I was just reading David Thomson's intriguing/perplexing entry on Paul Thomas Anderson in the new edition of his "Biographical Dictionary of Film" (more about that later) and he begins with reports that Anderson had at one point been unhappy with New Line's print campaign for "Magnolia":
Yet, truly, how would you do a poster for "Magnolia"? How would you begin to convey the feeling and form of the picture? Would you bother to ask the question why it is called "Magnolia"? Would you let yourself ask, are posters the proper way to offer great movies?
Such awkward questions could accumulate in Hollywood marketing offices, which have so little time or practice with the crosscutting ironies and countervailing doubts that obsess Anderson and are the energy of his films.
Yes, the job of marketing and advertising is to present the movie to the public and (if it's an honest campaign) entice them with a taste of what they can expect from it. And we all know that sometimes the efforts are woefully inadequate: "It's Terrific!" ("Citizen Kane"); "The Damndest Thing You Ever Saw!" ("Nashville"). I think the original paintings and drawings done for the Polish movie market -- most of which use no images from the movies themselves -- often do a stronger job of suggesting the feel of the films, like my favorite posters for "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "The Phantom of Liberty."
The original poster here for Jerzy Skolimowski's fantastic "Deep End" (1970) suggests a giallo (or Grand Guignol) picture, which it isn't, although it begins and ends with splashes of blood. Nevertheless, the tagline serves as a crude but dead-on capsule description (perhaps "too on-the-nose," as they say) of the story: "If you can't have the real thing -- you do all kinds of unreal things." Which is to say, it's about a 15-year-old boy (John Moulder Brown) who works in a public bathhouse with Jane Asher (Paul McCartney's ex-girlfriend!) and wants to have her in the worst way.
I raise all of this simply as an excuse to get around to a great piece of film writing, composed by Richard T. Jameson as a program note for a screening of "Deep End" in a University of Washington film series called "Love and Death" that I had the privilege of co-programming and presenting with Kathleen Murphy in 1983. I just came across it again on Parallax View, where all sorts of similar treasures are waiting to be discovered, and it made me think that the film's use of primary colors could have figured in its key art -- no less accurately, but perhaps not as eye-catchingly. Imagine these words below the title: "With mustard." Let RTJ explain:
Few films are so quirkily, relentlessly alive. Few succeed so vividly in evoking a distinctive vision of life, in which the abstract and the concrete, the accidental and the poetically inevitable, trade off and reinvigorate one another as naturally as the heart pumps blood. [...]
The distinctive thing about Skolimowski as a filmmaker is, he deals in ideas without ever letting them freeze into Ideas. They remain always in motion, always flexing into new, unexpected, and scintillating configurations. Consider the amazing scene in which Mike first realizes that his old athletic coach and Sue have a sexual relationship. After glimpsing Sue entering the coach's cabinet at the baths (which the camera also just glimpses, thanks to an exactly judged angle and the well-timed swinging open of a window), Mike rushes to the closed door. The sounds from behind it are tantalizing but they don't tell him enough. He grabs a wall mirror and shoves it under the door. Inverted glimpses of an embrace, clothes rustling up over shoulders; still not enough. He withdraws the mirror and looks at his own reflection; what does he expect to find there? What does he find? He smashes the mirror on the floor and, as if on the shockwave from that concussion, is propelled down the hall to shatter another piece of glass, the cover on the fire alarm. He drops down from the bench he has stood on to reach the alarm; and the camera drops too, tipping its gaze to his feet as they, almost of their own independent will, begin an eerie, childish, heel-to-toe regression along the corridor.... Skolimowski has covered all of this with only a couple of shots: he keeps the visual action as intact as possible, the better to measure the weird, shrapnel-like pattern that its logic describes as it explodes before our eyes. The tension--stylistic, emotional, symbolic--is ferocious.
This strategy operates in the film at large. Skolimowski can take the most incidental element of a scene or situation and turn it to suggestive advantage within the quicksilver flow of his narrative. Without being stressed in the least, the awning on the Asian hotdog vendor's cart crosses the framespace at just such a height that Mike and the vendor must bend slightly to see each other. It masks Mike's eyes, reinforcing his air of distraction and visually stimulating our own perplexity about what he's up to at this point in his frantic obsession with Sue. It also adds one more fillip to the scene's bizarre comedy by providing a physical nudge to Mike to return the Asian's bow every time he purchases one more "with mustard." Possibly Skolimowski thought of this only a moment before setting up the scene. Much of his work has that feeling, of almost tripping over the everyday detail that will spin us into recognizing the underlying complexity.
How are you gonna get that into a poster? You aren't. Few filmmakers ever manage to get it onto the screen, and few critics can recognize it and capture it on the page. But that's the good stuff.
Happy Birthday, RTJ!
P.S. "Deep End," perhaps because of the "Tea for the Tillerman"-era Cat Stevens sounds on the soundtrack, has not been issued on Region 1 DVD. But Turner Classic Movies has shown it a few times in the last year or two. Watch for it!
15 Comments
Your comment about Polish posters instantly made me think of a Photoshop Phriday series that was done on somethingawful.com a few months ago...
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/polish-movie-posters.php
I find it hard to believe that Anderson wasn't happy with the poster for Magnolia. The main reason being that he designed it himself. He says so on the DVD extra feature "That Moment" towards the end when he is on the press tour talking with William H. Macy. They are on the balcony and Anderson is telling him how he cut the trailer and designed the poster too.
Thomson mentions that New Line was eager to cooperate with any ideas Anderson had. I think he was referring to the first advance campaign that showed frogs falling out of the sky toward the camera. It didn't read very well in print. (Especially in b&w newspaper ads.)
I think this is the reason why we get so many floating head posters. It's hard to sum up certain films with a single image, so why not put a few random aspects of the film near the bottom, slap the heads of the A list celebrities near the top, and call it a day?
Deep End is going to be released in the UK (hopefully next year) by the BFI as part of their Flipside range. Don't know if it'll be region-free yet.
Link to the Thompson article?
FYI, Jane Asher was Paul McCartney's former girlfriend in 1970. Paul married Linda Eastman in 1969.
In my opinion, though, Jane was much hotter.
Take a look at these posters, their in the similar vein to Polish Posters
http://www.ibraheemyoussef.com/ibraheemshop/
I love the rhetorical question, "How are you gonna get that into a poster?" It's far too typical for movie poster design to just dodge thematic issues completely and instead focus on a collage of floating heads. The great posters tend to approach the film's themes head on. Your two Buñuel movie poster examples are fantastic (and worth seeking out for those who haven't seen them).
As a graphic designer, movie posters are very dear to me. They, along with album art, were one of the main things that drove me towards graphic design as a career. Jim, I hope you don't mind me linking to my own site in your comments area, but I recently posted two articles on movies posters that readers might appreciate:
Some brief comments on the really, really great poster for A Serious Man along with my own creation inspired by the film:
http://reel3.com/my-a-serious-man-fan-art/
A look into the stark differences between the American and French posters for the recent film, RED:
http://reel3.com/variations-on-red-white-and-blue/
Phil is completely correct about the MAGNOLIA poster. It's ugly and doesn't really feel like the film at all, but it's also director designed and approved. Compare it to the excellent Levi's Rolling Roadshow screening series one-sheet for THERE WILL BE BLOOD.
The floating head posters are mainly because marketing always looks at a new film like this: "How can I save this from box office disaster?" And so they end playing it super safe and up pushing whatever stars they have, on the basis that stars--not strong stories, interesting worlds or great concepts--are what sell pictures. At least they can't be blamed if they push the stars and the film still fails.
Polish posters rule. And the originals are still relatively cheap to collect, even for older films, especially if you order directly from places in Poland, rather than galleries in New York and London.
There are some great books available too. I can recommend ones called POLISH FILM POSTER by Kryszstof Dydo, WESTERN AMERYKANSKI by Kevin Mulroy and the Film Posters of the decade series by the Reel Poster Gallery, which have many classic Polish posters sprinkled throughout.
Still art promoting films is a tricky business. Most posters are instantly forgettable, but some find a way to burrow into your memory like Drew Struzan's work. Both his and John Alvin's posters for Blade Runner are pretty perfect. I can't think of any recent poster that grabbed my attention, but hopefully this drought will end soon and a re-emergence of movie-themed art will begin. In the meantime, I'll keep admiring the art that Criterion creates for their dvd and bluray releases as it rarely disappoints.
Thanks very much, Jim, for directing your readers' attention to that Deep End piece, and of course for the generosity of your endorsement. I just want to warn those readers that the version of Skolimowski's film shown on TCM (twice now) is dismayingly unworthy and unrepresentative of this brilliant work. For one thing, the ratio is probably not correct; it's what we used to call "TV shaped," back before home screens went wide -- not necessarily all that far off, given that during its theatrical release Deep End was shown "flat," as opposed to "Scope." What's really, grossly depressing is that the color has grown faded and smeary. That's bad enough, but when you add that this deprives the key red!!! punctuations of their proper vibrancy, you're seriously tampering with the movie's impact. The TCM-shown print actually has the old Films Inc. logo before the (very scratchy) Paramount logo; can it be a nontheatrical 16mm print left over from the early Seventies?
The good news -- if I can believe something I read on the interwebs a while back -- is that the movie is, perhaps even now, being restored in Germany. It was made there, you'll recall, despite its ostensible (and utterly convincing) setting in the dreariest imaginable English neighborhood. The eventual DVDs may get no more attention from U.S. distributors than the film got from most exhibitors and reviewers in 1971, but at least we can look forward to ordering Region-whatever discs from overseas.
Again, many thanks.
I'm confused. Did Anderson design the frog version or the flower version? I strongly prefer the earlier frog version. The floating heads execution is purely literal, which I think misses the mark (not to mention being aesthetically cluttered and unappealing).
The image of falling frogs against a stark blue sky is peculiar, striking, and unexpected (though I do agree that much of the effect would be lost in B&W translation, yet still would be more enticing than the floating heads).
It evokes the same curiosity and minimalist intrigue as the "Adaptation" poster (which also features a flower --the orchid--and Cage's shattered face), but somehow that poster captures the film's essence while keeping its narrative structure or plot or even genre hidden. Of course, "Adaptation" is a genre unto itself.
I've always preferred a movie poster to tease rather than explicate. If you follow filmmaking at all, the fact that P.T. Anderson or Charlie Kaufman are involved in a project should be enough to sell it. The poster image then can indulge its artistic potential, an ambiguous door that might be attached to an exquisite shack or a dull, cookie-cutter mansion. But I certainly don't want my poster to serve as cinematic Cliffs Notes.
Adaptation poster: http://www.impawards.com/2002/posters/adaptation.jpg
I joined the Skolimowski bandwagon after your last pledge drive, a couple of years back, and it was a wonderful discovery. Luckily, around the time you were posting about Four Nights with Anna, my local cinematheque had a Skolimowski retrospective, with the man himself in attendance. Watching The Deep End and Moonlighting for the first time, on the big screen, was a thrilling expierience. And Skolimowski was just as enigmatic and funny and provocative as his films. I guess I just wanted to take the opportunity to thank you. (I personally find the Deep End poster to be extremeley evocative...the 70's attempts at selling gore seem both a bit quaint, but also more appropriate to the kind of emotional violence present. Maybe I'm just weird that way).
When I saw the headline for this piece I immediately thought, "Oh my god, Jim's writing up that old Saturday Night Live skit!" This was a much better read but for those unfamiliar with it, they do a Citizen Kane redux in which the reporter discovers that after Kane said, "Rosebud" he uttered, "Henri." Then, when they can't figure out who "Henri" is, the butler tells them he also said, "with mustard." Finally, as they walked away baffled the camera turns to the furnace burning a takeout menu whose special of the day reads "Roast Beef, on rye, with mustard."
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