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

Screenplays are mostly seen as the written documentation of plot and dialogue. Other aspects of film, especially musical ones, tend to be ignored. With this project I wanted to demonstrate that screenplays fulfil an important role in film production and they include every aspect of filmmaking. The aim was to detect and analyse music numbers in screenplays. Austrian screenwriter Walter Reisch was the ideal case study to support the notion that screenplays are notable and rich documents of film production and film history. Reisch started his career in silent cinema and he was responsible for some of the most successful Austrian and German films until he had to leave Austria in 1936 to flee from the Nazis. He continued screenwriting in Hollywood, which makes his case suitable for a comparison of filmmaking and screenwriting between Austria/Germany and Hollywood. Reisch describes musical numbers in his screenplays in a highly detailed way. They are essential to many of his films, even to those not considered music films (or film musicals). His own musical knowledge, from classical to popular, is significant for a cultural background that is inscribed in the European films of the time, as well as in Hollywood films made by migrants. In addition to fully developed musical numbers, Reisch used music in his screenplays in a highly self-conscious way and puts them at the centre of attention. Reisch's screenplays were compared with American screenplays for film musicals from the 1930s and 40s. Those exhibit a more efficient, less diverse way of writing, but they also showed some obvious influences by European screenplays. This becomes especially prevalent in the case of the two-column format, in which visuals are written in the left and acoustic elements in the right column on the page of a screenplay. The results of the project demonstrate that musical numbers were not planned and developed independently from screenwriting, but in tune with it. The project makes a strong case for the analysis of screenplays in film studies and film historiography. Including them shifts the focus from the finished film to the production process and delivers new insights that have the potential to revise certain aspects of film history. The focus on musical numbers in the screenplays of Walter Reisch was the ideal lens to crystallize this broader approach.