Man with the Golden Arm^221
Saul BassThere are two Hollywoods. One, the land of
fantasy and glitz. The other, the land of
formula and convention. It was into the
latter that Bronx-born Saul Bass ( 1920 –
1996 ) arrived in 1945 intent on producing
unconventional advertising for the movie
industry. But the odds were against him. In
those days Hollywood promotion was mired
in formula. Convention dictated the look
and feel of posters, foyer cards, and ads.
Romantic realism was a conceptual and
aesthetic panacea, and the common poster
showed something for everybody whether it
was in the movie or not—bits of romance,
action, drama, and, of course, unblemished
portraits of the stars.
Bass, who had read and was
influenced by Gyorgy Kepes’s Language of
Vision( 1944 ), became a reductionist
designing in a modern idiom. When he worked in the New York office of
Warner Brothers, he toyed with the picture and text components of movie
ads, mostly playing with scale, which was the only latitude he was allowed.
Of course, it was a dead end. “I could only carry it so far, because the other
ingredients had to be there,” he recalled in Graphic Design America(Harry
N. Abrams, 1989 ). So he packed up for Hollywood and went to work for
Buchanan & Co., the agency that handled Paramount Pictures. Finally, in
1949 he designed his first breakthrough ad for The Champion,Kirk
Douglas’s seminal motion picture.
The ad was totally black with a tiny halftone and a little lettered
scrawl below it. It took up about an inch and a half in the center of the
page. In contrast to cluttered conventional ads, it was a real eye-opener. It
was also the auspicious beginning of what evolved into Bass’s
expressionistic approach to Hollywood publicity, the precursor of the
innovative advertising and film title sequences that he created first for Otto
Preminger and, later, for Alfred Hitchcock.
In 1954 Bass designed the titles for Preminger’s Carmen Jones,