A friend wrote to me recently, telling me of speaking with an elderly relative who told him about his earlier career as a graphic designer and how he had worked on a number of movie posters. It made me think of all the great old movie posters I had always seen and enjoyed over the years. I particularly liked the early ones, pre-computerization, that featured great graphics and wonderful illustration art. They were meant to grab the passerby’s eye and quickly give an impression of the film. Some are quite beautiful and stand up as objects of art in their own right.
Doing a little digging brought me to a book, Starstruck, by collector Ira Resnick that has about 250 images of posters from his large collection. There is a nice feature on his website that allows you to browse the first several pages of the book to give you a feel for the artwork shown. It has some great imagery which puts it on my list of books to get.
Page from "Starstruck" by Ira Resnick
I definitely have been influenced by popular entertainment and advertising in my own work. It would be easy to deny it but we are so bombarded in our culture that to do so would be disingenuous. I remember stopping and looking at movie posters in the lobbies of theatres from an early age, pulled in by the colors and images. There was a poster shop in downtown Elmira (actually a front for their adult books and material in the back) that I used to frequent as a teen. The posters hung from the ceiling like stalactites, hundreds of them in all sorts of styles. Some were funny, some were racy and some were plain stupid. But my faves were the movie posters. I can still see many of them in my memory. As I said, they definitely inspired how I see color and shape.
Redtree Times 
How wonderful to see King Vidor’s name here! He was born in Galveston and survived the 1900 storm. I go regularly to the Grand Opera House where he saw his first movie, A Trip to the Moon. He recalled later the discussion he had about the movie with his friends. He contended it was photography, the friends said no, the images were painted on the film.
There’s a nice article about him here.
I’ve not thought about him in ages – thanks for the reminder.
The posters themselves are great. They remind me of another “niche” I really enjoy – the cover art for vintage crime novels. 😉
Thanks for that link. I didn’t know much about him outside of his movies (and this article provides great insights into all of his films) and his great name. I also like the way he views his lack of success in other fields as his good luck. I indentify very much with that and am glad, like Vidor, that I wasn’t a better used car salesman.
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