MADness—the Blog

The art of the movies is not just what you find onscreen.  It includes those images that may have lured you to the theater in the first place.  If you’re like me and have a soft spot for great movie posters, you may be interested in Bill Gold:  PosterWorks, a new retrospective featuring one of the masters of the art.

In 1942, a young man at Warner Bros. art department created a poster for Casablanca. Over the next sixty-three years, posters for A Streetcar Named Desire, Dial M For Murder, Bonnie and Clyde, Bullitt, My Fair Lady, Get Carter, Dirty Harry, The Untouchables and Unforgiven became coveted items, cherished by movie-goers all over the world.

Those posters were all the work of Bill Gold.  In a career spanning more than 2,000 films, Gold created the images for many of the great movies of the past.  He worked on campaigns for many top directors, including Clint Eastwood and Alfred Hitchcock.  The first of his seven posters for Hitchcock was for Rope.

“The whole trick here was showing Jimmy Stewart holding a piece of rope,” [Gold] explained. “What’s going to happen with that piece of rope? That’s me instigating the curiosity of the film idea. At first the lettering was very crisp and casual and typical. And then I felt it needed something to be more active, something to make it move more, so I added the lines.”

And about those red clouds? “They bring drama to the sky,” he said. “It’s not a settling sky. The red makes it more imposing.”

You can find more about Bill Gold in Sunday’s New York Times, including the story of how the gun ended up in Bogart’s hand for the poster of Casablanca.  The Times’s slide show features a number of Gold’s more memorable images.