For many sighted movie fans, posters aren't just ads; they're a tease, a lure, the first glimpse of an eagerly-anticipated film. This week, Christine and JJ discuss and describe favourite and famous movie posters. From Star Wars to The Graduate , Frankenstein to Pretty Woman, Bill and Ted to Godzilla, if you're a movie fan, Talk Description has you covered.
For many sighted movie fans, posters aren't just ads; they're a tease, a lure, the first glimpse of an eagerly-anticipated film. This week, Christine and JJ discuss and describe favourite and famous movie posters. From Star Wars to The Graduate , Frankenstein to Pretty Woman, Bill and Ted to Godzilla, if you're a movie fan, Talk Description has you covered.
Talk description to me with Christine Malec and JJ Hunt
Christine Malec:Hi, I'm Christine Malec.
JJ Hunt:And I'm JJ Hunt. This is talk description to me where the visuals of current events and the world around us get hashed out in description rich conversations
Christine Malec:Today we're gonna talk about movie posters. And when the idea first came up, I'll confess I scratched my head a little bit only because I don't think I understood that the movie poster is is such a thing. Because in you know, living in a non sighted way of interacting with the world, I don't get access to them. And so we're going to talk about a bunch of them. But maybe JJ, you could contextualize them by saying, where do they appear? And why are they such a known thing to the sighted world?
JJ Hunt:Oh, my God. So I got to say right off the top. That's fascinating to me. I hadn't even I mean, of course, it occurred to me, but it hadn't REALLY occurred to me that movie posters are not part of your movie experience.
Christine Malec:Not in any sense. Do you have them on your walls? Like I guess everyone knows about this.
JJ Hunt:Yeah. When I grew up, and especially you know, we're talking the before the internet, movie posters were hugely important to the way you knew what was coming, what movies are coming movie posters in the lobbies of movie theaters, movie posters on billboards. This is how you knew what films were coming up. And they're still used like even in an age when teaser trailers are being released online months in advance to hype a movie. Often even before that, you'll get the first image from a from an upcoming film. And that image, while obviously an advertisement, that's just trying to get you into the theater is also there's a great quote by Michael J. Fox, where he says a movie poster isn't just an ad. It's the first notes of the piece. And it's very true. Like when you see the an ad, a movie poster, you get a sense of what the tone is that they're going for, you might get an idea of what the characters look like, or what the spaceships look like. And it's so it's enticing. It makes you interested in what story could possibly have all of these different elements in it or the mood, the tone of the piece. I was definitely a kid who had a bedroom filled with movie posters all over the place. I still have movie posters, the Rocky Horror Picture Show poster, stand by me movie poster. These are posters that are still to this day in my kids just put a poster from a Monty Python film up in their bedroom. The posters as a way of bringing you into the movie. They're they They're massive.
Christine Malec:See, now I had no idea. Now admittedly, you're a cinephile. And I'm kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum, I'm not a huge consumer of movies. So in I don't even know how to approach the topic because there's just there's a billion movies out there. Right. So that's ready. How can we break this down?
JJ Hunt:It's super tricky. When I was trying to compile notes on this stuff. I was thinking exactly that like how do we possibly like movie posters? There are literally entire design courses that are taught on this stuff. You know, sighted people could can break down movie posters in 1000 different ways. You can go by era by theme, by genre by trope by medium best of list personal favorites. I mean, there's in there are 1000s Every movie ever made. got at least one probably half a dozen movie posters made of it. So I don't know. Shall we just start with iconic posters? And then go from there?
Christine Malec:Yeah, cuz there must be some that are famous for being great. Or maybe because the movie is great, or is something catchy about it?
JJ Hunt:Absolutely. There are there are lots of posters that for sighted people, when you think of the movie, you think of the poster. And sometimes that's because there's an image from the movie that specific Lee referenced in the poster. And so it takes you back to that sometimes it's just a piece of art. It's about it. So anyway, let's get into it. So how about want to start with Star Wars? Star Wars is a good place to start. Okay, so the original poster from the original 1977 film. This is before it was called the New Hope it was just called Star Wars. The main image is a painting and it's a mash up of characters, ships and locations. So Luke is front and center dressed in his white outfit that looks a little bit like a karate gi so like white pants with a white Top closed with a black belt, his lightsaber is hanging from his belt and he's actually aiming this kind of retro futuristic laser gun at us no lasers coming out of it, but he's aiming a gun right at us. Princess layers behind him on our right, her brown hairs in the side buttons that she's well known for. And she's dressed in like a flowing white robe, and she's firing a rifle off to our right, and Han Solo is behind Luke. To our left, he's also firing a rifle. So both of those rifles are firing what look like solid laser beams, and Han Solo dressed in black pants and a black vest over a loosely buttoned white shirt. All three of these characters are more or less the same size like looks a little bit bigger because he's closest to us, but they look like they're part of the same scene. And then other characters. They're kind of added on and they're much smaller or much larger. So down at our right tucked behind Luke's leg. We've got Chewbacca Big Brown, furry Wookie with a bandolier across his chest. And there's the golden humanoid protocol droid, C Threepio and Artoo D to a waist high three legged bucket shaped droid with a dome shape top and then on our left, floating on our left, kind of beside a Han Solo. The heads of Obi Wan Kenobi and Moff Tarkin, two older white men and it's just their heads that are floating in this space. And then the large black helmeted head of Darth Vader looms over them all in the background, and he's holding a sword made out of bright orange light in his extended fist. So we've got laser blasts, exiting the frame on our right and left in his sword exiting the image at the top of the at the top of the picture. And then you've got the Death Star. This mechanical planet likes sphere floating in the upper left, there are battles being fought by small X Wing and TIE Fighter spaceships along the sides. And all of this is set against a hazy blue glow. And then the stars have deep space across the bottom. That's where you get a block of text that indicates all the credits the film name, you got Star Wars at near the lower right. And this is one word star written across the other wars and it's angled as if it's leaning back and away from us. So that's a ton going on in one poster.
Christine Malec:That's so busy! Holy mackerel.
JJ Hunt:Yeah, this is I think this poster is a Drew Struzan? Drew Struzan is a legend in the poster world. He designed I think, maybe not hundreds, dozens and dozens of posters from the 1980s. And they all kind of have this same idea. They hint at the key characters they hint at the action they pull in the ships or cars or airplanes, maybe they have little scenes or locations, all pulled into one image. And it's so exciting. It's so enticing. You wonder how the all of these things could fit into one. And this kind of movie poster in this kind of like oil painting style often kind of became everything for movie posters in the 1980s. The Indiana Jones movies use the same kind of poster, but you change the color palette from like sleek and modern black white and glowing blue to earthy browns and warm golds and oranges and instead of lightsabers and space pistols, it's whips and Tommy Guns. So the specifics are different. But the layout is the same. The very first Harry Potter film was actually a strucid poster. There you've got the head of young, bespectacled Harry front and center looking directly at us surrounded by the floating heads of all of his friends. There's a hilltop Castle looming in the upper right with a white owl swooping toward us. And again, all of this is painted in this rich dreamy style. Struan did the Back to the Future movies, the Goonies Blade Runner, risky business, even movies of today like the jungle cruise with Emily Blunt and the rock. They want this old fashioned adventure feeling for the movie. So they use this kind of old fashioned adventure poster, The Avengers, they use this kind of poster all the time because it allows you to get all of these characters and all of these stars into one poster. So that's a huge that like that kind of poster you see over and over and over again.
Christine Malec:And would not be specific to an action film or a fantastical film to have all of those elements kind of in a jumble. Like is there another genre of poster that's a bit more real life?
JJ Hunt:Yeah, that's definitely a kind of poster that works well when you've got lots of action, lots of adventure, lots of locations, lots of stars in it drums up excitement like just looking at the image is exciting. And so that's what they're going for and the more they do it, the more you want to reference it give your life So Jungle Cruise wants you to feel that old fashioned adventure is part of what that's what their movie is going for. So they use the iconography of the adventure movie poster in their posters. But yeah, there's absolutely different kinds of posters that work for different feelings. So let's take a look at a totally different one. How about the graduate, a completely different kind of image going for a different different vibe, a different feeling. So there are lots of different configurations of the graduates poster. There's some that are vertical, some that are horizontal, some that are black and white, some that are color, but they all feature the same image, that's the image for the graduate is is very famous. In the foreground, there's a white woman's leg that enters from our left, her toe is pointed to our right. And her delicate hands are entering the the image and she's pulling a shear black stocking over her calf, working it up toward her bear thigh, which is at the left edge of the frame. And then further back facing us is young Dustin Hoffman, Dustin Hoffman is dressed in an open tan blazer and he's got his hands in the pockets of his black pants. And he is staring at this woman's leg, and therefore kind of facing us looking at us. And you know, it's not exactly the same, but I think this poster is at least a little bit responsible for this movie poster trope, which is looking between the legs, looking between the legs, is have you heard of this, this drill for? No. So it's sometimes called the A frame poster. It's almost always a pair of shapely, thin white lady legs that are open so that the woman's feet are at the lower corners of the poster and the woman's bum is centered at the top. So her legs go up toward the middle and you know, enter into our spread and then all of the action in the poster is framed between her legs. And there are truly dozens of examples of this poster. Probably the most famous is James Bond for your eyes. Only. The owner of the legs is wearing silver heels and what looks like a denim bathing suit. So again, this denim bathing suited woman's bum is right up at the top in the middle, and her heels are at the lower corners. And she's got a great big crossbow in her right hand on the outside of her right leg. And Roger Moore as James Bond is framed between her legs. He's wearing a tuxedo and he's aiming his pistol at her so kind of toward us. Dozens of different takes on this and there's usually some sort of saucy change for the theme of the movie. So there's a blue and yellow cheerleader skirt on the woman who's in this pose in Made in America. There's sexy beige hot pants as a uniform for Super Troopers. They're sparkly red lace up thigh high heeled boots in the in the movie Kinky Boots. So you get the picture, this kind of trope, there are so many different tropes for these movie posters. They're everywhere.
Christine Malec:Let's talk about some more of those. I think that's really interesting to know what kind of tactics get used repeatedly.
JJ Hunt:Yeah, it's really funny. And I guess you know, in some cases, it's because you want to reference other movies in some cases, it's just because someone did did it once and it worked. So let's do it again. So there's one that's like back to back couples viewed from the side. This one's been done over and over again. So one person leaning against another the person back to back kind of turned to face us the audience as we view them from the side so pretty woman. This was probably one of the most popular takes on this Richard Gere in a black suit leaning against Julia Roberts and she's wearing her tight black miniskirt and black thigh high boots. How to Lose a Guy in 10 days. Kate Hudson is wearing a gold strapless dress Matthew McConnehey he wears you guessed it a suit and they're leaning against each other back to back even there's a kid movie My girl with Macaulay Culkin in it and this like little boy and little girl and they are leaning against each other back to back total trope. There's one of my favorites the trope of the hard core loner viewed from behind. So this is exactly as it sounds, you've got your hero or your antihero centered usually, usually it's dark enough that the character is almost silhouetted and they're facing away from us. Maybe they're turning back over their shoulder to look at us but generally they're facing away from us. And they're usually armed with something right so Wesley Snipes in Blade is reaching back for a sword that's you know she'd done is back for the poster for Resident Evil. Mila Jovovich just got her guns drawn as she is silhouetted against the sunset or something. And even in with the Johnny Cash Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix has a guitar slung on his back and very same like, you know, the loner facing away from us. The trope is so strong that it really is used to reference other films specifically. So there's a dark and dramatic poster for the 2011 animated movie puts in boots. And here we've got a cartoon cat in an oversized Feather Hat with a great big brim and he's in he's got a rapier behind his back. Obviously, this is a kid's movie. It's a spoof of this, but then you've got like Clint Eastwood with a four in Unforgiven, and he's got a six iron behind his back. And, you know, I think when Clint Eastwood's doing it in this way, this is to let us know that this movie is a movie in the western genre, but it's also a movie about the western genre. Okay, so there's a trope there's an article on bored panda.com which is one of these clickbait outfits, and they've got a list of different kinds of tropes and one of the tropes they call big heads over tiny people on a beach. It's exactly what it sounds like, you guys, these heads of the stars, they're floating in the sky, there's usually a sunset and a beach below them with either a silhouetted couple hugging or kissing or whatever. And big heads floating over tiny people on a beach. That's a thing. The lying in bed a lot of you know movies with two people lying in bed and their expressions tell you everything about how they feel about each other. So Oh, are they happy? Are they sad is one person reading and the other one got their arms crossed? Maybe there's a dog between them sleeping dogs lie there's the that's the movie poster. Two people lying in bed. There's a dog between them. So now we get to we understand what that's about. The four faced liar. This one has four people lying in bed together. So you're taking that trope and you're you know, changing it a little bit to blame what your take on this is going to be there's one there's there's a trope of just an eye the entire movie poster is nothing but a giant eyeball. There are lots of these and you know some of them it's it's like there's one for Bionic Woman where the eyeball has it looks mechanical inside and so you can see that inside the eyeball that's what lets you know that this beautiful woman is actually a robot there's one words It's a dinosaur I so the eyeball looks human and relatable, but the skin all around it is clearly reptilian. Yeah, so lots of different takes on just the eyeball. And then there's the there's the lady in red, which is probably the most common trope. Over and over and over again from like Tootsie to Jessica Rabbit all of these posters. A lady in red a woman in red right front and center and the poster usually it's a it's either a gown or a little red dress. But the you know, a woman in a red dress is is considered eye catching. It really draws attention and is considered by Hollywood extremely alluring. The number of like pretty women in red dresses on movie posters is a honestly you couldn't even count them all.
Christine Malec:So now that we've got some idea of the language of the poster, can we just do kind of a shotgun approach and see which posters fit into which genres?
JJ Hunt:Sure, absolutely. So um, okay, let's look at Jaws, probably the greatest movie poster of all time. The top third of the poster for Jaws is white sky with the title Jaws written in red, bold, uppercase letters, and a white sky ends at a water line. And there's a woman swimming the front crawl right at the surface and below that line. So the bottom two thirds of the poster is just blue water. But in that water shooting straight up with its mouth open jagged teeth bared is a great white shark and the snout of the shark is just a few feet from the swimmer and she's swimming along completely unaware. It is simple and it is terrifying. Jungle Fever by Spike Lee I love this poster. It's a close up of two hands. Their fingers interlaced to the entire poster you know three feet tall is nothing but these two hands the fingers interlaced, it's a white hand with light skin tone and red fingernails interlaced with the fingers of a black hand with dark skin tone. Really, really bold and very effective, especially for the era. The Color Purple, a silhouette of a woman with tightly braided hair, sitting in a rocking chair. Reading and is she sitting in front of oversize windows with a lazy curtain, and it's all rendered in deep muted Purple's really lovely. Pulp Fiction. I love the poster for Pulp Fiction. It's kind of brilliantly riffed on the idea of dimestore pulp novels. So it completely copies the layout of the novels, the font styles, the imagery. So the main picture is Uma Thurman, lying on a bed smoking with a pulp novel and pistol at hand. And the edges of the post are actually made to look tattered and dog eared. Like it's the cover of an old cheap pulp novel. Then airplane, the movie, this is one that I remember as a kid is probably the first poster I ever laughed at, like just laughed at the image of it. It's a commercial airplane flying through the sky, in the body of the airplane is tied in a knot. That's the whole image. But it's such a brilliant way to convey the absurd comedic tone of the movie is great.
Christine Malec:No, those ones that you described actually don't fit the the tropes and I wonder if that's why you focused on them because they're unique.
JJ Hunt:Yeah, I tried pulling some... I found when I was going through these posters and writing descriptions, I kept writing the same things over and over again, sexy white woman, sexy white woman. I'm like, Ah, really? Like is there? Is this me? Am I old? Is this my male gaze only finding these images of sexy white women or is it movies? And the fact is, there are a lot of movies and a lot of posters where like the there the white woman is at the front and center. And that's what's going on. There are lots and lots of others. Of course, you maybe have to look for them a little bit.
Christine Malec:We had some specific requests from our some of our Twitter followers, too. Can we talk about some of those? Yeah, absolutely.
JJ Hunt:So Kate, the queen of spook asked about classic movie monsters. There are some really fun ones there. So Frankenstein from 1931. This movie poster features the glowing green tinted head of Frankenstein's monster floating in the upper half of the poster staring straight at us. And his forehead is largely obscured by the title Frankenstein. And then the smaller tagline, the man who made a monster. And so this title hides the monster makeup, which would be really enticing to audience members of the day who would see the poster, get a hint that there was something going on behind that writing, but would maybe hopefully be excited enough to pay to see how they made the monster. And then Dr. Frankenstein in this poster is standing at our lower left mixing liquid in beakers by glowing lamplight. And then at our lower right, there's a woman in a white dress who's flopped back across a bed as if she has fainted. And the poster looks like it's kind of partially painted. But there may be photos at the basement. I'm not exactly sure how it was constructed. The monster is clearly based on a photo, but the other subjects they might be painted the attack of the 50 foot woman this poster an absolute classic in like dorm rooms of young men everywhere. Looks like again the cover of a pulp novel the woman in question is a thin white woman wearing a white miniskirt in a strapless bikini top and she's straddling an elevated highway beneath her people are running from their sedans and their sport coupes. And she's got a blue car in her hand, it's kind of small enough to be a toy. And there are actual there are several Godzilla posters that would fall into that like loner viewed from behind category. So the poster for the 1998 film is done all in blues. And it features you know, Godzilla this giant monster rising out of the sea spikes running down its spine. And Godzilla has got its head back mouth open and a big blue beam of light shooting out of its mouth toward the heavens, but very much part of that loan. Let that loner viewed from behind category. So those are the ones that that the Queen of spook asked for. I think we also got a request to do Young Frankenstein, the Mel Brooks movie, and this one kind of has a pulls a little bit from a few of the things that we've talked about so that the title Young Frankenstein is, is kind of arched right across the middle of the of the poster and it looks like it's chiseled out of rock. And you've got Frankenstein, the Dr. Frankenstein. Who is Gene Wilder, mouth open hairline mustache eyes wild with forehead wrinkled eyebrows raised the hair crazy on one side of a mountain with a castle on top and on the other side. You've got Peter Boyle as Frankenstein's monster and he's got a top hat. He's tipping his top hat and a white boat Hi, they are backed by a large setting son in a cloudy sky. And this is this is Young Frankenstein, which is a movie that I really did love at one point. I haven't watched it in ages. So I don't know if I'd have you seen it?
Christine Malec:I actually haven't know. I've heard it's good.
JJ Hunt:I did love it back in the day. Maybe I should go and re watch that one.
Christine Malec:You courteously texted me and asked if I had any requests. And we had a funny exchange about I suggested star trek 2 the Wrath of Khan partly because Ricardo Montalban as Khan was just indescribable as far as I'm concerned. He's never done anything else before or since cuz he just, yeah, a con so can just to indulge me. Can we talk about that? Thank you.
JJ Hunt:Of course! The Wrath of Khan. Actually, this is a poster that's very much in that Drew Struzan style that I described earlier. So you've got the crew, Kirk Spock and Kirstie Alley, I can't wait. What was her character name in that one? Do you remember?
Christine Malec:She was a Vulcan, and yeah, I'm humiliated to say, as a Star Trek fan, I cannot remember it'll come to me.
JJ Hunt:Right. So they're there in the poster kind of clustered together and red uniforms kind of at or middle, right. And the enterprise is doing battle with what looks like a space station in the middle of the poster. And then up top, looming over everything is con Ricardo Montell bond, and he's facing us. arms crossed. He's got this mullet. It looks in the poster like it's dark hair with silver highlights. But in the movie, it's actually just like silver hair, this silver mullet, and he's backed by a smooth sandstone desert and this line of cloaked figures. The title is at the bottom of the poster with the Wrath of Khan written in this very 1980s 3d metallic rainbow font that is backed by a spray of rainbow laser blasts it like it looks like the title screen for an awesome arcade game. And what's interesting about this poster is that the lower half looks like an oil painting so Kirk and Spock they look like Kirk and Spock. But the top half of the poster looks more comic booky, it looks more like a drawing. It's a little bit more stylized. So Ricardo Montalban doesn't look like Ricardo Montell bond very much. Certainly not like it's not photorealistic in the way that oil painting is intending to be. Oh,
Christine Malec:is that common? you've referenced it a few times that a movie poster is done as a painting?
JJ Hunt:Yeah, it is the a lot of movie posters of action movies are paintings, especially in back in the day like now the Avengers ones. Those are photographs that are digitally altered. But a lot of the classic adventure movies and certainly from the 80s and 90s. They're they're oil painting, there's an old fashioned drama to it. I think some of the lush colors were a you could get them to pop in and you could blend a little bit more easily. You know, in the days before you were you had easy access to really smooth computer graphics. You wouldn't be you know, you you couldn't Photoshop these things together. We need a picture of Kirk and this scale, but we need Ricardo Mondo ba scale, it would be easier to manipulate that stuff as as a PA Okay, okay, then you could do with the software at the time. Okay. Do you want to know about Montalbon's chest?
Christine Malec:Could you please? Yeah, the text exchange we had was extremely enticing. And I just want to know what what's the deal with Ricardo 's chest?
JJ Hunt:So he's outfitted in this like I don't, it's really hard to know how to describe this outfit. It's kind of like you take up, okay, it's like a copper color cardigan. But it's kind of plasticized. And it the the neck line it goes it's got this really thick neck that goes around the shoulders and down the chest. barely covering the nipples. So comes all the way down like a swoop neckline that's down to the sternum. And so what's in the middle is this two massive packs that are clean shaven and glorious, and it's vast. It's a neckline. And then he's got some chains hanging down and you know, but honestly, I remember this chest was holy cow, you could show a movie on this thing. It's incredible.
Christine Malec:Um, my other two requests came from two of my my favorite films. So can we start with Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure?
JJ Hunt:Yeah. So Bill and Ted. This is one that's part photo part painting, I think. So we've got part of the planet Earth at our lower left the curve of the Earth at the lower left, and there's a telephone booth shooting up from the planet and the telephone booth is shooting up such that it is positioned right in the center of the poster and sitting on top of the telephone booth or Bill and Ted To smiling white teenagers, they got their legs hanging over the side of the telephone booth. And each one has a one hand over their heart and the other hand is raised palm open as if making a declaration. Inside the phone booth are people from history Napoleon, Abe Lincoln, so crates.
Christine Malec:Ha ha!
JJ Hunt:And then George Carlin as Rufus appears in I think it's a sun, it might be the moon. It's his his face is kind of hovering at our upper left, and then the title and most of the text are down at our lower right. And the tagline history is about to be rewritten by two guys who can't spell is written at the top over the heads of Bill and Ted. So that's your Excellent Adventure.
Christine Malec:Be excellent to each other. My my other pick and I stand by it with pride was born out. Yes.
JJ Hunt:So the bore out poster has the title bore at in this like heavily outlined kind of Angular, Cyrillic looking, writing all caps right across the middle of the image. And the image itself is very simple. It's just a photo of Sacha Baron Cohen in a gray suit. He's got dark curly hair, thick black mustache, and he's got a leather valise at his side in one hand, and he's holding up a tiny American flag and the other hand and the point of view is kind of what's interesting here because instead of looking at him straight on, we're a little bit above him looking down and so it changes his appearance a little bit right he looks a little bit goofy a little bit more comical. He's his head and shoulders look big, his feet looks small. But it also makes him look up at us and we are literally looking down at him. And you know Sacha Baron Cohen is very smart comedian. I am sure this idea of looking down at this character is not an accident.
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