The film adapts the 1957 Broadway musical by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, which moves Romeo and Juliet to the Upper West Side of New York. The feuding houses become two street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, Romeo and Juliet become Tony and Maria, and the balcony scene is played on a fire escape. Recorded as influence rather than adaptation because the names, setting and ending are all changed.