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Popular Culture Review
visual interpretation of the rough shooting continuity,” Wise and Leven articulate the
film’s production design: “We open on a series of highly stylized “abstract-real” shots
beginning, perhaps, with a direct overhead aerial view of the lower two-thirds of Man
hattan... laying horizontally across the screen and covering it...spilling out of the frame
showing the small pattern that the streets and buildings form at that distance. On the
left of the screen is the top of the island. We pan in and down (helicopter shot?...or
series of cross-fades or cuts of stills, since there is no movement) until the entire screen
is filled with the building and street pattern.... There are several moments of complete
silence.” (“West Side Story: A visual interpretation of the rough shooting continuity,”
from the Boris Leven Collection, University of Southern California Cinema-Televi
sion Library, Los Angeles, California, undated, pp. 1-8.) It does not specify whether
this outlining of visuals for the film was written by director Wise or production de
signer Leven. Material from the Robert Wise Collection on the Criterion laserdisk of
the film shows black and white still photos taken on location in New York before
production to prepare for simulating a gritty noir realism; it also includes beautifully
stylized artwork, sketches and story boards by Leven to expressively articulate the
film’s dark visuals. Wise’s use of ambient sound effects deviates from classical sym
phonic musical scores such as the lyrical opening of Stanley Donen’s On the Town
(1949) shot on location in New York.
As Wise explains, “I was the one who insisted the picture had to open in New York
City; we had to put it in its milieu. Because if you think of the story, once you got
through the rumble at the beginning, the whole antagonism of the two gangs ending up
in a fight, the rest of the story onstage and in the film is told at sunset and at night.
There was no more daytime stuff in it. The studio wanted me to shoot the entire thing
on a soundstage, and you couldn’t do it. And I finally convinced them that if I could do
the whole daytime opening in New York, all the rest could be done in the studio.”
(Wise quoted in Kutner, “Interview, Robert Wise: Life at the Top, Part Two,” p.33.)
Production Code Administration records for West Side Story in the MPAA/PCA File,
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills, California, 1961.
Murray Schumach, “Violence in Films Seen On Decrease: Juvenile Delinquency Scripts
Drop as a Result of Drive,” The New York Times, July 17, 1961; notably, West Side
Story's ‘serious’ prestige spectacle as ‘theatrical event’ maneuvered around this re
striction.
Stephen Sondheim, “Officer Krupke” lyrics in Ernest Lehman, West Side Story screen
play (second draft), Ernest Lehman Film Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Re
search Center, University of Texas at Austin, undated, 54-55.
Ernest Lehman, step outline for screenplay West Side Story in the Ernest Lehman Film
Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin,
undated, 3.
What David Cook calls “elephantiasis” relates to a series of big-budget blockbuster
musical flops later in the 1960s spelling big losses and almost ending the genre—
certainly for financial reasons. (A History o f Narrative Film. New York: W.W. Norton