The best stuff does sing. I think of how much fun it is to read The Matrix, and how the evocative, rich word choices add to the overall enjoyment of the piece.

Here's the opening:

COMPUTER SCREEN

So close it has no boundaries.

A blinking cursor pulses in the electric darkness like a heart coursing with phosphorous light, burning beneath the derma of black-neon glass.


That could just as well have been:

COMPUTER MONITOR

So close the edges of the screen are way beyond the edges of the frame.

Against a black background, one of those old-style green cursors blinks like a taillight - blink, blink, blink - beneath the glass.


Same thing is described, but different feel entirely. But I think a caveat has to come with this. Poetry works because it's so short these days - a half a page in a magazine is considered a long poem. I wouldn't want to read a whole script done like the first version.

Even in the Matrix, the description gets toned down in parts, amped up in others. That helps to draw attention to certain passages and gives a hand to the pacing, because phrases like, "blinking cursor pulses in the electric darkness like a heart coursing with phosphorous light" slow down a read, if the reader is taking everything in and not just busting through. Your brain has to untangle the metaphors and translate the unusual visual images. So, I love poetry in scripts - just not every line of every page. And if every line of Moby Dick were as cryptic as "Call me Ishmael" I doubt we'd be talking about the book today.

Personally, I think its a mistake to assume that, just because the audience will probably never read the script, the writer shouldn't take care with the phrasing of it, even going so far as to make it poetic. It seems like poetry would only enhance the tone and feeling of the entire script and inspire the director, actors, musicians, set designers, etc. to approach the film in a certain way. Even though it won't be spoken out loud for the audience to hear, I believe the poetry will come through subliminally in the way the script is interpreted so that the audience would see the poetry instead of hearing it.

I also agree with Annika W that sometimes poetry isn't appropriate for an entire script or certain genres of scripts. However, I think it can be used to great effect in the right circumstances.

Word choice is important in description. You are writing it to be read, after all -- you want to draw the reader's eye smoothly down the page just as in any other kind of writing. At the same time, you have to master economy and keep your prose appropriate to the medium (for example, avoid similes!). :-)