Gerald Scarfe’s unique storyboard for the concept of the film The Wall. The only piece of artwork from his collection which depicts the story of the film in its entirety.
“Roger and I would talk in my house in Chelsea for hours about how The Wall should be turned into a film. I would make quick sketches on pieces of paper about 8 inches x 4 inches, and Scotch-tape them to my studio wall. We would move these sketches around, interchanging scenes, dropping some and devising others. It was a great creative process, and the storyboard is the culmination of that process. While it was still in my head, I sat for many, many hours transferring our thoughts onto one piece of paper. This is it.”
-- Gerald Scarfe, 2016
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Original Artwork for Pink Floyd The Wall From The Private Collection Of Gerald Scarfe
THE STORYBOARD
Gerald Scarfe’s original storyboard for the film Pink Floyd: The Wall measures approximately 98 ½“ x 39 ½” and is as large in size as it is in significance. It consists of fifty individual illustrations – some pasted onto the finished artifact – in watercolour, on paper.
Collectively, these images comprise Scarfe’s conception of a narrative for the film, based upon Roger Waters’ songs for the Pink Floyd album of the same name. Individually, they not only anticipate many motifs and scenes from the eventual film, but also demonstrate the artist’s unique ability to conjure up a scenario, a milieu, and a mood within a single striking image.
To accompany the storyboard, Scarfe composed a series of brief commentaries for each illustration, which were quoted in full in his 2010 book, The Making of Pink Floyd: The Wall. The first of these read: ‘The jet black helicopter bearing the crossed hammer symbol flies through a stormy night sky’. The sequence ended with these words: ‘In the aftermath, the lonely band of musicians playing the plaintive “All Along the Wall” walk off into the sunset. God Save The Queen. Have a good evening.’
When the film was released in 1982, Scarfe explained the rationale behind the chaotic and bleak vision of society that he had created: ‘I had a vision of decay behind the blossoming’. This vision is evident throughout the storyboard, with its haunting, oppressive atmosphere, often horrific characters, and fascistic imagery. What’s notable within this collection of vivid pictures is the grimness that pervades both the album and the finished movie: it portrays a world which is shadowed by political oppression, and in which liberation delivers not optimism but merely the deadening prospect of more chaos.
Many of the most searing images from Alan Parker’s film were present in Gerald Scarfe’s earliest conception of the project, such as the chilling symbol of the crossed hammers which signifies totalitarian despotism; the scenes that evoke memories of World War II bombing campaigns, and their victims; the grotesque orgy involving groupies and roadies; the leading character’s destruction of the hotel suite that supposedly represents his protection from reality; and the ever-present menace of the wall itself, a symbol of repression for society and every one of its inhabitants.
In this series of apocalyptic images, Gerald Scarfe succeeded in evoking all the latent despair, anger and fear in Roger Waters’ cycle of songs; and in setting the template for the movie that would bring this lacerating tale to cinema screens around the world. The complete storyboard not only encapsulates a filmic cult classic, but also represents an artistic imagination at the height of its powers.
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Original Artwork for Pink Floyd The Wall From The Private Collection Of Gerald Scarfe
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Gerald Scarfe (b. 1936) is one of Britain’s most celebrated and distinctive artists, cartoonists and illustrators. His unmistakeable political cartoons have decorated the editorial pages of London’s most prestigious Sunday newspaper, The Sunday Times, for more than five decades. For The Daily Mail he also contributed editorial reportage in the 1960s from around the world, including memorable illustrations of the war in Vietnam. The same decade saw his work appearing regularly in two of the country’s most popular magazines, Private Eye and Punch, while he also contributed several of the most creative cover designs for Time magazine.
His journalistic and editorial work was merely the springboard for a life devoted to a dazzlingly diverse array of creative ventures. Over the course of his long and distinguished career, Scarfe’s talent has been turned to many other media beyond the printed page, including television (where, among other commissions, he provided the unforgettable opening title sequence for the BBC comedy classic, Yes, Minister); theatre; opera; ballet; and cinema, notably his work as Production Designer on the 1997 Disney animation, Hercules.
His depictions of major British figures, past and present, were commissioned and exhibited by the National Portrait Gallery in 2003 – merely one of literally dozens of exhibitions of his work which have been staged since the late 1960s. He has been a regular broadcaster, most recently as the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Recycled Radio, and has also worked successfully as a film and TV director, a costume and set designer, and an author.
Among his many honours, he was awarded a CBE in HM The Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2008; and he was also invited to design a set of postage stamps for The Royal Mail. Since the 1960s, his drawings have often been collected in book form, most notably in his pictorial autobiography, Scarfe by Scarfe (1986), which was made into a BBC film, and also Drawing Blood, published in 2005. But perhaps his most familiar and widely seen work has arisen from his frequent collaborations with the rock band, Pink Floyd, on whose career he left an indelible and unique mark.
GERALD SCARFE AND PINK FLOYD
Gerald Scarfe’s first venture into film animation was A Long Drawn Out Trip, an impressionistic, satirical record of his ambivalent response to the culture of Los Angeles, circa 1971. Scarfe’s images teased and twisted a series of American cultural icons, with a soundtrack that montaged clips from popular songs, movie dialogue and the banalities of U.S. TV hosts.
The 16-minute film was screened on October 6, 1973 as part of BBC-TV’s arts programme, Second House. Among the viewers that Saturday evening was Nick Mason, drummer with Pink Floyd. The band’s bassist and chief composer, Roger Waters, recalled: ‘He rang me to say, “Check this out! I think we should do something with this guy.’ So I did check it out – it was beautiful, exquisitely insane – so I rang Nick and I said, “He’s obviously fucking mad, let’s get him on board”.’
A meeting was arranged at Mason’s North London home, so that Scarfe – who was aware of the band, but not intimately familiar with their music – could meet all four members of Pink Floyd. ‘I didn’t know what I was going to meet,’ he explained, ‘but they were all surprisingly civilized.’ Mason gave him a collection of Floyd’s albums, including their most recent release, The Dark Side
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Original Artwork for Pink Floyd The Wall From The Private Collection Of Gerald Scarfe
of the Moon, and invited the artist to watch the band performing that epic at London’s Rainbow Theatre on November 4, 1973. As Scarfe recalled, ‘The explosive visual effects that play an enormous part in the theatricality of their shows appealed to my delusions of grandeur’, and the seeds for a creative partnership were planted.
The first public evidence of this artistic collaboration was a quintessential Scarfe cartoon of the band in rehearsal, a stone’s throw from Kings Cross station in London, in October 1974. It comprised the centre-spread of the band’s comic-book programme for their 1974-75 U.K. and U.S. tour. Pink Floyd were working somewhat haphazardly towards two album projects, Wish You Were Here and Animals, and Scarfe began to assemble animated sequences to accompany performances of some of the key songs from those records during the band’s 1977 In the Flesh tour. These remarkable animations, visible today in the band’s official music videos for songs such as ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ and ‘Welcome to the Machine’, were the first hint of what was to come when Scarfe and Roger Waters entered into their most intimate and protracted project: The Wall.
THE BUILDING OF THE WALL
By the time of the final In the Flesh show, in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, Roger Waters had been experiencing a deep sense of disillusionment about the relationship between the band and their fans. To his subsequent horror, he actually spat at one member of the audience which, as he reflected later, ‘was a very fascistic thing to do. It frightened me. But I’d known for a while during that tour – which I hated – that there was something very wrong. I didn’t feel in contact with the audience. They were no longer people; they had become it – a beast. I felt this enormous barrier between them and what I was trying to do.’
Waters channelled this sense of frustration into a song sequence that was also shaped by what he called ‘the alienation I felt at the loss of my father, who was killed during World War II’. At the heart of his songs was a single simple image: a wall that, as Gerald Scarfe explained, was meant to ‘express the sense of isolation and alienation for the audience that he was feeling’. Pink Floyd’s live performances had long been acclaimed for their extravagant staging and imaginative flair, but here was a project that demanded to be expressed visually as well as musically. Roger Waters knew that there was only one possible collaborator: Gerald Scarfe.
During 1978, Waters played Scarfe his demos for the songs that would become The Wall, and invited the artist to respond in his own medium. ‘We seemed to get on well,’ Scarfe said later. ‘Roger has this rather acerbic sense of humour, as I do, and he’s extremely witty. Roger is one of those wonderful people, as far as I’m concerned, who seems to understand that when you hire an artist, you hire what the artist does, you don’t tell them what to do.’ For the next year, Scarfe created and refined a tapestry of designs and animations that could translate Waters’ dour, apocalyptic scenario into two- and ultimately three-dimensional shape. ‘The vision was mine,’ he remembered, ‘my interpretation of his ideas, and what I thought his life was like.’
Pink Floyd’s double-album of The Wall was released in November 1979, with a cover design (credited to both men) based around the central motif. The package opened up to reveal a set of Scarfe’s scabrous illustrations, while the inner sleeves included the song lyrics in his distinctive handwriting. At short notice, Scarfe also had to prepare animations and direct the video to accompany a single, ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part Two)’. The single reached No. 1 on both sides
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Original Artwork for Pink Floyd The Wall From The Private Collection Of Gerald Scarfe
of the Atlantic, while The Wall itself was destined to become one of the best-selling albums of all time, achieving multi-platinum status around the world.
The band’s subsequent tour was brief but equally gargantuan, in both concept and reception. To enact the theme of the album, Gerald Scarfe and production designer Mark Fisher created a sublime blend of theatrics, puppetry, lighting, animation and sheer chutzpah, which resulted in the creation – and then demolition – of a vast wall between the band and their fans. It was arguably the most spectacular rock show ever staged, and Scarfe’s animated sequences, which were projected onto the wall, were key to both the spectacle and the thematic unity of the performance.
FROM STAGE TO SCREEN
Even in purely aural form, there was something intensely cinematic about The Wall. The album’s producer, Bob Ezrin, claimed that he had originally helped Waters to sequence the songs by creating ‘a script for an imaginary Wall movie’. Waters, meanwhile, credited Gerald Scarfe’s animations with having triggered the idea that The Wall could become a full-scale motion picture. The two men once again embarked upon a long period of collaboration. At first, Scarfe imagined that the author Roald Dahl might pen a screenplay, but when it became apparent that he had not quite grasped the scale and nature of the project, Scarfe and Waters decided to go it alone. ‘We didn’t really know how to write a film script at the time,’ Scarfe admitted later, ‘but we learned, and we did write one.’ His London home duly became the centre of operations.
As one might expect from such a brilliant artist, Scarfe initially shaped the story in visual terms, with a remarkable sequence of illustrations that captured the pure horror at the heart of Waters’ original vision. Alan Parker, who was recruited as consultant and would ultimately direct the film of The Wall, recalled his first meeting with Scarfe, ‘whose drawings I’d long admired in Private Eye and The Sunday Times. When he arrived, he unrolled a kind of storyboard, the size of a bed-sheet: a patchwork of his sepia drawings.’ It is this item that is now being offered for sale.
As the collaboration progressed, the storyboard was ‘stuck up on the wall’, Scarfe explains. ‘We would move frames around to get the sequence right.’ In time, he adds, ‘I did a whole set of finished drawings, which were put in book form and passed around the Art Department on the film, and they simply translated them into technical drawings which could be built.’ Both Waters and Scarfe initially imagined that the film would merge animations and other visual sequences with a performance of The Wall by Pink Floyd; but eventually the performance element (and all sight of the band) was removed entirely.
Then Alan Parker entered the picture, and Scarfe and Waters faced a prolonged battle over the creative ownership of the project. ‘I can see now that when Alan came in, as a movie director, he wanted to make the movie and direct it,’ Scarfe reflected with three decades’ hindsight. ‘Roger and I, who had already invested three years of our lives putting it together, weren’t about to let that happen. We weren’t about to relinquish our power.’ The three-way discussions often descended into shouting matches between director and composer, with Gerald Scarfe as interpreter and referee. Parker remembered: ‘Gerry would quietly and unemotionally monitor these stormy days between Roger and myself, and when we left he would draw up the day’s thoughts into a wonderful cartoon patchwork that spread gradually across all the walls of his studio.’
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Original Artwork for Pink Floyd The Wall From The Private Collection Of Gerald Scarfe
The final film (titled Pink Floyd: The Wall) was necessarily a compromise between three men’s visions, as reflected in the credits. While Parker was undeniably the director, the film was credited as being ‘By Roger Waters’ – leaving Scarfe to note wryly that he had rather imagined that he and Roger had been creating the script together. The opening credits acknowledged that The Wall was ‘Designed by Gerald Scarfe’, who was also listed as ‘Director of Animation’.
Indeed, Scarfe’s animated sequences, some of which built upon the films he had already created for the live performances of The Wall, comprised the most memorable aspect of the film. Parker himself admitted that the visual highlight of the movie was Scarfe’s sequence depicting the erotic, and then violent, mating habits of two flowers. Many of the other motifs of the film can be traced back to Scarfe’s initial storyboard conception of The Wall.
This piece has been carefully selected by Gerald Scarfe from his archive. Despite numerous requests for him to sell works from this period, it is the first time Mr Scarfe has considered parting with this artwork that is so close to his heart, and presents a rare opportunity to acquire an original Scarfe design from this oeuvre.The buyer will receive a letter from Gerald Scarfe and a paperback edition of his book, The Making of Pink Floyd The Wall, to accompany the artwork.
The Storyboard is illustrated on pages 130 & 131 of the book, and can also be seen in photographs of Gerald Scarfe in his studio surrounded by artwork and artworks from Pink Floyd The Wall on the Contents page as well as on page 248.
Gerald Scarfe with The Original Pink Floyd The Wall Storyboard
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Original Artwork for Pink Floyd The Wall From The Private Collection Of Gerald Scarfe
STORYBOARD NOTES: FROM THE MAKING OF PINK FLOYD THE WALL
The jet-black helicopter bearing the crossed hammer symbol flies through a stormy night sky. It flies over the floodlit stadium. Lands some yards from the dark silhouette of the stadium. The band gets out.
Cut to a frenzied violent crowd of wild young men who burst into frame. They smash windows, scream and shout. Ditto.
Cut to a stoker (sic) driving menacingly over the heads of the anxious audience at this concert.
The bomber smashes into the gigantic wall.
Cut to the manic wife in the hotel room.
Cut to the stage with frightening images on the circular screen. The audiences have all turned to masked Pinks school children.
One of the children rises from his seat floodlit by the helicopter searchlight. The gigantic teacher menaces the small figure. ‘Hey you, laddie, stand still.’ (Roger does a good Scottish voice).
The teacher, large though he is, is crushed below his enormous fat wife enraging him further.
The schoolchildren riot smashing everything in sight. The rioting children start fires and through the swirling, choking, black smoke we see the silhouette of the angry Teacher.
He thrashes at the screaming children.
Lancaster bombers drone through a moonlit sky.
The phone-call. Pink leaves his room to use a public pay phone.
Back to the stage Roger is dwarfed by the gigantic mother inflatable. The wall is being continually built.
We see that the wall is now composed of glossy commercial products: Mercedes, TVs etc.
We cut to backstage, where a sexy groupie bumps and grinds through her sleazy routine. Watched by leering roadies.
Back in the hotel room Pink is driven mad by the menacing images of his vicious wife. He throws the TV through the window.
Pink now feels completely walled in. The memory of his unfaithful wife crushes his spirit. She fills the whole room, swirling like a mist and dwarfing the hopeless Pink.
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Original Artwork for Pink Floyd The Wall From The Private Collection Of Gerald Scarfe
The wall is now almost complete. All we can see is the figure of Roger backlit and silhouetted through the last remaining brick space.
Roadies.
The exits from the concert hall have now all been bricked up.
Screaming punters are trapped. Steve and Harvey?
A grotesque clown bangs a big bass drum.
On stage the hammer guards…
Pink hallucinating, imagines himself in a bleak Alien landscape.
The doctor injects the sick rock star to get him back on stage.
We see him crucified on the wall.
Roger in the back of his limo being screamed at by lunatic fans, driving alongside at breakneck speed down the freeway.
A gigantic rally is now taking place on stage, banners, cherry pickers. The gross black pig bearing the crossed hammers insignia breaks through the top of the wall.
Atop his back sits a hammer guard manning a chattering machine gun.
While hanging black pods machine gun the audience, the hovering black pig bombs the auditorium.
The fascist leader shouts and raves. Are there any……in the audience tonight? Put them up against the wall.
Intolerance.
The hammer guards carry out their grizzly work.
Images of the Wife and the Teacher loom from the wall.
The massed ranks of guards march below. Ranks of hammers stand guard while the dead and wounded are disposed of.
With a deafening roar the wall collapses in on itself.
In the aftermath the lonely band of musicians playing the plaintiff ‘All along the wall’ walk off into the sunset.
God Save The Queen. Have a Good Evening. THE END
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