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.
Each year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences releases an official Academy Awards poster to promote and commemorate the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony — the Oscars. In past years, the job of designing the “Oscar poster” has included an interesting spectrum of designers — from comic book illustrator Alex Ross to legendary graphic designer Saul Bass (and maybe a lesser known designer or two).
For the first time, the 78th Annual Academy Awards poster will come as a pair of designs based on vintage photographs. Entitled “Black Tuxedo” and “White Gloves”, the two official posters were designed by Joan Maloney of the San Diego design firm Studio 318. Each shows a cropped archival photograph of an actor holding the gold Oscar “moments after receiving the award”.
“We loved Joan’s idea of cropping the archival photographs down to just the torsos of the two performers, with their hands cradling their statuettes,” said Academy Executive Director Bruce Davis. “It transformed them from pictures of particular individuals at specific historic moments to images that convey the experience of capturing a dream.”
For some reason, the Academy has chosen not to say which two actors are seen in the “headless” photographs. (In case you were wondering, the poster images are of Cary Grant clenching his 1969 honorary Oscar and Julie Andrews with her 1964 “Mary Poppins” best-actress Oscar. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone.)
Speaking of Cary Grant and secrets, is it just us or does the male “Black Tuxedo” poster look just a bit phallic? Maybe we are seeing things with so much talk about Brokeback Mountain and the Oscars lately.
The IMP Awards film poster site has quite a few online movie poster jigsaw puzzles that you might find entertaining. The film poster puzzle for Being John Malkovich is downright evil.
Speaking of Bettie Page, model turned actress Milla Jovovich sports a familiar black hair with bangs hairstyle in her new movie UltraViolet. Sony offers this plot synopsis:
Set in the late 21st century, a subculture of humans called Hemophages has emerged who have been genetically modified, giving them enhanced speed, incredible stamina and acute intelligence. To the government’s dismay, more and more of the population are being transformed, and they have set out to rid the world of this new subculture that they deem menaces to society.
In the UltraViolet movie poster, Milla Jovovich as “Violet” is pointing a very long sword (and thin stomach) towards the viewer. This key art illustrates a “sword” sub genre of the ever popular “Girls with Guns” action heroine movie theme. The UltraViolet movie trailer promises plenty of firepower in addition to sword fighting, as the film will be offering another round of ridiculous “Gun Kata” director Kurt Wimmer created for his previous science fiction film Equilibrium. Fortunately for the filmmakers, Milla is no stranger to firepower or science fiction.
First a disclaimer or two. We are very biased when it comes to the subject of Bettie Page. (Also, some links and images in this post are NSFW.) Who is Bettie Page, you may ask?
Bettie Page is the most photographed model of all-time.
How is this “original supermodel” claim possible? It is a bit dubious, but the statement is derived from the prolific career of Bettie Page as the premiere pin-up model (and Playboy Playmate) in the 1950s. (It also helps to understand a bit about the history of mail-order pin-up photographs, “camera clubs”, and men’s magazines from that time period.) “All-time” claims aside, the impact of Bettie Page is too broad a topic to discuss in a weblog about movie posters, but needless to say: even if you have never heard of her before, you are probably aware of her influence on beauty, fashion, modeling, sex, and pop culture — even if you didn’t realize it.
Her life story is finally coming to the big screen via the dark haired bangs of actress Gretchen Mol in the movie The Notorious Bettie Page. The film covers the modeling career of Bettie Page, including the controversies surrounding her sometimes risque fetish photographs.
In The Notorious Bettie Page movie poster, we see Gretchen Mol as Bettie Page, leaning against the oversized typography of the film title treatment against a bright yellow-orange background. At least, it used to be an image of Gretchen Mol. When we compare the poster to the original photograph of the actress, we can see this Bettie Page has had quite a bit of retouching. While the real Bettie Page never needed any retouching (nor does Gretchen Mol as Bettie Page for that matter), a fact of modern life is everyone (and we mean everyone) in advertising is retouched in one way or another. You can bet that unless the image is an editorial/news photograph, it has been altered in some way. (Sadly, sometimes news organizations do alter photographs.) In this case, the poster image of actress Mol as Page has literally been painted into existence. This happens quite often in film poster one-sheets. When working with varying levels of quality of source material — a dark and blurry unit photograph for example — the retoucher, working on the final “finishing” stage of the key art, can be called upon to create all kinds of things in Adobe Photoshop. Looking at the original Gretchen Mol photograph, we can speculate that the photo was a bit out of focus and grainy, requiring extensive “painting” in the final stages… Or maybe the account executive in charge of that campaign was simply over zealous in having the composition retouched. Or perhaps a mixture of both?
