Advertisement
The Art of the Poster
Three legendary illustrators speak out on the declining state of movie poster art
 |
| Drew Struzan |
Throughout the 1970s and even into the beginning of the 1980s, one of my fondest memories was of my father taking me on a weekend drive down to the Sunset Strip to look at the billboards for upcoming films. Right before a big movie season, the skylines of Hollywood were crowded with works of hand illustrated art that I wished I could take home with me. Thinking back on those years made me realize why people collect posters in the first place: they're great pop artifacts of their time that spark wonderful memories.
Whether it's a sign of the declining quality of film or illustration in general, these days most movie posters just don't inspire the same artistic awe.
The film Website chud.com recently echoed my feelings about ad campaigns. “In these days of floating-head posters and art-monkey Photoshop jobs, it's rare to see an original or even remotely daring design for a movie onesheet.”
So what happened to the great poster art of yesterday? More importantly, what happened to the great poster artists?
Drew Struzan
Legendary Star Wars Illustrator
Still Paints to Please
One of the best poster artists in cinema history, and one of the few still illustrating ad campaigns today, is Drew Struzan. Struzan started drawing at an early age and found it much easier to communicate with his parents through illustrations than with words. When Struzan made it to college, his counselor asked him whether he wanted to be a commercial artist or a painter of fine art. Struzan didn't know the difference. When the counselor explained that fine artists paint what they want, while illustrators get paid to paint, Struzan said “I'll be an illustrator!” But really, he'd always wanted to be an artist. “The reason was that I enjoyed it, “ he says. “I loved the fact that what I did made other people happy.”
 |
| Struzan: Star Wars art a “wonderful accident” |
After attending the Art Center College in Los Angeles, Struzan got some gigs here and there and sold paintings to his friends to make a very meager living. But after going for too long without being able to make ends meet, he went to an employment agency, which got him a job at Pacific Eye and Ear, a design studio. There he began designing album covers, including Alice Cooper's Welcome to My Nightmare cover portrait. “The '70s were a really good time for musicA0becauseA0labels had a lot of money to spend and we had these great 12-inch vinyl discs, with a nice surface to do the art,” recalls Struzan. Yet he was still getting paid only $150 to $250 per album cover.
By the mid '70s, Struzan had begun working on movie posters, at first creating illustrations for now-forgotten big studio bombs and B pictures like High Ballin' and Squirm. He says he can't pinpoint a “big break” moment when his career really took off because it inched forward gradually. In fact, working on a little science-fiction movie called Star Wars didn't feel like a big step up the ladder for Struzan. It was just the next poster down the line he chose to work on.
With Charles White III, a well-known airbrush artist, Struzan drew the portraits and White drew the hovercrafts, Darth Vader, C3PO and all the mechanical features that made up the blockbuster's poster art. The poster replicates a posted bill, with tears on the bottom showing a plywood construction site wall underneath. “It was necessity that invented that,” Struzan explains. “They found out there wasn't enough room for the typography and the billing block they had left in the design. What can we do to make more space on a poster that's already been printed? Let's pretend it's posted, then they can put the type below the actual poster. We painted Obi Wan down the side and stuff across the bottom to make it wider and deeper.”
It was a wonderful accident that made a unique poster, and the fact that it was a different design wasn't discouraged by the powers that be. “At the time, that was only the second Star Wars poster,” Struzan continues. “I don't think it upset or scared anybody. In fact that poster remained the favorite for many art directors in town for decades.” (It's also reportedly one of George Lucas' favorites as well.)
 |
| Berkey: Creating King Kong art
caused hands to drench with sweat |
Star Wars may have changed the merchandising for toys and album soundtracks, but it also heated up the climate for movie poster collectors . “Posters weren't really collectible on a wide basis before that time,” said Struzan. “But the artwork on posters got better and better, and posters became a force to be dealt with—to be collected, remembered, honored and respected.”
Many stars and directors are very hands-on with their ad campaigns, and from time to time stories make the rounds about demands they make for their onesheet issues/53/images. (As Robert Evans recalled in The Kid Stays in the Picture, Warren Beatty, one of the most finicky stars with regard to ad campaigns, demanded that the posters for Heaven Can Wait be redone to give him a bigger bulge in the crotch.) When Struzan painted the poster for First Blood, the only request Sylvester Stallone had was a small change to his image of the gun-toting Rambo. “I have bedroom eyes,” he said. “Make my eyelids a little heavier.”
Struzan says the best scenario in designing a poster is to watch the film with the director and discuss everything together. But you can often be given as little as a couple of sentences on what a film is about, or even just a photograph or two, with which to build an ad campaign.
Commercial illustration is not a field you should go into if you aren't willing to compromise your art. Working on the Star Wars campaigns, Struzan not only had to please George Lucas, but the stars, art directors, advertisers and merchandisers as well. But Struzan counts himself very lucky in that he's never been embroiled in any battles over his artwork—and has seldom been asked to make major changes. “It's a different boss and a different job every day. That would drive most people insane—and it drives me insane! But I love the chance to do it. I love it when people enjoy it.”
Poster artists often aren't given a lot of time to create an ad campaign and it's a tribute to their talent that they can put together great art on short deadlines. Struzan designed the poster for Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones in two weeks.
Independent Moviemakers and Poster Design Today Of all the major poster artists of the ’70s
and ’80s, Struzan is the only one who still works
regularly in the field. Clearly poster art has changed for the major studios, but what about the indies? Can a small moviemaker have control over an ad campaign, and is there any such thing anymore as creating a film, as well as its ad campaign, completely independently? Sure, George Lucas has the power and the clout to get any ad design he wants, but as Struzan points out, “Most directors don’t understand that they can be involved in the process. They can say, ‘Part of my contract is that I want to be involved in the advertising,’ and they can make that part of the agreement.” When working on a minuscule budget, it’s sometimes up to the moviemaker to put the ad campaign together. The Dogwalker, a film written and directed by Paul Duran, came out through a tiny distributor, Outrider Pictures. There was no budget to make a poster, so Duran put one together himself using Photoshop, which he says “is an anomaly in terms of what’s going on today.” If you’re putting together your own ad campaign, Marian Koltai-Levine, Executive VP of Marketing at Fine Line, recommends picking the most provocative component of your film from a visual sense for the poster and advertising, and not to get too arty or esoteric. Also, good reviews you can quote in the ads are crucial. “For a smaller, independent film, reviews are the number one reason people will go to see it,” she says. The struggles to make your movie don’t end at the marketing stage because, as Duran says, “It all affects how your future is going to be. Marketing is how films get seen and get positioned. This is what’s gonna determine where you’re going to break out and whether you’re gonna have to struggle with the second one.” As for what components Duran feels a good poster and ad campaign needs, Duran says “I think it’s all crucial. You’ve got to convince the audience there’s a valid reason they need to go to the theater and see it.” |
“In the production process, the advertising is the last thing that's done,” he says. “It's usually very close to the release schedule, so it's not until the last minute that they call someone in to do the poster.”
Rather than feeling limited, Struzan enjoys the challenge of trying to reach as many people as he can. “Painting to please people is a really wonderful lesson,” he says. “As my skill developed, I learned what makes other people happy. It's a real connection to humanity, which is something I enjoy about being an illustrator. There's no such thing as complete and utter freedom unless you want to paint and not have it looked at by anybody else.”
“I think the '80s were the era when poster art was strongest,” says Struzan. “It started to taper off in the '90s when computers came into it; it took a lot of work away. People got excited about this new medium of computers for the last 10 years to the point where there were hardly any illustrations at all. As they learned how to use computers, the quality of the work kind of declined.”
 |
| John Berkey |
John Berkey
Illustrator of King Kong and Towering Inferno
Finds Hollywood Unnerving
When illustrator John Berkey first worked at Brown Bigelow, a major catalogue and calendar company, he learned how to research his subjects and put together paintings quickly. He also learned another valuable lesson, which he took with him into movie advertising: you can't paint anything that isn't pleasant to the eye. “I couldn't paint anything that was disturbing to anybody,” Berkey says. “I had to make pictures that people would want to look at for a while.”
Some of Berkey's best ad campaign art includes the remake of King Kong and the disaster film The Towering Inferno, both of which feature incredibly detailed buildings and skylines. What helps give them their stomach-dropping feel is that Berkey is afraid of heights. When painting the King Kong campaign, where the gigantic ape straddles the World Trade Center, Berkey was offered a trip to the rooftops of the buildings to make sketches—but was too terrified to go. So a photographer went up instead and took snapshots for Berkey to draw from. Once Berkey received the slides, he projected them in the darkness of his laundry room and the sights of the city hundreds of stories above the ground made his hands drenched with nervous sweat.
Berkey was also used to working on tight deadlines. In fact, he became accustomed to designing a poster while the film is still in production. Often he would read the screenplay for ideas. In the B-movie world, where a lot of poster artists started out, an artist can be given almost nothing to work with.
In the '70s, before we had a lot of modern conveniences, even getting the artwork to the studio wasn't easy. Berkey would first sketch out an idea and send it to the studio via an early version of the fax machine. “We take for granted what a fax machine is today,” says Berkey. “Back then, there were two of them in Minneapolis and they were about as big as a refrigerator!” Then, once the initial idea was approved and the painting completed, he'd ship the original artwork to the studio through Federal Express. “The Fed Ex offices were a little bigger than a bathroom,” he continues. “They were working on a shoestring then; this was before they had all the trucks.”
Today, a lot of posters are put together on computers, but back in the day when posters were completely handmade, illustrators worked in a variety of mediums including acrylic, oil, colored pencil and watercolor. Berkey would mix acrylic paint with casein, an adhesive made from cheese curd. “It's one of the strongest binders there is,” he says. Mixed up with acrylic, it made a very hard surface of paint that would be tough to damage. If Berkey wanted to make changes to his illustration after the paint dried, he would have to remove the area with sandpaper.
Berkey eventually fell away from illustrating film posters because he found working in Hollywood could be an unnerving experience. He wound up in the middle of a lawsuit when Universal alleged his illustration for the film Orca was a rip-off of the Jaws poster. Berkey was able to prove to the court's satisfaction that his incredible illustration of a rampaging killer whale tearing through a small fishing village was not inspired by Jaws. But after the trial, his painting was stolen from the courthouse and has yet to be recovered. (Anyone seen it listed on eBay?)
Berkey now lives in a small town in Minnesota, as the ways of Hollywood often left him shaking his head. “You know, there were things that were just funny working with movie people, that's the only way I can put it. It didn't make a lot of sense to me, but it was life or death to them!”
Still, he looks back proudly on the years during which he designed some 40-odd ad campaigns. “The nicest part was always seeing the finished product,” he says. “I enjoyed being a poster artist; it was fun to be a part of that time. I didn't know it then, but it was the end of illustrators working on films. I think the field of illustration in general has kind of collapsed.”
 |
| John Solie |
John Solie
You Don't Need to See a Movie to Know How to Advertise It
Designer john solie was also no stranger to planning his poster ideas long before a movie's completion, especially when in the employ of directors like Roger Corman. Solie designed a number of B-movie posters for Corman's New World Pictures, and with one of their releases, Savage!, almost nothing in the ad campaign was in the film except the star. Then the film was re-released and the hero on the poster's skin was changed from black to white. “Then there absolutely nothing in the poster that was in the movie,” says Solie with a laugh. For New World's Tidal Wave, Solie painted a gigantic ocean swell about to demolish the Santa Monica Pier—even though the movie takes place in Japan!
In Solie's case, he got into painting movie posters by accident. In the '60s, he was an artist looking for freelance work and a friend got him an appointment at Columbia Pictures with Lyle Wheeler, an art director who had won five Academy Awards and worked on Gone With the Wind. Initially, he didn't want to work in the film business and tried to up his demands to get out of the job. When Wheeler offered $250 a week, Solie said he needed $300—and Wheeler said no problem. “I started working there and it was the best, most fun job I'd ever had,” he says.
For New World Pictures, where Solie worked for four years, he had tremendous
freedom. “If they gave me as much of a free hand as possible
to do the work, I didn't care whether I was working for a B-movie
company or a major,” he says. “At New World, I'd go to lunch
with the art director, he'd tell me the story of the movie, I'd
make a drawing on a napkin, he'd approve it and I'd go home and
do it. I never saw any of the movies, but I made the movie ads
and they made a lot of money!” MM
SHARE THIS STORY |
TAGS |
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Del.icio.us
Reddit
YahooAdvertisement
COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Curtis Chajkowski on 11/04/07 at 1:08 am
I compliment you David and heartily thank the legendary illustrators for providing such a worthwhile read. An abundance of historical recollections held my attention throughout this fine article. I hope to read more articles of this style and substance again.
Regards, Curtis- Comment by Mike Simon on 4/12/08 at 9:25 pm
I would like to ask if John Berkey painted 2 King Kong pieces with King Kong and the snake fighting in the jungle. I am asking becasue I own one piece and I saw another piece sell just like the one I had, can you please let me know. Thank you!
Mike
This story was published in the Winter 2004 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Poster Art and The Art of The Poster / Three legendary illustrators speak out on the declining state of movie poster art
Order this issue | Subscribe to MM
Latest from the blog:
James Schamus Honored with Trailblazer Award at Woodstock
James Schamus, the man behind Focus Features (think The Constant Gardener, Atonement), was chosen to receive the 2008 Trailblazer Award from the Woodstock Film Festival. Prior to working at Focus he was co-president of independent production company Good Machine for 11 years and won numerous awards for his own work, including the award for Best Screenplay at the 1997 Cannes International Film Festival for The Ice Storm.
Posted 09.5.08 | No comments yet...
Other recent posts:
In Theaters Now: Bangkok Dangerous & Everybody Wants to Be Italian
“Give ‘Till It Hurts” at the Fourth Annual SAW Blood Drive
Tropic Thunder Holds Strong Over Labor Day Weekend
Posts people are talking about:
SITE DELIVERY OPTIONS
Advertisement
