Greetings SS members!

I've been pondering a situation I'd appreciate your input on.
When writing a screenplay you know will eventually contain musical numbers...
How does one properly document their placement within the pages?
There's no lyrics or music yet, but you know where you want a song to be.
Do you place some kind of parenthetical marker in the script at that spot?
Do you give a brief description of the song and mood for the reader there?
A paragraph perhaps? A dry line in parenthesis or something?
Or do you leave all that out until you have more details to go on?
There must be a standard for this, scripts comes before songs are written for them.
Any help would be appreciated, especially by our more musically inclined members.

Cheers!

E.D.

ask Shelton. he's written and sold a musical. I don't think the script is here anymore, but you can check. title is Jack Amsterdam.

George is also quite well-versed in this aspect from what I understand.

Shoot him a PM with specific questions if you are serious about this undertaking.

Pia and Bert,

Much thanks for pointing me in the right direction on this subject.
I have sent PM's to those folks you both mentioned.
I've had zero luck find any referential material on the net about this.
In the interest of information sharing, I will post any significant findings here.


Regards,
E.D.

Check out the August 2009 OWC for ideas.

http://www.simplyscripts.net/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl?b-OWC0809/

That was a musical challenge.

There is a spec called Imagine by Dan Fogelman that has just sold for $2m and it has a song in it, it sounds exactly like what your are asking.

As with all of these things, the simple answer is usually the best, remember there are no rules, whatever works for you...

Quoted Text Danny cracks his neck, then: He starts playing.  He's playing the same MELODY he started back in the fancy studio of his penthouse, long before he'd received Lennon's letter.   But now it has words.   Danny starts to sing... the music is simple, the melody and lyrics wrenching.  It's Dylan, it's Cash, and these will NOT be the final lyrics.                                    DANNY (CONT'D)                   I woke up just this morning/Didn't know where I'd been/But                    there's far bigger things/That

Michael and Murph,

Thanks lots for the helpful suggestions.
It seems there is no wrong way to go about it, so long as its clear and concise.
For some reason I thought there might be a set way to do this.
Just enough to inspire the reader and hopefully fuel a musician later.
I think I can work with that.
It helps that the public domain source material I'm using is in poem form!
A musical OWC? Wow, dunno if I coulda pulled that one off!

Regards,
E.D.