Posterwire.com is a movie poster weblog. From images of the latest Hollywood one-sheets to vintage movie posters, this film poster weblog hopes to offer a bit of insight into film key art.
In 1992, famed Czech photographer Tono Stano (NSFW) produced an arresting black and white photograph entitled “Sense”. Stano is famous for posing models into suggestive shapes and symbols in his photography. Two years later, Stano’s “Sense” photograph was used in the book cover design for the photography book The Body: Photographs of the Human Form by William A. Ewing. The Stano “Sense” image was cropped slightly on the top for the Ewing book cover design, which made the photograph an even more abstract and effective visual shape.
MGM’s marketing department liked the image too, so they utilized the very same concept for the one-sheet for the infamous 1995 Paul Verhoven film Showgirls. To be clear, MGM acquired licensing to use Tony Stano’s image for it’s Showgirls key art campaign, but it makes one wonder if the licensing became an afterthought of the poster’s release. A home video release of the poster art removed the original cropping of the photo (making it even closer to the original photograph), while an even more recent DVD release dropped the Stano inspired artwork altogether.
Does anyone remember that moment in time just after the film Mean Girls, when cute little Lindsay Lohan turned into Lindsay Lohan: Fully Loaded? (This cultural shift probably happened during a well-known sketch appearance on Saturday Night Live.) Well, Disney doesn’t remember any of that, and would rather you didn’t either, at least when thinking about her new film Herbie: Fully Loaded.
Look no further than the new Herbie: Fully Loaded poster to see what some might call a “shift in focus”. The Love Bug appears first and foremost in all his number 53 VW glory, while owner/driver Maggie Peyton (played by Lohan) takes a back seat as a line art illustration. Her image has been what the kids call “vectorized”, which is a vector illustration style of recent years made popular by Flash web animators.
IGN’s FilmForce has an interview with the so-called Ladies of Sin City, or more specifically Rosario Dawson, Brittany Murphy and Jessica Alba. The article describes the roster of femme fatales in the Sin City film this way: The ladies of Sin City, in contrast, are sexy seductresses. They’ll keep the men happy, but if you cross them, you probably won’t live to tell about it.
Continuing the series of character posters (we last left off with Jessica Alba), we have Brittany Murphy posing as Sin City waitress Shellie (while her loose-fitting shirt does battle with a wind machine). This advance poster echoes the tinting Robert Rodriguez did with the palette for the film — previous versions of some Sin City posters were black and white, only to be re-released with slight tinting. Only blood red lips get the tinting treatment in the poster for the dangerous trio of the girls (Devon Aoki, Rosario Dawson, and Alexis Bledel) from Sin City’s Old Town.
With the upcoming release of the Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller film Sin City, comes a series of character posters that have quickly become fan-boy favorites. Like the film itself, the movie posters for the comic book film adaptation are striking graphic representations of Frank Miller’s original duotone artwork in the Sin City graphic novels.
First up is the character movie poster for Nancy, played by recent GQ cover model and “it girl” of the moment Jessica Alba. One of the centerpieces of the film, the character Nancy Callahan is a stripper who performs nightly at Katie’s Club Pecos in the underworld of Sin City. Whether you consider it stunt casting or brilliant casting, Alba is more than capable of representing the “comic noir” of the film’s key art.
Unlike it’s U.S. counterpart the one-sheet, the standard UK movie poster size is known as a British Quad (or sometimes as a UK Quad or Quad Crown) and measures 40″ x 30″. The British quad movie posters are a favorite among collectors, especially since they usually involve changes and alterations from the film’s U.S. domestic key art in order to fit the quad’s horitzonal format, or sometimes completely different poster artwork.
In 1992, Tim Burton was set to release his sequel to his smash 1989 film Batman. Like most summer blockbuster films, Warner Bros. released a teaser poster for Batman Returns several months in advance. The initial advance poster featured a close crop of a black and white image of the Batman logo “ears” with the word “RETURNS” underneath. The iconic look was interesting to say the least, and surprisingly artistic for a big budget studio film poster. Just one problem: movie theater owners absolutely hated the Batman Returns teaser poster design — and made this clear to the higher ups inside Warner Bros. marketing and exhibitor relations. Faster than you can say “Holy Revision Batman!” a replacement teaser poster with a more conventional version of the Batman logo filled theater lobbies everywhere.
Wild Posting is “the practice of displaying multiple eye level impressions in highly visible outdoor locations in major urban centres.” Or more accurately, a group of under-paid workers driving around in the middle of night pasting up long rows of movie posters (and other print ad posters) on construction site barricades, building walls and other available urban spaces in large cities. While some are placed illegally, the practice isn’t always as guerilla as it may seem — some walls used for the wild postings are actually rented ad spaces, just like any other piece of visual clutter, er… advertising. Movie poster wild postings are similar to standard one-sheets (often using the same artwork), although sometimes in smaller sizes (such as 24″ x 36″) and printed on cheaper paper stock.
The most famous B-movie poster of all time may be the poster one-sheet for the film Attack of the 50ft. Woman. The 1958 B-movie is about a rich housewife increased to gigantic size by space aliens. The films tagline: See a female colossus… her mountainous torso, skyscraper limbs, giant desires! The supersized woman then decides to inflict havoc to those who have wronged her. Despite being a camp science fiction classic, far more people have seen the film’s iconic poster than have actually seen the camp film itself. (The illustrated movie poster even makes appearances in other films, including on the wall of the club Jack Rabbit Slims in the film Pulp Fiction.) It’s not hard to see why the Attack of the 50ft. Woman movie poster remains popular to this day — the stylized brush strokes and image of a giant woman smashing cars on a highway overpass is hard to ignore.
A one-sheet refers to the standard U.S. sized 27″x41″ movie poster, usually printed on paper stock. Modern posters are rolled, while most older (pre-1985) film posters were folded. Modern one-sheets can also be printed on both sides, called double-sided, which improves the poster’s appearance in theatre lobby back-lighted poster frames. Speaking of sizes, what is misleading is the one-sheet size isn’t necessarily consistent or standard, and can vary by several inchs. This is especially true of some borderless full-bleed posters, which may be 26″x40″ or smaller. The sizing can also change between film studios, with each film company in-house ad production group following it’s own sizing and printing standards.
The advance poster for the upcoming film the Fantastic Four features Reed Richards / Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd), Susan Storm / The Invisible Woman (Jessica Alba), Johnny Storm / The Human Torch (Chris Evans), and Ben Grimm / The Thing (Michael Chiklis). (Perhaps their arch enemy Doctor Doom will make an appearance in the final domestic one-sheet.) Like the previous Marvel Comics film adaptation, the Fantastic Four seems to be following the look and feel established by X-Men — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You can see an earlier version of this photography/artwork (with slightly different posing and less retouching) in this Fantastic Four promotional photo.
The most common question we get: What is the font used for the credits at the bottom of a movie poster? The short answer: There is no one particular font used for movie poster credits.
Now the long answer: The credits at the bottom of a movie poster are known as a billing block or credit block. The credit block consists of the names and titles of many of the “above the line” talent, key crew members, and others involved in the production of a film. The billing also includes logos for film related properties, including the MPAA rating — these logos are known as bugs. The order of names appearing in the movie’s billing are tightly regulated (as many aspects of film production are) via contracts by the various actors, agents, producers, director, etc. For example, some directors invoke the infamous “a film by” above title credit in their film’s billing. Once you factor in all these names and titles, space becomes a premium in the billing block. That’s where a condensed typeface comes into play. Most good ultra condensed typefaces (usually sans serif) will work in a billing block. A few popular movie poster credit fonts include: Bee, Univers Thin Ultra Condensed, Tall Skinny Condensed and Triple Condensed Gothic.
One of my favorite poster illustrators is famed artist John Alvin. Alvin is responsible for some of the most famous pieces of film poster art, including memorable one-sheets for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and the Star Wars trilogy. But his most striking work (and our site’s mastehead inspiration) is his one-sheet poster illustration for the 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner. Surprisingly, Alvin was never completely satisified with his original poster art for the Ridley Scott film, and set out to revise and redo his original Blade Runner artwork in the year 2000. Alvin, speaking about revisiting past projects: “But in the same sense, a chance for the artist, in this case myself, to go back and recreate something that I always liked but wanted to do it a little differently at the time and circumstances didn’t permit.” Here is a Blade Runner poster comparison of the two versions of the artwork. Which version of the poster do you prefer?
The phrase equal likeness is common term and often an overriding factor in the design and creation of movie poster art. Basically equal likeness is the film advertising equivalent of a “favored nations” clause in an actor’s contract. It means that if one actor has “equal likeness” to another actor, than images of both actors must be equal in size and promience in the key art. Contract requirements can be taken further when an actor has an additional “first position” clause, which would translate to the actor’s likeness always appearing first (usually on the left side) in any artwork. These contractual obligiations can get fairly complicated in terms of layout and design, since showing one actor can trigger a requirement to show a group of other actors that have the same equal likeness terms in their film contract.
