The Great Saul Bass (1920 - 1996)

Saul's New York Times obituary read " minimalist auteur who put a jagged arm in motion in 1955 and created an entire film genre…and elevated it into an art." I found this while doing research on him for a logo. The more I dug the more I realized how much his influence effects us today.

Everyone remembers the movie poster for Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock. But did you know that he designed the title credits also. He also did it for many classics such as The Man with the Golden Arm, Exodus, West Side Story, Anatomy of a Murder, Vertigo? As wells as design some of the greatest marks in history, AT&T for example.

It was The Man with the Golden Arm which really put him on the map. When the reels of film for Otto Preminger's controversial movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, arrived at US movie theatres in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans - "Projectionists, pull curtain before titles". Until then, the lists of cast and crew members which passed for movie titles were so dull that projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they'd finished. But Preminger wanted his audience to see The Man with the Golden Arm's titles as an integral part of the film. Saul recognized that the arm was a powerful image of drug addiction. So he went on a limb and chose it, rather than Frank Sinatra's face as the symbol of both the movie's titles and its promotional poster. That cut-out arm caused a sensation and Saul Bass reinvented the movie title as an art form.

For the rest of his career he would hone down this style and continue to be consistent between film and print. Each new generation of movie makers wanted to work with this cinema legend and so he went on to design the posters for James Brooks' Broadcast News and then Penny Marshall's 1988 Big. But it was with Martin Scorsese that he did most of his work towards the end. Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence and lastly the haunting images of Robert De Niro falling through the neons of the Las Vegas Strip for Casino. He died a year later, but his style lived on.

Just recently the Coen Brothers released the poster for their new movie Burn After Reading. You can see Saul's style very distinctly, the cartoonish figures, solid colors and uncomfortable fonts. It's also evident that you don't see any of the actors faces. That's because he taught us to have faith in the story to sell the movie, not star appeal!

That's why you have to love Saul Bass, he always gave you a little glimpse of the plot. He didn't bother to focus on the actors except in name only. In his mind that was shallow and he wanted you to see that this movie is more than the actors in it. I think you can see from his body of work which approach was better.