← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
The Anatomy of a Movie Poster
00:20:00
We look at a new exhibit celebrating iconic movie posters of Dawn Baillie.
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Angelina Lippert
Let's go.
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Michael's Party Shop Announcer
Attention party people. You're officially invited to the party shop at Michael's where you'll find hundreds of new items starting at $0.99 with an expanded selection of party wear, balloons with helium included on select styles, decorations and more. Michaels is your one stop shop for celebrating everything from birthdays to bachelorette parties and baby showers to golden anniversaries. Visit Michaels store or michaels.com today to supply your next party.
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McDonald's Promoter
I'mma put you on nephew.
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Angelina Lippert
All right unc. Welcome to McDonald's.
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Dawn Bailey
Can I take Ms.
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McDonald's Promoter
I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.
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Angelina Lippert
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McDonald's Promoter
Listener supported WNYC studios.
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Angelina Lippert
This.
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Kusha Navadar
Is all of it on WNYC. I'm Kusha Navadar in for Alison Stewart. Just a reminder that this month's get lit with all of It Book Club is meeting this Thursday night at 6pm we will be in conversation with author Sociale Gonzalez about her new novel Anita Damonte Laughs Last. Plus enjoy a special musical performance by Caridad de la Luz, Executive Director of the New Yorkin Poets Cafe. Tickets for the in person event are sold out, but you can join us via livestream. For more information, head to wnyc.org getlit and if you haven't finished the novel, there's still time. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, New Yorkers can check out a free e copy of. Again, all the details are on wnyc.org getlit that's on Thursday. But let's get this hour started with Anatomy of a Movie Poster. Dawn Bailey designs movie posters. Maybe you've seen her work. Dirty Dancing, Little Miss Sunshine, the Truman Show, Silence of the Lambs one of my favorites, SpongeBob SquarePants, a new show explores the anatomy of a film poster, specifically. Specifically through Dawn's work over four decades. The exhibition reflects on her experience of going into film advertising as an assistant art director in the 1980s, when the industry was dominated by men and posters were mostly made by hand. The Anatomy of a Movie Poster, the work of Dawn Bailey, is on display at Poster House through September 8th. Dawn Bailey joins us now to discuss. Don. Welcome to all of it.
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Dawn Bailey
Thank you.
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Kusha Navadar
And also joining us is Angelina Lippert, the chief curator and director of content of Poster House. Angelina, thanks so much. Welcome to all of it.
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Angelina Lippert
Thank you for having me.
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Kusha Navadar
Absolutely. So lots of great movies. Some of my favorites were in this exhibit. Very excited to talk about it. Dawn, let's go to the beginning. You entered the industry as an assistant art director for Tony Saiger, the creator of the Jaws poster film advertising company in the 1980s. What's the job of an assistant art director? And how did you find your way into this side of the industry?
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Dawn Bailey
Actually, I started as a junior designer. I wasn't really sure what he hired me to do. He saw my portfolio straight out of art school and asked me how much I needed to live on. And I said, $100 a week. And he said, kid, I'm going to make you a star. And he didn't actually tell me what I was going to be doing or how much I was going to be making. And I showed up, and one of his creative directors, Tom Martin, he was kidding me, but he said, you should be paying us to work here. But the first thing I did there was working on. On review ads for awards campaigns for Peggy sue, got married, and I was doing what we call paste up, and that was breaking type paragraphs using X acto blades and moving words around. And then as I got well better known for my willingness to learn and ability to do things, I would start contributing ideas and that under Tom Martin and Tony Sinegar as the creative director. And so it was like preliminary design things. And then the first opportunity I had to design a movie poster is when Tony asked if I wanted to work on Dirty Dancing.
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Kusha Navadar
And that was your first.
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Dawn Bailey
That was the first movie poster that I did as my own design, my own approach. Otherwise, I was working under Tom as his. An assistant, where he would give me a list of ideas. He would give me thumbnails to build of posters that he was working on. For example, he was working on planes, trains and automobiles. And he would thumbnail up what he wanted me to do. And then I would put all the pieces together for him. He would approve it, give me notes or whatever the things were.
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Kusha Navadar
Do you remember what it was when you first started working in these movie posters that made you think, this is a medium that I love?
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Dawn Bailey
Oh, I knew I wanted to do movie posters since I was a kid. I grew up in Hollywood, and I used to walk Hollywood Boulevard with my grandma just as what we would do. And Hollywood Boulevard was my art museum. And I would see framed movie posters and just think, oh, I want to do that. That's what I wanted to do. I didn't really spend time at museums, but I spent time in front of movie theaters just studying the posters.
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Kusha Navadar
And did you watch a lot of movies as well? Were you really into that?
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Dawn Bailey
Well, it wasn't like now. There wasn't VCRs or things back in the day, but I did. I remember talking my grandma into taking me to see the Omen when I was probably a bit too young. And I really regretted that. But I loved that campaign, and it was one of the reasons that it was all coming together for me. I remember seeing planes going by in Hollywood, doing the 666 in the sky, and then putting that together with the film poster and the marketing and saying, oh, my, I see that this has become an event. And which is why I wanted to see it, because it was eventized. Like, you had to see this film. Didn't matter if it was scary. I was going to muscle through it and see this film, and I wanted to be part of that.
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Kusha Navadar
Wow. Yeah. What an omen for the future of your career. Sorry to put the pun, but it was just out there for the plucking. Angelina, now that you're hearing dawn talk about the start, walk us through this exhibit. What can viewers expect? And what was it about Dawn's work that made you think, oh, I want to put this up as an exhibit?
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Angelina Lippert
Sure. So we had somebody working in our shop at Poster House, and she said, oh, my God, you're not going to believe who walked into the museum today. I said, who? She said, dawn Bailey. And I said, who's Dawn Bailey? Because dawn isn't a household name to someone like me. And I then looked more into her work and realized that this person has had her hand on so many of the most iconic movie posters of the last 30, 40 years that why has there not been an exhibition about her work? So I got to talking to Dawn. We did a public program online about the 50 best movie posters of all time with the Cleo Awards. And from there, the exhibition evolved. And you can kind of walk through the exhibition three different ways. One way, you can look at the trajectory of Dawn's career. So starting as a junior designer, going up all the way to creative director over the course of three different agencies. And it's a great didactic of how someone's career can evolve in that time. Another way you can go through it is as just a fan of great movie posters. And you start with Dirty Dancing, you hit all these major moments in movie poster history, and then we end with the tragedy of Macbeth that came out during COVID And then the third way you can do it, which is one of my favorite ways. We're an educational institution, first and foremost. So we've created this book called a little book of movie poster terms. And it's got, like, two parts to it. One, it goes through every type of role associated with the building of a movie poster with, and it explains what that person does. Like, what does a designer do versus a creative director. And then the other half of it is terms that are highlighted throughout the text and it expands on that. So, like, what are comps? What is a building block? And you can essentially get an education on all of the aspects of a movie poster and how it is built and view the show like that, and how those approaches to those things have changed from the 80s, when much of it was done manually, through to when Photoshop happened, to today, when it's incredibly digital. You learn about how the movie industry and how the movie poster industry has evolved in that period.
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Kusha Navadar
As you think about Dawn's career, I mean, you've been steeped in it for a while now, looking through everything. Is there something that really sparkles about the different posters over time that you really love about her work?
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Angelina Lippert
Oh, gosh. I mean, every poster has an amazing story behind it. Obviously, the Silence of the Lambs poster is the one that everyone knows. It was voted the most impactful poster or the most important poster of the last 35 years, which I would absolutely agree with. Like, the story behind just. Actually, no, there were these little stories, like when Photoshop didn't have layers, which is essentially the way that you can, like, pull out different parts of a photographic element. I didn't. That's not something you think of that. If in a. There was a time when if you put something in a composition, it was stuck there and you couldn't remove it. So learning about the things that you were. The restrictions with which dawn was working on all of these items is actually the Thing that I found most compelling cause within restrictions come creativity. And seeing her press that and work with it and shift with it is really magical.
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Kusha Navadar
Let's talk about that process a little bit. Dawn, I'm bursting with questions right now about how you even go about doing this. Do you watch the movie first? Is it different on a case by case basis? Talk to me a little bit about how you approach making a movie poster.
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Dawn Bailey
As you said, it's a case by case situation, depending on the film. Sometimes I'm reading a script, sometimes I'm seeing a sizzle reel, sometimes I just have a summary. And in the case of, like Dirty Dancing, I had nothing. I had a stack of photos that were unit photography. And for me, I studied illustration and painting. It was Otis Parsons. So I come from an illustration tradition on approaching a project. And I had what a great title, Dirty Dancing. So I had a stack of photos and I had to figure out how to illustrate a title in a way that created some interest to the story rather than just illustrating it, trying to find the dirtiest photo or the dancingest photo. I was actually looking for a quiet moment to juxtapose a large title with and going through all those things that Angelina highlighted. Dirty Dancing was a manual job. I had a stack of photos that I had were black and white. I would cut them out with an X acto blade. I would come up with my composition, and then it would progress from there. The next step from a computer is what we call them from those looks. Then we would order photography at the right size, cut it out again, airbrush it, Chromatex, all the things. But then when Photoshop came in, we were actually using something called Color Studio before Photoshop, and that was before Layers. But the poster that Angelina is talking about was Sleepless in Seattle, which was made before Layers. And as you're building something like that, when a client calls to make changes and they want to see a different figure, you're often cloning out the background behind the head and then you have to glue a new one down. So it was a lot of work back and forth until you get to the finishing, which back then was still more traditional finishing. You still had to put it together in a manual way. But then as Layers came in, you were able to do much more complicated things. And that's what we tried to show was like, by the time we got to the Truman show, you could have. When Photoshop introduced Layers, you could have a few layers and you could have a few more. But then by the time Truman Show Came around, you could have 100. And if you look at the Truman show poster, it's very, very complicated. There's a crowd at the bottom made from stock photography, but. But there was hundreds of layers in there. And at that point, I was working as creative director and Steven Stewart was my designer on that, helping to assemble hundreds of photos into Photoshop to try to create the scene. That would kind of give you an idea of what was happening in the movie, which was actually bigger than what the script is. Amazing. It's a really beautiful film. But what I was trying to convey, there was millions of people watching this character Truman, sleep, you know, And I thought that was the way to really convey this beautiful story.
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Kusha Navadar
Yeah. Another poster that I think so many of us have seen, Angelina you mentioned it, is the Silence of the Lambs poster. It was a big hit for a horror film in 1991. The show includes four posters which all feature the Death's Head hawk moth. What are some details people might have missed in the poster if they didn't look at it too closely? Any Easter eggs in there or little details that you're particularly fond of?
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Dawn Bailey
The things that I'm fond of are, like, designer y things. Like on the billing block, I put little slashes between each name. I was really excited by the font. It was Opti binder style. Like, these are the kinds of things that I get excited by.
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Kusha Navadar
It's very layered.
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Dawn Bailey
It's very layered. It was also a technical thing. I made the poster, the comps, using a mezzotint, which becomes the first poster that we tried to do a digital finish. And that was done on Quantel Paintbox. And that was the first time finishing something not photographically, but. But with a computer. Yeah, but in terms of the storytelling, the Death's Head moth was there, but that came from Jonathan Demme, and I incorporated it. We rented a moth and photographed that and superimposed that into Rented a moth.
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Kusha Navadar
Like you rented a live moth.
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Dawn Bailey
We rented a taxidermy moth.
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Kusha Navadar
A taxidermy moth. Did somebody send you a list of pictures of moths and you said, this is the taxidermied moth.
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Dawn Bailey
You could go to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles at that point in time and you could rent one.
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Kusha Navadar
What was it about that moth that made you pick it?
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Dawn Bailey
It's the ones that's in the film. I mean, that's part of the story.
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Kusha Navadar
I see. It was the off. It was, this is the moth you will use.
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Dawn Bailey
Got it. But we rented one knowing that is a character in the movie.
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Kusha Navadar
We Rented a taxidermied moth is something that has probably never been said on WNYC airwaves. So moment of happiness right there in the show. These posters are placed up against a wall featuring Jodie Foster's character Clarice's eyes. Angelina, why did you decide to zoom in on her eyes?
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Angelina Lippert
So that actually, when we're building a show, I work very closely with our director of design exhibits. That's Ola Bald. Ola is a really brilliant exhibition, a designer in general, but her exhibition design is amazing. And what she does is she reads my exhibition text and then she pulls out things that I would never have even thought to pull out to highlight in the show. She makes every story I tell better. And that was her design choice. She noticed that all of the eyes, if you stacked all the posters on top of one another, the eyes all line up, no matter whose face is in the shot. And if you zoom in any of these, they are photo offset printed. So you would get a dot pattern, like a dot matrix that would become apparent if you zoomed in and in and in. So it's kind of an homage to that. It's a very pixelated, for lack of a better word, zoom in on Jodie Foster's eyes that you might not see right away, but if you get to the right distance, it's like an impressionist painting. So that was entirely Ola's decision. And I love these Easter eggs that she tends to hide. In all of our exhibitions, they're these moments just like, oh, wow. Oh, that was really just so clever to tie that into there. The opening wall of the exhibition, kind of like our own key art. We have the standard parental guidance, like PG13 notice on the wall, as most movies would have. And originally it was just a regular PG13 notice. But then Dawn's team came back with One that said PG13, blood, sweat and tears. Mostly tears. And so we incorporated that on the opening wall. So there are these moments that I think really highlight both. They're in dialogue with the design of the posters as well as the design of the show.
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Kusha Navadar
So thinking about all of these posters, I'd love to hear from both of you. Maybe, Angelina, we can start with you. What do you hope viewers walk away with from going to visit this exhibit?
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Angelina Lippert
Oh, I hope they walk away with many things, but I want people to understand, as I came to learn, because this show was built primarily through inter interviews with dawn, not through. I'm usually doing shows with like, tons of books and historic research in the library, having a greater understanding of both the evolution of how movie posters are made and how they are made today, that this is also, this is not a show that ends with necessarily the tragedy of Macbeth. I mean, dawn is at the peak of her career. This is the highlights reel of the first half. Who knows what she will do next? So knowing that this is a story to be continued, I want people to have a greater appreciation of this art form. Posters continue to be great. Posters continue to be made today.
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Kusha Navadar
Wonderful. And dawn, how about you? What do you hope people take away from this?
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Dawn Bailey
I hope that people, when I wanted to do this, I didn't know how to do it or how to get into it. It seemed like a big mystery. I think, I hope that people understand that there's a team that is working to convey the love of film into these kinds of images for people to celebrate film, to really love it as an art form, as a complimentary experience. To enjoy the poster when you go.
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Kusha Navadar
To a film, we've been talking to Dawn Bailey, who's a film poster designer and Angelina Lippert, who's the poster house chief curator and director of content. The exhibit is called the Anatomy of a movie Poster, the work of Dawn Bailey. It's on display from March 14th to September 8th of this year. Encourage everyone to go check it out. And listeners, if you want to check out some of the previews of those posters we've been talking about, just go to our webpage. On our segment page you can see some of them. Dawn, Angelina, thank you so much.
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Angelina Lippert
Thank you so much.
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Michael's Party Shop Announcer
Attention, party people. You're officially invited to the party shop at Michael's where you'll find hundreds of new Items starting at 99 cents with an expanded selection of party wear, balloons with helium included on select styles, decorations and more. Michaels is your one stop shop for celebrating everything from birthdays to bachelorette parties and baby showers to golden anniversaries. Visit Michaels store or michaels.com today to supply your next party.
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McDonald's Promoter
I'm gonna put you on nephew.
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Angelina Lippert
All right, unc. Welcome to McDonald's.
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Dawn Bailey
Can I take your order, miss?
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McDonald's Promoter
I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack rack. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.