the bird, and the desecration of that little grave that happens when the bulldozers start digging the pool, is a set up for the payoff that the developers put the housing development on top of a cemetery. It introduces a thematic concept and supernatural explanation without announcing that that’s what it’s doing.
- In Jaws, when Sheriff Brody first gets on board Quint’s boat, he accidentally pulls a rope that makes the oxygen tanks tumble to the deck, and Quint and Hooper freak out because the tanks could have blown up the ship. It looks like just a moment showing how out of place Brody is on the boat— but actually it’s a set up for how he will kill the shark in the end. Again, the plant is cleverly hidden, so we virtually forget about it until that “Aha!” moment when Brody brilliantly decides to use the tank to try to kill the shark. It’s that recognition, the fact that you understand what he’s up to, that makes the audience feel they’re in on the action and not just watching.
- Another textbook example of brilliant use of plants and payoffs is Back To The Future. Pretty much everything we see in the entire first sequence is a setup for a perfectly exhilarating reveal at the end. And you could say the same about the first sequence of Groundhog Day: the first sequence sets up the day that Bill Murray will repeat over and over and over again.
Plants are often used to set up a weakness of the hero/ine that will be tested, usually in the final battle. Very often in the second act we will see a battle before the final battle in which the hero/ine fails because of this weakness, so the suspense is even greater when they go into the final battle in the third act. I’ve mentioned both of these examples before:
- In the training sequence of The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda continually gets angry with Luke for not trusting the Force… and in his final battle with Vader, Luke’s only chance of survival is putting his entire fate in the hands of the Force he’s not sure he believes in. It’s not just a victory in battle, but a true character change as well.
- And in the film Dirty Dancing, in rehearsal after rehearsal, Baby can never, ever keep her balance in that flashy dance lift; then in that final performance number she nails the lift. And on the way to that big payoff, there’s a kind of suspense every time they dance: “Will they get the lift this time?” The lift of course is not just a dance move but a visual symbol of Baby’s character arc and transformation into a powerful, independent, and sexually liberated woman.
Plants can be used on a very small level to create suspense or comic effect. For example:
- In The Terminator, we see early on that Sarah Connor has a pet iguana that is always getting loose, and later that iguana provides a big scare at a crucial moment when it drops onto Bess Motta’s head in the kitchen at night.
But plants can be used in a much bigger way to convey THEME as well:
- In Witness, we see the Amish community working together to build a barn; their whole way of life is community. We’ve also seen their absolute commitment to non-violence. And we see both these themes and values in action at the powerful climax; when the whole community surrounds the bad guy, and without lifting a hand against him, keeps him subdued as he sinks into a silo of grain (and that grain has been set up as a symbol for the community in the opening image of the film).
- And plants can help define a subplot, as in The Silence of the Lambs, in which Catherine’s love of animals that we see in the beginning later helps her engineer her own escape using Buffalo Bill’s dog.
- And a great Setup/Payoff can help you create an unforgettable climax and/or closing scene. I love the movie Saltburn for its terrific casting/performances and sheer shameless decadence, its stunning SETPIECES, and all those pretty, pretty boys. But beyond all that, it might have one of the best closing NEW WAY OF LIFE scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie, up there with the exhilaratingly romantic final scenes of Romancing the Stone and Sense & Sensibility.
In the long, seven minute end, Barry Keoghan (as Oliver Quick) dances naked through Saltburn, the ancestral mansion he has acquired by killing off the family it belongs to one by one - all to the giddy soundtrack of “Murder on the Dancefloor.” He has achieved both his outer and inner DESIRE: the house (along with what’s left of the family’s fortune). In this final scene he’s essentially making love to the house, to put it euphemistically, and it’s perfectly obvious that he intends to out-decadence the decadence that has come before.
The scene is so joyfully audacious that it inspired a viral craze of TikTokers recreating it.
Now, I’ve complained about the too-longness of Saltburn (especially the over-explaining in Act III), but I enjoyed every second of that end.
And a huge reason it works so well, and is such a satisfying conclusion, is that it was SET UP, or PLANTED, early on in the film, when gorgeous, wealthy Felix (Jacob Elordi) takes Oliver on a breezy tour of the house, referring flippantly to the ‘dead rels’ in the paintings and the priceless furniture. Oliver’s triumphant and far more sensual recreation of that tour needed that previous, planted scene to resonate the way it does. In that first scene, Felix’s wealth seems both incredible and completely unattainable, and we take that tour from Oliver’s point of view of stunned envy.
In the final, naked dance through the house, we realize that this was Oliver’s PLAN: he intended this end all the way back in that first house tour. As impossible and unattainable as it seemed, he got it.
It’s the audience’s RECOGNITION of the scene, how it is repeating the earlier scene but with a twist that tells so much more, that makes it so exciting. Audiences and readers love to be rewarded for paying attention (the ancient Greek story guru Aristotle called this Anagnorisis).
- A classic example of an intricate plant/payoff is (are) the letters of transit in Casablanca (here serving a dual function as MacGuffin: the object that everyone wants). The thief Ugarte has stolen letters of transit, signed by Charles de Gaulle, which will allow two people safe passage out of Casablanca (let’s just overlook the plot hole there: that the Nazis aren’t about to let anyone do anything they don’t want them to do! But it works for the purposes of the movie). Ugarte is killed for the letters, but has stashed them with Rick for safekeeping. Those letters of transit are what Ilsa desperately wants in order to get her husband safely out of Casablanca, and Rick first toys with her about them, then wants to use them for himself and Ilsa, and finally uses them to get Ilsa and her husband out.
- But Casablanca has an even more classic plant/payoff: the line, “Round up the usual suspects,” a gambit Captain Renault uses in the climax to save the day. The story goes that the screenwriters, the Epstein brothers, were banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out a believable way to get Rick off the hook for the murder of Nazi Colonel Strasser at the end, and then one day they were driving over Mulholland to a meeting and both turned to each other in the same moment and exclaimed, “Round up the usual suspects!!!!”
This story illustrates an important point: plants and payoffs are often painstakingly engineered and deliberately woven into the plotline for maximum effect. Once you’ve written your first draft, you can start looking for what your subconscious has already set up, and engineer the payoffs – or reverse engineer a set up to make a payoff play.
- I want to take a look at the way a particular setup and payoff is used in the movie Jerry Maguire, by the brilliant Cameron Crowe.
Sports agent Jerry Maguire has a crisis moment early in the movie that starts his journey toward wholeness: he visits a client in the hospital after the jock has had his fourth concussion on the field (football, I think…), and the client’s young son confronts Jerry and says someone has to make his dad stop playing. Jerry blows him off with a platitude, and the kid bursts into tears and tells Jerry to fuck himself. That incident makes Jerry realize he hates himself and his life and inspires him to write a mission statement about how agents should really be acting, which gets him fired and starts his journey.
Jerry is left with only one C-list client, Rod, who decides to be loyal and stick with him. And early on Rod and his wife make the decision not to accept a lowball contract renewal so they can hold out for a real contract, which they are trusting Jerry to get for them. Jerry is worried and tells them that this is a huge risk to Rod, because if he gets injured there will be no insurance. So RISK OF INJURY is set up as a big FEAR for Rod, his wife, Jerry, and us, the audience.
We are reminded of this fear when Rod signs a football for a man in a wheelchair: it’s a visual representation of what could happen to him.
And then in the climactic game, what happens? Rod takes a huge hit and is knocked out – while he is still not under contract. It’s our greatest fear made manifest and plays for maximum emotional impact because it has been set up and spelled out so clearly.
And the twist is, that injury and Rod’s recovery on the field, and his bonding with the stadium audience in that moment, is what gets him the contract he’s been looking for all along - creating a DOUBLE PUNCH FINAL BATTLE: a second ALL IS LOST moment leads to a blinding REVELATION that wins both heroes their hearts’ desires.
This is a great example of how plants not only can pay off for emotional effect, but can become an integral part of the structure of a story.
Again, plants and payoffs are often developed in rewrites, and it’s a good idea to do one complete pass of your manuscript or script just looking for places to plant and payoff.
I discuss other rewrite passes that I recommend, here:
Full story breakdowns of Romancing the Stone and Sense & Sensibility in the workbooks: Stealing Hollywood , Writing Love
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All material © Alexandra Sokoloff, Screenwriting Tricks for Authors
What a wonderful technique!
I would call it a seed that would grow through the story. I wonder if some examples of this could be:
a. the girl with the red coat in Schindler´s list
b. the spinning top at the end of Inception.
c. The "you´re fired" paper at the end of Back to the future trilogy
Thank you for this eye-opener!
In the last two years, I've read dozens of books on writing. This is one of the best instructions I've read! I've subconsciously put my plants in, but as I'm on my third draft of a manuscript, this comes at the perfect time to hone those plants.
Thank you.