Why This is Good

Another gray area in screenwriting is music. Because we screenwriters often envision our story playing in our heads, we feel that we know best what will work, down to every last detail, including the music. This, again, is not your job. The background music, or score, will be composed by someone else. Whether the film’s score will use original music, existing music, or a combination of both, the soundtrack will be added later and should not be included in the script.

You can and should, however, write songs that are heard by the characters. A classic example is the song “As Time Goes By” as it is used in Casablanca. The song was a thematic element of the story, and it was part of both the background and a part of the story. As a modern screenwriter, you would have noted the song being played when it Sam was playing it and the characters themselves heard it. You would not include the times it served as an instrumental background soundtrack to the flashback montages. This distinction is easy to remember if you go back to the fundamentals of screenwriting, that you are to write only what we see or hear, and in this case, only what the characters see and hear. The characters do not hear their own background music. If they did it might play out like that Family Guy sequence where Peter wishes for his own theme music. It’s funny because it’s so silly. Remember that scene and use it to help you remember when to include music and when not to. If a character turns on the radio and sings along to “Free Fallin’” as in Jerry Maguire, it’s included in the spec script. When we hear the love theme of “Secret Garden” in the background, the characters do not, so it’s not a part of the spec script.