Romeo and Juliet on screen the story have also been filmed, most notably "West Side Story", Prokofiev's ballet "Romeo and Juliet" and "Romanoff and Juliet". Several theatrical films, such as "Shakespeare in Love" and "Romeo Must Die", consciously use elements of Shakespeare's plot. Producer Irving Thalberg pushed MGM for five years to make a "Romeo and Juliet", in the face of the studio's opposition: which stemmed from Louis B. Mayer's belief that the masses considered the Bard over their heads, and from the austerity forced on the studios by the depression. It was only when Jack L. Warner announced his intention to film Max Reinhardt's
Romeo and Juliet on screen a plot which involves Kyser producing an adaptation featuring "swing musician Romeo Smith and opera singer Juliet Jones, with Juliet's father, a devotee of classical music, as obstacle to their romance." André Cayatte's "Les Amants de Vérone" (France, 1949) features Georgia (Anouk Aimée), the daughter of the declining Maglia family (roughly the equivalent of Shakespeare's Capulets) who meets her Romeo in working-class Angelo (Serge Reggiani) while working as stand-ins for the actors playing Romeo and Juliet in a film of the play. The film is a melodramatic reworking of the Romeo and Juliet story, centering on the beauty and passion