Brooks' look hooks

One of the goals of an effective ad campaign is a consistent, identifiable look that’s distinctive of the advertiser and can unify the campaign across different mediums and messages. And that can apply to movie posters, too. (And not just for series like Star Wars and Indiana Jones.)

While reading Mel Brooks' recent autobiography, All About Me, which is illustrated with posters of many of his movies, I realized something that I hadn’t, back when the movies came out years apart. Several of the posters for first half-dozen or so movies had a kind of “house-style” to them.

In fact, the poster for 1974’s Blazing Saddles was the first for designer John Alvin, who would go on to create posters for more than 135 films, including Blade Runner, The Color Purple, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King.

Alvin died in 2008; today, he’s remembered as a “master of the tease,” the image that sells the movie without the hyperbole and hucksterism of classic movie advertising. (Think of his personal favorite, his art for E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, that samples Michelangelo’s painting, The Creation of David, to inspire a glowing alien finger reaching for the hand of a young boy.)

And yet, the first movie poster he created was a far cry from this pared-back style for which he’s best remembered. The title, Blazing Saddles, came from Brooks combining of two “western” words into one incongruous phrase. “No one ever put them together, and for good reason: They simply don’t go together,” Brooks mused. “However, they cry, “Crazy Western” … the title tells you everything.”

 

Well maybe not everything. Alvin helped.

 

His Blazing Saddles poster was overstuffed with off-kilter imagery, including Cleavon Little rising up, Lone-Ranger-like, on his horse, and Brooks himself in a headdress (bearing Yiddish characters) over the backdrop of a coin (inscribed with “Hi, I’m Mel, Trust Me.”), all against a twilight western sky with the movie’s title in big 3D letters that looked both overblown and oddly authentic. Oh, and if you noticed, there was a boom microphone dangling down from the top, foreshadowing the movie’s reality-warping ending. 

 

Word-of-mouth made Blazing Saddles a hit, but the poster helped create the buzz, selling the film as both parody and epic. It captured Mel’s vision perfectly.

 

“Making a satiric comedy serves two audiences equally and simultaneously: the audience that gets every film reference and all of the subtext, and the other audience that has never seen or heard of any related film,” Brooks explained. “I wanted Blazing Saddles to work on its own. What I mean by that is even if you’d never seen a Western before, you’d still get it.”

 

Amid the posters for the increasingly darker, cynical movies of “New Hollywood” in the 1970s (Think Taxi Driver, The Conversation, The French Connection, Death Wish), Alvin’s image was colorful and bold, in a way, the last gasp of Hollywood’s Golden Age of “costume” spectacle, glitzy musicals, and epic westerns.

 

So when Brooks made four more movies based in parody, he returned to John Alvin for posters in a similar vein. Maybe not surprising, as his movies of the era were populated with returning actors and writers, too – and when something works, why change it? 

Just like any successful product, that recognizable graphic style told Brooks fans what to expect from his latest movie. If it wasn’t quality assurance, it was at least the promise of some good laughs.

 

As Variety might put it, the look was Brooks’ hook.