Using songs in a script

Occasionally this question will pop up: Is it appropriate to include specific song titles / lyrics in a spec script? Taking into consideration the conventional wisdom of what’s perceived as professional vs. amateur by script readers, the basic answer is no. The logic behind those style considerations is that any song by a recording artist will have to be vetted by a studio, requiring them to pay a rights fee, so a writer shouldn’t tell the studio what songs to use by including them in their script. 

However there is one circumstance in which you can not only include as many songs as you like with a script, but also burn a CD to accompany the script for readers: If your name is Cameron Crowe. Per Slashfilm:

Leave it to Cameron Crowe to make the soundtrack for a movie before he’s shot a single frame. In a recent interview with MTV, Matt Damon said that when he got the script to Crowe’s new film, We Bought A Zoo, it came with a soundtrack that featured “a lot of Eddie Vedder” and “a lot of Neil Young.”

The film, scheduled for release almost one year from today, December 23, 2011, stars shooting next month. It’s based on a memoir by Benjamin Mee chronicling how he and his family decided to buy and run a dilapidated zoo after the death of his wife. Written and directed by Crowe, Damon stars as Mee alongside a love interest played by Scarlett Johansson, his brother played by Thomas Hayden Church, and zoo employees Elle Fanning, Patrick Fugit and Angus McFadyen. See Damon’s interview and more after the break.

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Damon got a CD of music with the script to We Bought a Zoo and burned it to his iPod so he could listen to it while running in Central Park. When pressed as to what kind of music he was, he dropped the names Eddie Vedder and Neil Young.

Crowe’s fascination with rock music goes back to his days working as a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. Do you remember these musical bits of business from Crowe’s movie Singles?

Alice in Chains

Pearl Jam

For more of the article Crowe, go here.

UPDATE: In comments, Kyle makes a good point:

Here’s Quentin Tarantino’s take:

“A good majority of the cues in here, I had in mind in the writing stage. I don’t add them to the script because then they ask for more money. If I usually put anything in the script, it will be the wrong song. Then we say, “You’re really the second choice, you know, because we really wanted The Judds!” A good majority of them I come up with beforehand. More or less the way my method works is you have got to find the opening credit sequence first. That starts it off from me. I find the personality of the piece through the music that is going to be in it. If there is going to be no modern music in the movie, then that becomes the personality of the piece, but if there is, it is the rhythm that I want the movie to play at; it is the rhythm of the film. Once I know I want to do something, then it is a simple matter of me diving into my record collection and finding the songs that give me the rhythm of my movie. “I find the personality of the piece through the music that is going to be in it.”

Although not every writer gets as much control as he seems to have, he seems to have music in mind even though he doesn’t put it in the script and in some cases he lets the music set the tone for the scene instead of finding music to fit the mood.

If you see a scene in your head with a song playing on the soundtrack or within the setting itself, and that song really helps you tap into the mood, feel and tone of that scene, great. Write the scene with that song in mind. And again, if it feels absolutely necessary for you to convey something important about that scene, you may choose to include the title in scene description because I do think a writer has some wiggle room on this front. But if you’re not Cameron Crowe, Quentin Tarantino, or a working writer in Hollywood, just know there is this conventional wisdom about using song titles in a spec script. And heaven forbid you produce an indie movie, no matter how small, where you’ve got songs by recording artists playing as part of the ambient audio because then you force whoever might plan on distributing the movie to get music clearances.

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