Raiders of a Lost Art

Here is an interesting article about the good old days of when movie posters were done as
illustrations. Those days are long gone, and now we are stuck with digital realism and digital blah blah.




"It’s happening all over again; this time to the illustrators whose artwork graced a generation’s worth of movie posters. It’s next to impossible to think of Raiders of the Lost Ark without recalling Richard Amsel’s whip-wielding portrait of Harrison Ford, and Bob Peak’s nightmarish image of a blood-tinted Marlon Brando for Apocalypse Now is equally unforgettable. Rick Meyerowitz’s in-a-nutshell rendering of Animal House’s plot and characters is as iconic as the film itself — but don’t expect to see their likes again anytime soon....

One reason for the switch may be the increasing importance of DVD sales to a film’s revenue stream: the finely detailed, densely populated illustrations of a Davis or a Drucker are close to impossible to enjoy — or even decipher — once they are reduced to the dimensions of a video box. Back in the VHS era, distributors reused the original theatrical posters; today, those films’ DVD re-releases sport original package art designed to stand out on store shelves. The “Double Secret Probation Edition” of Animal House for example, replaces Meyerowitz’s famous poster with an angled, oversized logo containing photos of the supporting cast behind a close-up of a toga-clad John Belushi that dominates the cover. While the new Animal House cover conveys the film’s anarchic spirit, the cascade of cast photos on the It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World DVD doesn’t even hint at the spectacular chaos so beautifully captured in Davis’ classic poster."

Read the rest of the AWN article here.


And Hug your pencil and kill your computer.