British Comedy Guide

Writing music and song in script

Hi,

I have a character who is a budding musician. He writes a song and then sits alone, playing it on his guitar and singing along.

Does anyone know the convention for putting songs into a script? I've written the music but obviously I wouldn't write the music itself in the script - that would be mental. But the words are very important. Should I just write the words in verse form? Does anybody know of any script examples where this has been done before? The Mighty Boosh is the first one to spring to my mind, but I haven't seen any scripts for it.

Stu

Right. In one of my scripts a character sings "La-di-da-di" by Slick Rick and this is how i wrote it.

Liz exits the room and begins singing:

LIZ
La-di-da-di, we like to party/We
don’t cause no trouble/We don’t
hurt nobody/We’re just some men
that’s on the mic/And when we
rock upon the mic/We rock the mic
right...

Also you may want to check out the Stranger Than Fiction script. There's a scene where Will Ferrell's character plays guitar and sings.

Hope that helps.

Just looking at that script now. It's a great script. Thanks for the tip.

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