I’ve been known to spend some of my “free time” over at Empire Online. I like the cut of their jib. They write good reviews, they’ve got a polished look, and they’re petty funny for a bunch of British guys. When I was there last week I was checking out one of their trademark lists – this one was about great movie posters that never saw the light of day.
This alternate poster for Back to the Future was one of the ones on display. I was not a big fan of the spacey look on Fox’s face, nor of the fact that he dominated petty much the entire space. What I did take note of was the name of the artist and how the Empire guys were saying that no collection of poster would be complete without some of his work. The guy’s name is Drew Struzan, and I have never heard of him before.
With his name in tow I hit the google and dug around for mentions of his name and work, and stumbled on a post on Celluloid Zombie about his work that included this little gem, a poster that has been hanging on the walls of my humble abodes since my 2nd year of University. I had always thought of it as some kind of novelty knock-off, but it turns out it’s the actual poster for the 1978 re-release of Star Wars. The playbill effect on it was to make up for Struzan running out of room for the text, and having to shrink it down to fit the rest of the credits in there, and that bit with Obi-Wan on the side there too.
After that juicy morsel of information I was hot on the trail for more details. It turns out that Drew Struzan is like the Jonathan Williams of the movie poster world – having done every poster for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. His other works include the cover for Alice Cooper’s Welcome To My Nightmare – voted one of Rolling Stone magazine’s top 100 album covers of all time. As a longtime collaborator of George Lucas, he was the designer of the original ILM logo, and has a diverse body of work including commemorative plates for Princess Di and the box cover for the 1996 edition of the Clue board game.
This concludes another journey through the vast network of tubes known as the Internet, one of the rare ones that wrapped up with me actually having learned something. Expect this little escapade to be talked up on this weekend’s segment of “What did I learn this week?”
A worthy expedition! So many movie poster artists are unsung heroes in a diminishing art. It’s great to give some of them the credit they deserve.
Thanks for the mention!
Yeah, what a strange journey that was – leading all the way back to my little home office with the “circus” poster on the wall. There’s just so much stuff going on behind the scenes to keep movies so fascinating, and we have a duty to keep those fires burning in the minds of fans. So thanks for writing your post long before I ever wrote mine, and thanks for checking in!
No problem. Love the site and I’ve added you to my blogroll. Cheers!
One good turn deserves another. Consider yourself added to ours!
I miss the world of hand drawn movie posters. Always great stuff going on in the tiny details on those things.
Not this guy, but this topic almost came up with you the other day. The great thing about ComicCon is you get posters for films real early on and they don’t always make it to screen. We were talking Revenge of the Nerds and I have a poster for the remake which the studio totally abandoned. It was for McG’s interpretation of the film. So cool that I will always have that and the movie will never happen.
Sorry… side tangent.
Totally dig this guy’s stuff. Off to do a google search!!!
I’ve been taken aback by some of the fanfare that goes along with so called one-sheets these days – in that they’ve become even more disposable than trailers. The hype-machine chugs along so quickly now that it almost seems pointless to try and add any real artistic sensibilities to any promotional material. In fact, it almost seems like the good stuff doesn’t start coming out until after the movie is a success. Sorry, that’s my tangent.
Struzan’s got some great stuff he did for Star Wars, other than his poster work. Check out this great one for Ladyhawke:
