A meaning classic … The original promotional poster for North By Northwest. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Is it me, or are pellicle posters surpassingly, to a high degree boring nowadays? Somehow they look like they be obliged all been created by the same computer, with the sizes and positions of images, logos, star names and critic quotes machine-tooled with actuarial software to make the maximum possible impact on the target demographic. Where’s the flair? Where’s the prototype style?
The reason I ask is partly on this account that I have been flicking through some 70s classics in the book-series published by the Reel Poster Gallery Collection and likewise the thoroughly outrageous and fascinating crowd by movie historians Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh entitled X-Rated: Adult Movie Posters of the 60s and 70s.
Working Title producer Eric Fellner once showed me a broadside hanging in his office for Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz: a really witty, elegant retro design in black and white, with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost represented as Dixon-of-Dock-Green original coppers. Admiringly, I asked when that campaign had glide – I didn’t remember seeing it – but, laughing and shaking his head, Fellner explained it was a one-off mock-up: “You can’t actually design posters like that nowadays!”
Pity. This nostalgia is the reason on this account that me joining the ranks of those obsessed by the design-blogger Spacesick — otherwise 26-year-old Mitch Ansara from Toledo, Ohio — who has created the sublimely enjoyable I Can Read Movies series. Basically, it shows meticulously designed spoof 1960s paperback covers: a wholly imaginary series of novelisations of films, some of which — and this is to what the postmodern wooziness kicks in — were produced much later than the 1960s.
What a joy it is. Looking at his 1960s paperback designs in opposition to Mean Girls and Caddyshack, I felt the floor tilting under my feet and the account of pop culture melting like a Dali watch. Somehow, the fact that they are imaginary book covers, not posters, gives this fantasy an extra subversive twist, and a subliminal anxiety-frisson of wonder. Film novelisations were such a minor ancillary market that, in quest of a fraction of a second, you might wonder … gosh, maybe these books did exist and I just never caught them at the time. Maybe there was a 1960s book version – now highly collectable – of, erm, Shaun of the Dead.
I had a Proustian flashback to being on holiday when I was nine years old in 1970s Cornwall, and finding, outside the shore workshop, along with the buckets and spades and the 10p flip-flops, a revolving strain of brilliant, yellowing Mad magazine paperbacks and other pulpy gems published by means of the New American Library and Signet Classics. Yet now I’m stuck by a disappointing memory of one of these chunky paperbacks being Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.
The Film School Rejects site calls the I Can Read Movies creation “the first geekgasm of 2009″. It certainly is. One comment on the Spacesick blog, a touch grumpily, points out that other bloggers are also working in the field of fantasy retro design. Anyway, take 10 minutes to look at the Spacesick place. I guarantee it will show you smile for the rest of the day.
