Director: Mike Nichols
Storyboards: Maurice Zuberano

Mike Nichols was the most successful, sought-after stage director in America by the time he was approached by Warner Brothers to adapt Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? for the big screen. He had no film experience, but he was also unafraid—and the quality of his production team was unrivalled (from Haskell Wexler’s camera to Richard Sylbert’s production design).

The producer Ernest Lehman agreed to have the experienced illustrator Maurice Zuberano at Nichols's side throughout the production, which starred the powerhouse couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as Martha and George (the scenario was thought to reflect the troubles of their own marriage). Nichols and Zuberano worked closely together, as this storyboard illustrates—it comes close to being an animated stage direction. Sylbert also worked with the storyboard artist Harold Michelson on this film. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards—including for Nichols as director—winning five, among them Elizabeth Taylor’s second for acting.

Maurice Zuberano’s storyboards is littered with character notes, stage directions, and snatches of dialogue, reflecting the close working relationship between Zuberano and the film’s director, Mike Nichols.

Maurice Zuberano started out as a storyboard artist on the ultimate Hollywood classic, Citizen Kane (1941). He may well have provided the boards for Orson Welles’s followup, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942; see pages 40-45), although he was not credited on the final, much-edited film. He certainly enjoyed a close relationship with Welles’s editor on both pictures, Robert Wise, and they continued to work together when Wise made the jump to directing, on Helen of Troy (1956), West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). Zuberano’s last work was for Warren Beatty, on the director/ star’s Dick Tracy (1990).