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 what may turn into an on-going series of celebrities critiquing the movie poster campaigns from their own projects (see director Frank Darabont on The Mist poster), we now have comedian Dane Cook. The comedian recently posted on his MySpace blog about his thoughts about the movie poster for his new film My Best Friend’s Girl. A few thoughts on this movie poster from Dane Cook:
1. Graphics:
Whoever photoshopped our poster must have done so at taser point with 3 minutes to fulfill their hostage takers deranged obligations. They should have called Donnie Hoyle and had him give a tutorial using “You Suck at Photoshop” templates. This is so glossy it makes Entertainment Weekly look wooden.
2. My head:
The left side of my face seems to be melting off of my skull. I guess I am looking directly into the Ark of the Covenant? Are they going for the bells palsy thing here? My left side looks like Brittany Spears’ vagina.
3. The Stare.
My character apparently has fallen in love with a strand of Kate Hudsons hair. Kate’s mannequin is desperately in love with the inside of my right ear while Jason is half stunned, half corsage.
4. Lips:
It looks like I’m wearing Maybelline Water Shine Diamonds Liquid Lipstick. My characters name is now Winter Solstice and I’m a hooker with a heart of gold. Jason is my floral carrying pimp, while Kate is my first trick!
Interesting comments, and no need to re-hash the perils of the “constructed reality” based around unit photography and head strips. But you have to wonder if Dane Cook hates the My Best Friend’s Girl movie poster key art so much, why did he incorporate the Flash animated version of the same movie poster art on his own personal site?
Director Frank Darabont’s horror movie The Mist (based on the Stephen King novella) was recently released on DVD. In the film, actor Thomas Jane plays a movie poster illustrator, which has to be a first as far as film character occupations go. The movie poster illustrator as a hero character is interesting when one considers director Darabont’s strong feelings about modern movie posters. In this Comic Con interview with Chris Hewitt of Empire Magazine, Frank Darabont does not mince words about his assessment of the state of film poster art. The Frank Darabont interview begins at 2:10 in the Comic-Con Video Diary #3 (Part 2) (Warning: NSFW language):
“Blow me with that poster art” musings aside, Darabont has long been a strong advocate for movie poster illustration, which is apparent in his film projects, like The Majestic movie poster or the DVD cover art for the anniversary releases of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. The Mist Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVD even includes a featurette called Drew Struzan: An Appreciation of An Artist about the famed illustrator, who illustrated The Mist teaser poster.
You have seen us mention the infamous “Two Big Heads Floating in the Sky” cliché of movie poster design many times in the past. (This “Big Head” type of movie poster could also be called a “Star Sell” — meaning the biggest selling point of the film, the film’s stars, are featured the most prominently on the one-sheet.)
So in honor of the big movie star heads on movie posters we asked one of our favorite artists — Goopy — to illustrate this beast of Hollywood film ad marketing: The Two Headed Movie Poster Monster. This Goopymart creation is available as a poster (natch), on t-shirts, and more.
The Hollywood gossip blog Defamer.com points out that the new Just My Luck movie poster showcases Lindsay Lohan winking at the camera, which signals the message that Lohan will be showing you a fantastically good time in said movie. In fact, Lohan seems to be sending out this signal with a wink of her eye quite a bit. It remains to be seen as to whether Lindsay can trademark “The Wink” as a movie poster marketing look (see the Herbie: Fully Loaded poster and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen poster). What’s interesting about the Just My Luck poster is that she has a paparazzi photographer to thank for her one-sheet movie poster image:
Lindsay Lohan may have had problems with the paparazzi, but that doesn’t mean she won’t use their help in promoting her new movie. I’m told that the photo of the 19-year-old starlet on the poster for ‘Just My Luck’ is actually a paparazzi shot from more than a year ago. Lohan sat for an official photo shoot for the poster — she even wore a red wig for it because she had gone blonde by then — but a source tells me the images were rejected because “they were too high style.” The studio asked for another shoot, but someone suggested a paparazzi shot of a winking Lohan. Not only did everyone apparently agree that the pic captured the movie best, but it even inspired the film’s tag line: “Everything changed in the wink of an eye.”
The paparazzi photo of Lindsay Lohan used in the Just My Luck movie poster was taken over a year ago on Madison Avenue by New York Post photographer Larry Schwartzwald. As always, he wasn’t the only celebrity photographer there to capture Lohan out shopping. Since paparazzi photos (and most any other type of news photographs or “photocalls”) are available for sale and licensing by publications and other outlets, it’s not unheard for a film studio to use this type of third party photography of actors. Although, this type of candid photography tends to be an image source of last resort.
We’re not really trying to pick on Sharon Stone… (If we were, we might ask, why is she auditioning for American Idol with a microphone in hand?) Nor are we interested in mentioning Basic Instinct 2 again. But the IMP web site recently pointed out the new Basic Instinct 2 Korean poster features an altered version of the original Basic Instinct 2 poster key art. The Korean poster uses the same artwork, but replaces Sharon Stone’s head with a different headshot with wet hair. The only problem is they forget to also replace the original (and dry) hair reflected in the mirrors behind her. Oops.
Photoshoping an actors head onto a different body pose (or a completely different person — a body double) happens all the time, and is known as a head strip. This can be taken further when an actors image is composed of many different “parts” — a face from one image, hair from another pose, body from yet another, etc. — resulting in a sort of “Frankenstein” creation as the final result. This sometimes doesn’t work that well. There are a variety of reasons why actors may find their heads moving from body to body double, the most common being that they haven’t posed for special shoots that some movie poster concepts might require. As an actor reaches a certain popularity, the likelihood of that movie star being unavailable for a needed marketing photo shoot increases exponentially. The solution is a head strip.
Ang Lee’s new film, Brokeback Mountain, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, isn’t your run-of-the-mill western… or love story. Commonly referred to as the “gay cowboy movie” (although the film’s trailer and Oscar buzz imply it could rise above that label), the film could prove a tough sell to certain audiences.
For the Brokeback Mountain movie poster, the film’s producer James Schamus wanted to emulate the one-sheet for the biggest film of all time — the ultimate “chick flick” — the Titanic movie poster.
When it came time to design the poster for the film, Schamus didn’t research posters of famous Westerns for ideas. He looked at the posters of the 50 most romantic movies ever made. “If you look at our poster,” he says, “you can see traces of our inspiration, ‘Titanic’.”
In this case, “traces of our inspiration” means “traces of an exact copy”.
Comparing the two posters side-by-side, the similarities become clear — the layout of Heath Ledger’s shoulder even matches the clothing “steam iron” ship of the Titanic one-sheet.
If “eyes are the window into the soul” then two recent and similar one-sheets are out there doing some soul searching. Or at least striving for a visually interesting image of the film’s star… with a close crop of a face making eye contact… and tinting of the eye color. (Now I am just rambling… Must be lost in their eyes.)
“Eye” cliches aside, this type of close-up key art often centers around female actors, in this case Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld: Evolution movie poster and Ziyi Zhang in the Memoirs of a Geisha movie poster. In both cases their eye color is altered to make them pop. (Since Beckinsale plays a vampire in Underworld: Evolution, the look may reflect the way she appears in the film. But I don’t think Ziyi Zhang was wearing glowing tinted contacts as a 1930s era Japanese prostitute in Memoirs of a Geisha.) While it’s common for a bit of eye tinting for effect in one-sheets, it does risk looking distracting, even a bit unnatural, like color contact lenses.
Since eyes are literally the focus of many poster images, they are also a favorite visual device for horror films, such as the movie poster for the recent film The Skeleton Key or even a B-movie like Roger Corman’s Frankenstein.
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.
In 1989 Paramount Pictures released a teaser poster for the horror film Friday The 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan. The poster depicted hockey masked killer Jason Voorhees slicing a large knife through the well known I LOVE NY logo. This was a fairly effective movie poster design which gets the “killer tourist” plot point across quickly. (In reality, the Jason character only spends the final few minutes of the film in New York City.)
But Jason Voorhees was no match for the New York State Department of Economic Development, which owns the trademark to I ♥ NY. The state tourism office demanded the poster be pulled. Paramount quickly replaced the poster. This was probably for the best, since the state of New York spends a lot of time suing anyone using any variation of I ♥ [blank].
The I LOVE NY logo was designed in 1976 by legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser. The logo is said to be the most imitated logo in history. It was part of a campaign to pull the state of New York out of its economic slump in the 1970s.
Here is a look at the final domestic one-sheet for Tim Burton’s upcoming film Charlie and the Choclate Factory. Johnny Depp stars as mysterious and eccentric candy maker Willy Wonka, in this update of the classic film (and children’s book) Willy Wonka and the Choclate Factory.
It’s interesting to note the poster is using a “gallery”, which is a series of small photos of the film’s costars. The gallery as a movie poster device was popular in the 1970s, especially on posters for star-studded disaster films. Disaster films aside, the gallery in this case highlights the popular children’s characters in the Wonka film: Mike TeaVee, Augustus Gloop, Charlie Bucket, Violet Beauregarde, and Veruca Salt.
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.
The Indiana Jones film series has had a great history of movie posters, including impressive work by Drew Struzan. The best poster from the series remains the very first release poster for Raiders of the Lost Ark by artist Richard Amsel.
As a student at the Philadelphia College of Art, Richard Amsel won a nationwide Hello Dolly movie poster contest sponsored by 20th Century Fox. He later went on to create artwork for several movie posters and magazines, including over 40 notable illustrated covers for TV Guide.
Stop me if you’ve seen this poster composition before: Large images of movie star faces (often of a couple), with a small scene (usually at the bottom of the poster one-sheet) depicting some sort of action or scene. Sound familiar? In the film advertising industry, this is known as Big Heads Floating in the Sky. The “big headed stars” layout is so common it is often a point of criticism directed towards modern poster art. But that type of layout has been around since the beginning for one simple reason: stars sell movies. It was true for Casablanca, and it is even more true today. After all, if Paramount just paid Tom Cruise $20 million dollars to star in a “tent-pole” picture for the studio, you can bet they aren’t going to keep his a participation a secret on the film’s one-sheet art.
