DIRECTORS' ART IS SKETCHING A VISION

By Lea Saslav

From USA Today, 04.14.1993, Final Edition

No wonder Edward Scissorhands looked like his creator, director Tim Burton. He was drawn that way.

And Taxi Driver director Martin Scorsese's vision of Robert De Niro watching Jodie Foster in a rearview mirror was originally a sequence of penciled sketches.

Burton's eerie Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice animation drawings and Martin Scorsese's storyboards from Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are exhibited at the groundbreaking show, "Drawings Into Film: Director's Drawings," at New York's Pace Gallery.

It's a film buff's dream. In all, 14 directors' drawings are on display, including samples from Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, John Huston, Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa. This is the first time many of them have let the public see this early work, much of it dug up from the archives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Scorsese's drawings of the Jake LaMotta/Sugar Ray Robinson Raging Bull fight take the action frame by frame.

"It's all sort of pre-edited in my head, you know what I mean," says Scorsese, fresh from editing his fall release, The Age of Innocence. He says he studied Hitchcock's Psycho shower sequence--fast cuts and edgy violence--and then modeled the La LaMotta/Robinson fight after it.

For the shipboard fight in Cape Fear, Scorsese started using a storyboard artist so "everyone on the crew could understand what's going on." But even with an artist, "it takes a long time," he says. "I have to tell him . . . 'more of a high angle,' 'more of a low angle,' that kind of thing."

Burton uses storyboards for animated films, but takes a more whimsical approach for live action. "I doodle all the time--it helps me think," he says. "I, uh, don't have the most cohesive mind." He's working on a new animated film, Nightmare Before Christmas.

The prize for "Director Who Could Have Made it in Art School"? Easily Burton, Gilliam (for his Brazil sketches) and Kurosawa for lush color treatments of scenes for Ran and Dreams.

The "This Looks Easy--Maybe Anyone Could Direct" award? To the late Huston for simplistic depictions of whales for Moby Dick and Hitchcock's plan for the climactic scene in North by Northwest, drawn on a paper place mat.

For Pace Gallery owner Arne Glimcher (he directed The Mambo Kings), it has been a show eight years in the making and "a chance to show the process behind making a film," he says. Storyboards and drawings "are so very important."

Drawings are on display until April 24. An August showing is planned at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in Los Angeles.