When popular artforms collide: songs about movies

“Leroy” by The Fibonaccis, based on The Bad Seed. Someone with the right equipment and editing talent really needs to set that song to scenes from the movie, but having access to the song is better than not having access to the song.

“Roy (Back From The Offworld)” Another one based on Blade Runner. (here’s a fan video set to the movie, but the audio is bad. I don’t know the person who did it)

If we expand a bit and add songs inspired by movies…

“Down Down” Inspired by the submarines of Das Boot and The Hunt For Red October.

“Charlie” Inspired by Robert Crumb’s brother Charles in the Terry Zwigoff movie Crumb.

The Roxy Music song “2HB” was written about Humphrey Bogart (hence the title), and specifically references Casablanca, so that may count.

More recently, Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance” contains a few Hitchcock references (Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window), but this amounts to just a couple of lines in a much longer song otherwise not about movies.

Death Cab For Cutie’s Death of an Interior Decorator was based on the Woody Allen’s movie “Interiors”.

Weird Al also had “The Saga Begins”, based on Phantom Menace.

And how about their other song, “Along Came Jones”?

I thought that was by The Coasters?

Juice Newton’s “Gonna Find You” contains the line “like a James Dean movie.”

Robert Mitchum’s Ballad of Thunder Road tells the story of his 1958 cult classic movie Thunder Road. It even made the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #62 in 1958 and back at #65 in 1962 when the movie was released to drive-ins.

A lot of the songs by the Misfits are about horror movies:

Night of the Living Dead
Astro Zombies
Return of the Fly
The Haunting
Mars Attacks

etc.

Heh, I’m surprised no one has mentioned an entire album that was made about a Movie that was NOT written as the movie’s soundtrack nor featured IN the movie:
Jay-Z’s American Gangster is pretty much an entire album about the film of the same name, but was pretty much just him being inspired by the movie after seeing it.

“I Am Spartacus” from the That Thing You Do soundtrack. No lyrics, just a drum solo, but the title name-checks Spartacus

This one’s a little off the wall:
“Mr Jaws” by Dickie Goodman.

It looks like he did several movie parodies, including “Superfly Meets Shaft” and “Star Warts”.

Sonovagun! You’re totally right.

Dire Straits Romeo and Juliet

there’s a place for us you know the movie song
when you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong?

Refers to West Side Story

The Big Audio Dynamite song “E=MC2” (also sometimes called “Relativity”) is about several films by Nicolas Roeg, including:

Insignificance (“Ritual ideas, relativity/Only buildings, no people, prophecy”)
The Man Who Fell to Earth (“Space guy fell from the sky/Scratched my head and wondered why”)
Don’t Look Now ("Man dies first reel/People ask “What’s the deal?”)
Performance (“Gangland slaying underground/New identity must be found”)