BORIS LEVEN: SETTING THE SCENE FOR MOVIE WORLD

Art director Boris Leven died Oct. 25 at the age of 78. He is remembered here by veteran art director Bob Boyle, whose work includes “The Birds” and “Marnie” for Alfred Hitchcock, “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Private Benjamin” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

It was the eve of the Great Depression. It was a time of optimism, promise and plenty. The crash was unimaginable. I’d come to the USC School of Architecture from a small ranch town in the San Joaquin Valley. My rural background had not equipped me for the “big city,” and the obligatory freshman’s green beanie I wore effectively established a wide gulf between me and the world.

One day, an intense young man with dark, probing eyes and a soft, musical voice suddenly appeared at my side, like a genie. It was Boris--an upperclassman who, recognizing my lonely insecurity, ignored strict class distinctions to offer support to a lowly freshman. Only a year out of his native Russia, he spoke English with just the slightest trace of an accent. There was an encompassing self-confidence about him, and his slender fingers held a pencil or a brush with a sureness that stirred both awe and envy in those around him.

By tradition, freshmen were “bound in slavery” to upperclassmen. A slave’s duties were to help “make the stretches,” prepare the paints, wash the brushes and, most importantly, fill in the tedious, repetitive detail of the huge “projects.” It was my good fortune to become Boris’ slave. Together we worked to meet the impossible deadlines of the Beaux Arts competitions with complete dedication, no sleep and an inevitable closeness that was to survive to this day. It was then that I saw the extraordinary design sense that characterized all of Boris’ work.

Those were turbulent years in architecture--embroiled in the crosscurrents of classicism, the international style of the Bauhaus and the new Art Deco. Boris managed to cut through the quarreling and found his expression in a clean, minimal use of exquisite proportions applied to forms that elegantly followed function. He developed his own unique style. The clarity and unity of his designs, the attention to detail and those incredibly clear, graded washes in an unearthly blue-gray that defied description or imitation, brought him many awards.

The unimaginable crash came to pass--largely unnoticed by most of us who had nothing to lose. Boris and I became closer--he was now Bobba--and then the never-to-end ended. Boris graduated. I graduated a year later. The Depression that had never really touched us now stood across our paths. To become a licensed architect, an architectural apprenticeship was required. But architectural firms were going into bankruptcy one after the other. We scrambled around with little success for other ways of making a living.

Then came a ray of hope. Paramount Pictures had hired Boris to design and sketch for the art department--an unforeseen break in a bleak prospect. That motion pictures could use art and architectural training was a new and welcome idea. Boris had paved the way. Shortly thereafter, I joined the ranks of the Paramount art department and renewed my association with Boris.

Under the highly sophisticated tutelage of Hans Dreier, we learned to adapt our skills to the film-making process. We were draftsmen, illustrators, assistants and whatever else was needed. Working on pictures directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Lloyd, Josef von Sternberg, Mitch Leisen, Henry Hathaway and, of course, C.B. DeMille exposed us to a rare blend of European, the UFA film studio and Hollywood influences.

The training was invaluable, but it was a paternalistic situation that one would inevitably leave. Boris was the first to break away. He was disgruntled when, because of his Russian background, he was assigned to design icons for Marlene Dietrich’s “Scarlet Empress.” His talent and ambition needed greater challenges, and it was not long before he struck out on his own. He went to Fox as a full-fledged art director and soon received his first Academy nomination for “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” In subsequent years, he received seven more nominations and an Academy Award for “West Side Story.”

Boris’ total dedication to work was matched by the fullness of his involvement in living. He surrounded himself with elegance. He enjoyed good wine and caviar with friends, painting and music, reading, travel and dancing, and his wedding to Vera was a most rollicking, lusty, till-dawn affair that included an off-key rendition of the basso Boris Godunov by the groom.

His intolerance of mediocrity and his protectiveness of the integrity of his work became legend in the industry. The story goes that one day on the “Giant” set, as George Stevens was blocking out action in front of that wonderful mansion that made an exclamation point above the barren Texas plain, a speck appeared on the horizon, followed by a plume of dust. The speck grew larger, becoming a speeding automobile that skidded to a stop at the bottom of the rise. Boris emerged. At the sight of him, Stevens wheeled around to his crew and exclaimed in mock terror, “What did I do now?!”

Boris was among the foremost of the now dwindling ranks of art directors who made a truly creative contribution to the art of motion pictures, who used their skills and vision to pursue dramatic truth through illusion, who had to call upon all their resources at a time when films were made entirely within the confines of studio walls and a whole city went up in flames on a back lot. They produced a controlled, carefully selected environment that served the character and essence of the film, sometimes interweaving reality with artistic invention, as Boris did in “West Side Story” and “Sound of Music.”

Once, in an interview, Boris said: “In my work I have always tried to achieve the greatest simplicity, both in form and style, and in my life and relationship with other human beings, I have tried to be as honest with them as I am with myself.” And indeed he was.