From Directors’ Doodles to the Big Screen : Exhibition Juxtaposes Artwork by Hitchcock, Others With Clips of Actual Scenes

In the art of movie-making, it is the director’s job to make a script visual. And sometimes the easiest way to prepare for the cameras is to pick up a pencil and draw the scene.

Presumably inspired over dinner, director Alfred Hitchcock sketched the setup for the great Mt. Rushmore cafeteria scene in “North by Northwest” on the back of a Sheraton Hotel paper place mat.

Between takes of “Moby Dick,” director John Huston made doodles of a lazy stretching cat, which evolved into a drawing of the great white whale plowing through the ocean.

Martin Scorsese’s storyboard drawings for “Raging Bull” break down the Jake LaMotta-Sugar Ray Robinson fight scene shot by shot, almost exactly indicating the editing of the final cut before any camera began to roll.

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These works, along with others by 14 luminaries of the cinema, can be seen in “Drawing Into Film: Directors’ Drawings,” an exhibition opening Friday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills. This museum-quality exhibition is the pet project of Arnold Glimcher, known both in the art world as director of New York’s Pace Gallery and in the film world as the producer of films such as “Gorillas in the Mist” and as the director of “Mambo Kings.”

The elaborate exhibition, the first of its kind, juxtaposes directors’ working drawings with TV monitors showing clips of the sequences depicted, so the viewer can see a director’s imagined ideas literally come to life. Glimcher states that his involvement in the process of filmmaking drew him to show this material.

“Film is a medium that doesn’t readily reveal itself. In fact, you could say a film’s success depends on a denial of the complex process involved in making it,” says Glimcher, whose gallery exhibited the show this spring. “That’s why it is fascinating to see drawings that reveal that process--whether they are as casually playful as the ones by John Huston, or as complex as Marty Scorsese’s storyboards.”

The exhibition’s curators, Mark Pollard and Marc Glimcher (Arnold’s son), tracked down the drawings in private collections, archives and libraries from throughout the country, expanding their list of participating directors based on availability of material. “Some directors never actually made drawings. And many used professional storyboard artists,” Pollard says. “We decided early on to limit the exhibit only to drawings made by the director’s hand.”

Most of the drawings have never before been exhibited and some were hardly known to exist. Pollard located drawings by Orson Welles when he contacted the University of Indiana looking for works by John Ford.

“The library told me there were no Ford drawings,” Pollard says. “I was disappointed. But then, they asked if I was interested in anything by Welles. They said they had a couple of rough sketches.”

These “rough sketches” are gorgeous ink wash studies for Welles’ “Macbeth,” proposing set designs and depicting Macbeth’s confrontation with the witches on a stripped-down foggy heath. The drawings perfectly capture the stylized theatricality and subtle black-and-white tonalities of the finished film.

The drawings of the great Indian film director Satyajat Ray almost didn’t appear in the exhibition. In hopes of borrowing work, a representative of Pace Gallery traveled to India to speak with the director’s son, Sandip Ray. But, due to a technicality, the drawings were not allowed to leave the country.

“Then,” Pollard says, “about a week before the show opened, I received in the mail an uninsured package wrapped in brown paper and twine. Inside were all these incredible drawings. It was definitely one of the greatest packages I’ve opened in my life.”

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The exhibition presumes that the director is a film’s single auteur, capable of realizing on film his uncompromised vision. Happily, since these directors are, for the most part, among the strongest visual presences in film history, such auteurism seems justified.

The presence of the video segments makes the exhibition a must-see for film students. Scorsese’s visually precise, shot-by-shot storyboards for key sequences in “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” do much to belie the notion of filmmaking’s “mystery.” But storyboards are often used in less specific ways to sketch out the look of a film sequence, rather than to delineate specific shots. With his background as a cartoonist, director Terry Gilliam drew storyboards for “Brazil” and “Adventures of Baron Munchausen” in punchy, cartoon-like frames, marking the overall visual movement rather than specific camera shots.

Also on display is Rainer Fassbinder’s thick notebook for the 14-hour epic “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” filled with shot-by-shot sketches. Scrawled in red ballpoint ink, the massive document resembles a book project by some crazed contemporary artist. The hundreds of pages of stick figures testify to Fassbinder’s visual obsessiveness and the relentlessness of his human melodrama.

As drawings, Federico Fellini’s bright sketches for characters in “City of Women” are standouts. Akira Kurosawa’s drawing of a warrior on horseback from “Ran” and a series of light-drenched drawings from the Van Gogh sequence in “Dreams” reveal a major draftsman and colorist tied to the landscapes he has so obviously loved to depict in his later films.

The show is expected to travel to Europe and Japan. Pollard reports that London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Kyoto’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Venice Film Festival have all expressed interest in hosting the show.

Also on display in the academy’s lobby is an exhibition of drawings by art directors that demonstrate the crucial contribution of another group of artists to filmmaking. The show features storyboards and set designs by well-known art directors such as Robert Boyle (“The Birds”), Boris Levin (“Giant”) and Anton Grot (“Mildred Pierce”).