Category Archives: Movies

Saul Bass and the Title Sequence

by

Saul Bass (1920-1996) created an entire film genre. Bass started his career as a graphic designer who filled the American landscape with such designs as Exxon service stations and the jars for Lawry’s seasonings. But it was in film where he made his most lasting impact, as the man who invented the opening credit sequence as a free-standing movie-before-a-movie and elevated it into an art.

Saul_Bass

Movies have always had opening credits, but until The Man With the Golden Arm, in 1955, they were  rarely more creative than having the names of the movie’s stars and production staff revealed by the turning pages of a book.  However, Bass revolutionized the form when he created an innovative title sequence with a grotesquely deconstructed arm symbolizing heroin addiction for Preminger’s movie.

He designed the deconstructed body for Anatomy of a Murder; had an aerial camera swoop across Manhattan before zooming in on a schoolyard at the beginning of West Side Story, and set a black cat walking through the titles of Walk on the Wild Side. In what was perhaps his most daring innovation in opening credits, Bass created a reprise of the story of Around the World in 80 Days in a 20-minute sequence that did not run until after the movie.


Together with his wife, Elaine Bass,  he made a series of acclaimed short movies, among them From Here to There (1964) and Why Man Creates, which won an Academy Award for documentary short subject in 1968.

Bass,  also did the titles for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and North by Northwest, but did even more for Psycho. The director had become so impressed with Bass’s work that he included him in the  planning of the infamous 70-shot shower sequence within the film. The same year he also helped Stanley Kubrick design the final battle scene in Spartacus.

 

Street Artists Clash With Weinstein Company Over “Fruitvale” Murals

by

To promote the upcoming movie “Fruitvale Station,” about the 2009 fatal shooting of an unarmed Oscar Grant by a Bart police officer on a platform at Oakland’s Fruitvale BART Station, the Weinstein Company. commissioned three murals in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco by street artists Ron English, Lydia Emily and LNY.  Unfortunatley, logistical issues and creative conflicts between some of the artists and the studio have led to delays and disagreements.

Ron English’s work on the Los Angeles mural was supposed to begin June 27th, but production stopped that morning.  For this mural Grant’s face was to be seen over a rainbow-colored backdrop, not unlike the “Abraham Obama” image English created for the 2008 presidential election.

Ron English, "Abraham Obama"

Ron English, “Abraham Obama”

English’s first choice, however, was a version of a Norman Rockwell painting, in which he depicted an African American boy with a target on his back. He was told, however, that the image was “too aggressive.”  “It’s been pretty frustrating,” English told the Los Angeles Times. “They rejected my first idea. The next one we changed about eight times and the director got involved and rejected it. The director said it can’t be anything negative or about the police or guns.”

Lydia Emily, "Oscar Grant"

Lydia Emily, “Oscar Grant”

Los Angeles. artist Lydia Emily was originally to paint the San Francisco wall with Oakland-based street artist Eddie Colla. After creative differences, however, Colla left the project.  Emily painted the San Francisco mural solo on the side of Ian Ross Gallery, south of Market Street.  LNY is set to begin work on her mural in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, once unspecified “logistical issues” are settled.

“Fruitvale” took home both the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.