The Art of Movie Storyboards: Visualising the Action of the World's Greatest Films by Fionnuala Halligan

Author:Fionnuala Halligan [Halligan, Fionnuala]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Octopus
Published: 2015-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

The Boy Friend 1971

DIRECTOR Ken Russell

STORYBOARDS Shirley Russell

After the outcry over his sex-and-Satan romp The Devils (also semi-released in 1971), the eccentric British director Ken Russell abruptly changed tack for his next film. As if to confound expectations, his light-as-air adaptation of Sandy Wilson’s stage musical The Boy Friend saw Russell give the model Twiggy her big acting break in a lavish 1920s-set confection of elaborately-costumed song and dance numbers.

Russell’s The Boy Friend wraps Wilson’s play—which is about schoolgirls at “La Caprice” villa getting ready for a party—inside a story about a rundown theater in Portsmouth, which is staging the show in front of big-cheese Hollywood producer Mr. Cecil B. De Thrill. Twiggy plays understudy Polly Browne, in love with delivery boy Tony (Christopher Gable). In typically exuberant Ken Russell fashion, the film’s Busby Berkeley-style dance sequences explode into money-is-no-object fantasy riffs that jump off the stage with the most extraordinary costumes designed by Ken’s wife, Shirley.

Despite its sumptuous, over-the-top visuals, The Boy Friend was regarded as a commercial disappointment on release, and Russell’s 136-minute cut was pared back by the studio. It certainly didn’t dent his career, however, and Russell’s star continued in the ascendant with the rock opera Tommy in 1975.

Shirley Russell, generally acknowledged to be one of Britain’s costume design greats, produced the costume-focused storyboards reproduced on these pages, working directly from Ken Russell’s screenplay. The sequence is probably the film’s most elaborate, although there are many to choose from.

Ken and Shirley had first met at art school and married in 1956. While bringing up five children, Shirley worked with Ken on everything from his first, televised “biographies” of the great composers to his most ambitious productions, from Women in Love (1969) to The Devils, The Boy Friend, and onto Tommy. They divorced in 1978 and Shirley died in 2002; Ken Russell passed away in 2011.

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