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.
As some of you may know, there is nothing we love more than discussing hidden imagery in movie poster one-sheets. It’s like Hollywood’s version of a hidden 3D poster you saw at the mall as a kid: stare at it long enough, and you are bound to find something. An impressive variation on this “hidden gem” idea is when the extra discovery actually contributes to the design of the poster itself. This idea brings us to the U.S. domestic one-sheet for the Oscar winning film Silence of the Lambs.
When a designer hides or adds a less than overt element to a composition it is sometimes called a secondary image or second read. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo. You’ve looked at something countless times only to discover something new (or like most of us, have it pointed out to you). In the Silence of the Lambs movie poster, Jodie Foster’s face is given a high contrast treatment with a large moth placed over her mouth. Looking closer at the moth, we notice a subtle skull on the head of the butterfly — the so-called “death’s head” moth from the film. A striking image, which matches the dark tone of the film itself.
In the Silence of the Lambs image, the ambiguous skull on the moth is actually made up of seven naked female bodies. The image of the “skull orgy” originated in a portrait photograph by Philippe Halsman of Salvador Dali, entitled Salvador Dali In Voluptate Mors. (The photo itself was inspired by surrealist Dali’s gouache Female Bodies as a Skull painting. Dali later translated the same idea into his own live sculptures.) The Lambs one-sheet was created by the (now defunct) film ad agency Dazu, and the skull image idea was reportedly given to the agency by director Jonathan Demme specifically for use in the film’s poster artwork.
IGN FilmForce has released the teaser poster for the upcoming horror sequel Saw 2. The Saw 2 poster is a sequel in itself, following the look of a previous series of one-sheets from the first film. For such a gory concept (digits as digits), there isn’t much blood to be seen in this horror film poster. Why?
One thing you may not know about movie posters (and film trailers) is that the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has approval over them. The film industry trade group, which assigns film ratings to all U.S. domestic films bound for a theatrical release, also has control over the content of one-sheets and trailers sent to movie theaters. As with all matters involving the MPAA, this involves some de facto censorship on the part of film studio marketing departments in an effort to comply with undefined and arbitrary rules imposed on advertising.
For example: Blood.
The MPAA hates blood, and doesn’t want to see much of it on one-sheets and in film trailers. Have you ever wondered why Miramax spent countless dollars to digitally change all of the red blood to the color black on Uma Thurman’s yellow jumpsuit in trailers for Kill Bill: Vol 1? To avoid a “red band” trailer label from the MPAA, Uma goes from being a bloody mess to just a mess.
The MPAA also isn’t a fan of guns. Sometimes they choose to impose a rule that a character cannot be holding more than one gun at a time. (Example: One of Lara Croft’s trademark dual pistols conveniently falls under a shadow in the Tomb Raider poster to meet this requirement.) But like all oversight by the MPAA, these rules are not consistent. (Example: Is Niboe free to hold two guns in The Matrix Reloaded?)
But getting back to films like Saw 2, it’s interesting to note that the (literal) life blood of horror films is largely absent in recent horror film movie poster artwork.
A sometimes thankless job in a niche industry, the film advertising copywriter is employed to hone a film’s creative direction into a phrase or sentence, known as a copyline or tagline. Copylines appear in movie posters, film trailers, and other material used to market a motion picture. A well thought out piece of copy can help deliver that extra edge a studio executive is looking for in the film marketing sweepstakes.
The most famous and well-known copyline would have to be:
“In space, no one can hear you scream.”
The tagline appeared on posters for the Ridley Scott sci-fi horror touchstone ALIEN, and was written by copywriter Barbara Gips for 20th Century Fox. The line does exactly what it was designed to do: advertise the fact the film combines the two genres of horror and science fiction.
A copywriter, often working on a freelance basis, can be called on to generate hundreds of taglines over the course of a film poster’s design/revision process, which can last anywhere from a few months to over a year. You’d be surprised how much work it takes to get to a single line, even when it ends up being a quote taken from the film itself, such as the famous tagline “They’re here.” from the film Poltergeist.
For film trailers, the copywriter is given a few sentences to summarize a film’s plot in conjunction with the appropriate trailer imagery. (The shorthand for trailer copy seems to be: “In a world…” [setup film’s plot] “…but now…” [setup film’s conflict]. Regardless, the trailer voiceover copy will sound better coming from “the voice of God” Don LaFontaine. Trailers get a better explanation in an “entry” in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)
What are some of your favorite movie taglines?
Warner Bros. has released yet another movie poster for the upcoming film Batman Begins. (I believe this is the French version of the one-sheet.) That brings the Bat-total of Bat-posters (including international one-sheets) to six. That is a lot of sepia toned Dark Knight being pushed around.
A large number of posters for a film release isn’t uncommon (look at the series of posters for Sin City), but that type of campaign is more appropriate for covering a series of characters. In this case, the countless posters (even if you exclude international one-sheets) seem to dilute the previous posters that much more.
MovieMaker Magazine has a 2004 interview with three illustrators lamenting the state of movie poster design in relation to art. Artists Drew Struzan, John Berkey, and John Solie offer their take on the “declining state of movie poster art”:
“I think the ’80s were the era when poster art was strongest,” says Drew 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.”
With the recent announcement of another Jaws Special Edition DVD release of the Steven Spielberg classic film, Guido Henkel of DVD Review notes the Jaws DVD cover design “features the crappy new cover art that disgraced the previous release, showing a Mako shark as opposed to a Great White.” This kind of criticism seems a bit unfounded, since the shark as depicted in the poster art has never been a Great White or Mako shark, just an ungodly sized set of teeth bearing little resemblance to any real type of shark whatsoever. The artwork used in the Jaws DVD releases is a reworking of the original Jaws one-sheet art. (The updated DVD art was reportedly done by noted movie poster illustrator John Alvin.)
The original Jaws one-sheet was created by film advertising ad agency Seiniger Marketing Group. Known as the “New York Yankees” of film advertising, Seiniger Advertising was one of the biggest forces behind movie posters for several decades. And no “Yankees” team would be complete without a George Steinbrenner, in this case company head and namesake Tony Seiniger. The Jaws artwork itself was painted by illustator Roger Kastel, and remains an icon of film related key art. It also launched Seiniger as the premiere ad design house in the film industry for many years. Despite the countless sequels, the original image of “Bruce” the shark about to devour the disproportionately sized nude swimmer remains an effective image.
The best thing and the worst thing to happen to movie poster design (and probably commercial art in general) is Adobe Photoshop. Then again, whenever a creative enterprise is changed by technology, you’ll have an equal number of people singing the virtues of new “tools” versus those crying about the death of “art”.
Today, all movie posters are designed and finished using Adobe Photoshop software — especially in the area of retouching and photo illustration. As recent as the 1990s, this wasn’t always the case. Before the advent of cheap color printers, affordable high-end scanners, and a Apple Macintosh G5 on every desk (even for the receptionist) at an ad agency, high end photo illustration and retouching was an expensive enterprise. For film ad agencies working on movie poster one-sheets, this meant employing outside finishing houses (media agencies that specialized in digital retouching and output) to handle the large image files and finishing work involved in creating print ready artwork. Photo illustration meant expensive service bureau Iris prints that you weren’t allowed to touch (for fear of smudging), high end $500,000 Quantel Paintbox workstations created expressly to push around large graphics, and professional retouchers costing $500 a hour to use.
But those days are coming to an end. With the growing use of Photoshop, many design agencies have taken retouching/finishing in-house, rather than employing an outside finisher. (Some retouchers work on their own, much like a freelance designer, rather then being part of a larger company.) Adobe Photoshop has made the retouching process easier and less expensive — just about anyone can do it. Unfortunately with this availability, comes the temptation for misuse and overuse.
Master typographer Ed Benguiat is one of the most important font and logo designers in the modern era of design and publishing. He has created the lettering used in logotypes for the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and Playboy. He designed such typefaces as Avant Garde Gothic and Caslon, which you probably have installed on your computer as you read this. (For you typophiles out there, House Industries has a font collection tribute to Ed Benguiat you may be interested in.)
Edward Benguiat also produced type used in movie posters, including logos for Planet of the Apes and Super Fly. It’s interesting how a good logo can elevate a poster for films about those “damn dirty apes” or a 70s cocaine drug dealer. This is especially true in the case of the one-sheets for Super Fly, which gives the wonderfully “swashy” Benguiat logo the prominence it deserves. Blaxploitation never looked so good.
We’ve covered hidden (and perhaps unintentional) sexual imagery in movie posters before, but film studios often make phallic imagery front and center as part of a marketing hook. The most recent example is the leaning penis tower of Pisa as a visual pun in the new poster for Rob Schneider’s upcoming comedy Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. (Apparently the sequel will cover all the unanswered questions posed by Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.) And if you haven’t gotten your fill of symbolic penises, look no further than 40 Days and 40 Nights, Howard Stern’s Private Parts, the appropriately titled Prick Up Your Ears, or any one-sheet poster centered around a large gun.
Cable network Showtime is set to premiere the movie musical Reefer Madness this month. The cable movie is a film version of the hit LA and off Broadway musical Reefer Madness, which was in turn based on the infamous 1938 cult classic film of the same name.
While it’s origin is the subject of some debate, the 1938 anti-drug film was said to originally be conceived by a church group and was called Tell Your Children. The film fell into the hands of infamous exploitation filmmaker Dwain Esper, who retitled and recut the B-movie to help launch the “drug panic” genre of films of the period. The “grindhouse” film circuit became an early incarnation of “indie” filmmaking — independent roadshow filmmakers made and exhibited films that titillate by addressing such forbidden topics as sex and drugs, which the mainstream film studios were unable to do.
In the case of Reefer Madness, the film was nothing more than propaganda, complete with an “educational film” label to justify the topic being depicted. The film’s poster also illustrates another advantage that small-time producers had over their mainstream studio competition — it was relatively cheap and easy to generate a salacious and provocative one-sheet poster, regardless of a film’s budget. Decades before the era of movie trailers and film reviews across all media outlets, a film was judged by it’s cover, the movie poster. Who couldn’t resist the sensationalist images and copylines like:
The deadly scourge that drag’s our children into the quagmires of degradation. Your child may be next!
Movie posters are often designed using photography shot especially for the film’s one-sheet campaign and other film advertising key art. These photo shoot set-ups are known as special shoots. The shoots usually involve photographing the actor(s) to be featured from the film in various poses and situations conceived by film ad agencies working on the ad campaign. Sometimes special shoots are acquired by the unit photographer working with actors on the set during a film’s production. But more often than not the special shoots are executed by a photographer shooting the actors against neutral backgrounds during a film’s post production.
For example, while Uma Thurman was trying to KILL BILL, she offered two films worth of character poses when being photographed for the film’s key art campaign. While most of her looks came straight from the film, there were a few concepts that never actually appeared in the Tarantino series. (We don’t remember the scene where Thurman’s character “The Bride” wields her Hanzo sword while wearing her wedding dress, but it still looks good for a photo shoot.)
In the 1950s the motion picture industry did battle with it’s newest and biggest rival: television. This meant trying everything from gimmicks (”in 3D!”), genre films (such as horror and science fiction), to a bit of sex appeal (courtesy of the likes of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean).
In Tony Nourmand’s book Film Posters of the 50s: The Essential Movies of the Decade, the movie poster takes on a vital role in advertising films of the time: getting people to leave their home (and TVs) and into to the movie theater. Whether it was the science fiction classic Forbidden Planet or the emergence of designer Saul Bass, some consider the 1950s as part of the “golden age” of film poster art. The fifties certainly marked the transition into the modern equivalent of the so-called “star sell”, where big name movie stars began to drive film advertising (and film production in general).
What could be better than “Big Heads” on a movie poster? The answer is obvious: “Big Heads Wearing Sunglasses” on a movie poster, silly. Actors wearing sunglasses in a piece of key art can help establish a character, especially when that look is featured in the film itself. Sunglasses are also one of the few examples of a product placement making it onto a one-sheet poster. For example, did Tom Cruise wearing Ray Bans in the film poster for Risky Business help drive sales of the Wayfarer style sunglasses? Yes. Woody Harrleson’s small rimmed specs in Natural Born Killers? Not so much.
From The Aviator wearing Aviators, to Kate Hudson looking Almost Famous, shades seem to be everywhere. This is especially true in science fiction, as all killer cyborgs, agents in secret government agencies, and everyone inside the Matrix are required to be wearing sunglasses.
