Screenwriting Musical Numbers

The recent success of film musicals like La La Land is accompanied by a renewed scholarly interest in the topic, generating innovative approaches to the discourse about musical numbers that shift away from former questions of narration and representation and are more interested in notions such as affect, emotion, repetition and difference. However, one critical aspect is still missing in the scholarly discourse: the way musical numbers are written. Since the early days of sound film, the screenplay is a standardized type of text: descriptions of scenes and settings alternate with passages of dialogue. There is no space for anything else; at least so it seems, at first glance. Yet the writing of musical numbers within a screenplay is one of the very few things that is still not as standardized as the rest of a script. In this project, I want to survey and analyse how screenwriters and screenplays influenced and shaped the ways in which musical numbers were produced and integrated within fictional films. Following the notion that the American film musical is heavily shaped by European influences, I focus on two screenwriters as case studies for my project: Walter Reisch and Felix Jackson. Both writers represent the (Jewish) European heritage of Hollywood musicals as they immigrated to the United States and became famous for films in which musical numbers play a significant role. Fundamentally, this project analyses how these two screenwriters dealt with musical numbers and traces back the influences to the Viennese operetta and to Austrian- German silent cinema. Findings of the close-readings of their work, both on paper and on screen, will then be interpreted within the context of the recent scholarly discourse. My project aims to demonstrate that writing for film is more than just storytelling and dialogue and that music has been and continues to be an indispensible part of film making. 1

No additional funding sources recorded.