Craig McNamara writes

Not just a vivid poster here. A vivid lesson in the impact of good cropping. I was reading an article on the movie-poster art of Al Kallis for American International Pictures. AIP was, per Wikipedia ,  "the first company to use focus groups, polling American teenagers about what they would like to see and using their responses to determine titles, stars, and story content. … a typical production involved creating a great title, getting an artist such as Albert Kallis who supervised all AIP artwork from 1955 to 1973 to create a dynamic, eye-catching poster, then raising the cash, and finally writing and casting the film.” Kallis had the pedigree. Along with his previous work as a poster layout artist for the influential Saul Bass, Kallis was the son of Maurice Kallis, a famed movie poster artist himself.   Perusing the work of Kallis the younger, I have to assume that his posters were likely more effective at evoking terror and dread than the movies themselves....

It’s not unusual for a product to undergo rebranding. In fact, one of the most successful was covered on this very blog .    But in this case, the product in need of a new image wasn’t found on a store shelf. It was projected on the silver screen.   In 1973, United Artists released its movie,  The Long Goodbye  to theatres in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Miami. The movie re-teamed director Robert Altman and star Elliot Gould of the box-office hit  M*A*S*H  three years earlier, in an adaptation of the Raymond Chandler noir novel.    “Nothing says goodbye like a bullet,” the movie poster announced, Elliot Gould brandishing a cigarette and pistol, looking as hard-boiled as Humphrey Bogart’s Marlowe in 1946’s  The Big Sleep.   And the audience stayed away in droves.    When the limited release ended, United Artists pulled the film from its next opening in New York and, baffled by the apathy of audiences (and the host...

The story of this movie has a surprise ending, one that's more interesting the movie itself  – and was literally decades in the making. In 1974, as a ninth-grader enrolled in Film In The Cities, a filmmaking program of the St. Paul school system, I created an animated film starring my ersatz Spider-Man character, The Human Fly.  I had originally planned to draw it in traditional animation style, cell by cell, but when my instructor figured the cost of acetate sheets for even a short movie, it was suggested that I instead use cutout figures against drawn backgrounds.    After storyboarding a very simple story – the Human Fly breaks up a mugging – I set to work drawing the necessary figures and poses, and hinging their limbs with threads attached to the back of the cutouts.    Over a couple of months, I animated the figures, edited the film, and added a soundtrack of "action" music and sound effects. At my instructor's suggestion, I wrote and recorded a conve...

We all have someone we look up to, someone who inspires and awes you, who motivates and challenges you by their example.   Mine was my best friend.   I met Jeff Vlaming when we both worked in the advertising department of our college newspaper. We hit it off right from the start, and for the next 40 years, we kept each other laughing and endlessly discussing movies, TV shows, books, comics, and music.   I’ve never known anyone else like him, his talent bursting out in all directions at once.    Jeff sold his first TV script while still living in Minneapolis. When he and his wife, Kathy, made the move to California, he beat the odds by getting his first staff writer position on the critical favorite,  Northern Exposure . From there, he moved to  The X-Files  and began a long career writing and producing for many popular sci-fi and horror genre shows, including  Weird Science ;  Xena, Warrior Princess ;  Battlestar Galactica ;  R...

What’s your favorite song by The Carpenters? That would seem to be a simple enough question – but when it comes to the ‘70s sister-and-brother duo, it can be a little more complicated. Because often, you don’t just have to choose a song, you have a choose a version. Richard Carpenter didn’t just sing harmony to his Karen’s lead vocals. As producer,  arranger, lyricist, and composer, he was deeply involved in the production of the tracks – and a bit of a perfectionist. So over the years, as their hits have been re-released, he’s used the opportunity to remix many tracks  to improve sound quality and add new instrumentation and flourishes – on songs like  Ticket to Ride ,  Top of the World , and  Superstar . And it hasn't been just Richard Carpenter re-doing works long after they’ve been completed. Think of Neil Sedaka, re-recording his 1962 bubblegum hit,  Breaking Up is Hard To Do  as a soulful piano ballad in 1975. Or the group Chicago, re-arranging t...

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 di ed in 2008; today, he’s remembered as a “master of the tease,” the image that sells the movie without the hyperbole and hucks...

It’s not what you put into your ad, it’s what the audience takes away from it In his recent autobiography,  All About Me , writer, filmmaker, and occasional actor, Mel Brooks, talks about the one fight he had with Gene Wilder on the set of their 1974 movie,  Young Frankenstein . It was over the scene where Dr. Frankenstein introduces his creature to the medical community with an absurd song-and-dance to  Puttin’ on the Ritz .   “It was Gene’s idea and I told him I thought it was a great idea and very funny, but it was too far out … I insisted it was too silly and would tear the continuity of the movie to pieces. … we almost got into a fistfight because of it.”   Finally, Brooks agreed to film the scene and test it on a preview audience. When the audience loved it, Brooks happily conceded, “Gene, you were absolutely right. Not only does it work, but it may be one of the best things in the whole movie … it took the movie to another level. We left satire and made ...

They say hindsight is 20/20 and that was proven again with the following short essay which I wrote five years before the runaway success of the first Iron Man film made possible the Marvel platform strong enough to launch both familiar and unfamiliar characters – including the Netflix Daredevil series, which fared better than the movie version which would underwhelm critics, moviegoers, and most importantly, studio executives. So despite how events have invalidated many of the opinions below, it's still an interesting look into the state of superhero movies circa 2003. (Of course, 19 years later, we’re still waiting for a Sub-Mariner movie to surface, so I may have been onto something there.)   Hollywood has discovered comic books. Again.   In the ‘60s, it was the big-screen version of the Batman TV show. In the 70s, we had Superman: The Movie Picture . The less said about Howard the Duck in the ‘80s, the better. And in ‘90s, Batman was back and hanging around for too many ...

What's it like to create advertising for a living? What’s it like to work at an ad agency?  What’s to like – or not like – about certain ad campaigns?  What do I like in how advertising in portrayed in movies and TV?   Find out here, in essays, articles, podcast scripts, and blog posts – nothing too heavy and written with wit and style.  Like the writing on this blog?  It's like that, and more. $9.99 softcover – $4.99 ebook Read excerpts and order  here .

A few months back, I noticed there were lists making the way around the web that purported to be "The Greatest Movie Themelines Ever Written" -- actually, it seems to be more or less the same list everywhere. This list is pretty representative of the thinking. I'm not going to go through the choices movie by movie. But if you do, you'll see that most of the themelines chosen are are, at best, just clever wordplays, and at worst, too-clever-by-half puns. They may bring a smile to your face and they might even give you some idea of the subject matter. But by and large, most of these evoke no real desire to see the movie. And shouldn't that be the real yardstick by which you should judge the "greatest" themeline? It's not surprising that truly great themelines are few and far between. After all, it's not every day that someone comes up with "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water" or "In space, no one can h...

Yes, every summer now brings us a spate of formula movies that we all feel like we've already seen at least one time before. But now it seem that even the movie posters themselves are interchangeable. I've covered one of the more common motifs before here and here . But here are some of the more current poster layouts: The main action-hero character in front of an exploding fireball... The big X... The fragmented, David Hockneyesque photo collage... The mysterious movie-title-only-on-a-dramatic-black-background... The big intriguing closeup with the title stamped over it... The weird two-half-faces joined to make a single face... The action-hero looking battered but unbowed, weapon in hand... A guy slouching in a chair, legs splayed... The shoulder-to-shoulder heroes, with the bigger star out front... The sideways poster with black silhouette and steely blue sky... And finally, the whole gang, striding purposefully at camera... And that's just from a couple recent intern...