Romeo and Juliet on screen choreography by Jerome Robbins. Widely admired, and the winner of ten Oscars, the 1961 film of the show – set among New York gangs – does not aim for a realistic portrayal of New York gang culture: in the opening sequence the Jets and the Sharks trade dance-steps instead of blows. The Jets are a gang of white youths, equivalent to Shakespeare's Montagues; the Sharks, equivalent to the Capulets, are Puerto Rican. Unlike Shakespeare who included relationships between his young lovers and the older generation (the parents, and parent-substitutes such as the Nurse and Friar Laurence) "West Side Story" keeps
Romeo and Juliet on screen undermining the play's original ending and its lesson concerning the price of peace. Todd McCarthy, in Variety, summed up: "as irritating and glib as some of it may be, there is indisputably a strong vision here that has been worked out in considerable detail." As Zeffirelli's version had done before it, Baz Luhrmann's film broke the record for the highest-grossing Shakespeare film of all time, taking $144m worldwide. Film scholar Douglas Brode claims that "Romeo and Juliet" is the most-filmed play of all time. In the silent era it was filmed by Georges Méliès, which inspired a burlesque by Thomas