Many are the disciplines of commercial cinema: director, cameraman, editor, grip. Among the least sung but most critical to a movie's first public impression are the poster artists, whose job is multiple. They have to hard-sell us yet seduce us; they have to array the movie's stars in the proper order of their marketability while signaling genre through canny use of fonts and design. They have to sum up the totality of a film - the experience of watching it, its greater meaning, pop impact, subtleties - in a 43-by-62-inch rectangle suitable for a bus stop.
The studio executives call it "key art," and with the advent of the Internet and increased TV ad campaigns, it's an art that's dying. It died a little further with the passing of John Alvin on Feb. 6.
You don't know Alvin, but you know his work. Born in Hyannis in 1948, he grew up obsessed with movie posters and moved to Los Angeles to study art. His first job was designing the one-sheet for 1974's "Blazing Saddles," with its painterly profile of Mel Brooks in Native American headdress (the Hebrew letters on the band read "Kosher for Passover"). It was an old-school take on a madcap movie; along with the work of fellow artist Drew Struzan, Alvin inaugurated the neoclassic era in movie posters, turning away from the stark postwar abstractions of Saul Bass to a softer, ironically retro presentation of stars and titles.
He followed "Saddles" with "Young Frankenstein" (1974) - again, a riotous exaggeration of something the Universal marketing department might have turned out in 1941 - but didn't hit his stride until 1982, when he painted the iconic posters for "Blade Runner," "Victor/Victoria," and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial." The latter, with its sci-fi Sistine Chapel riff of alien and human fingertips touching, was suggested by director Steven Spielberg but flawlessly executed by Alvin, who used his daughter Farah, now a Broadway singer and actress, as a hand model.
After that, the work came fast and often: Alvin designed the posters for 135 films in all, including "The Princess Bride," with its reinvention of Maxfield Parrish's hues and vistas, "The Color Purple" (a rocking-chair figure in lavender silhouette), and "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," which somehow crammed Pee-wee and his bike into a hectic, hilarious floating space.
He worked on all the "adult art" campaigns for the Disney cartoons from "Little Mermaid" onward: That image of Ariel swimming up toward the light is his, as is the "Lion King" standing over the assembled animals as the heavens part with his father's image. Alvin wasn't afraid to work large and mythical, but he could create a work of unerring simplicity as well.
The poster for "Rain Man" (1988), for instance, doesn't seem like a poster at all - just a photo of Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise walking down the road. Yet the design work is perfect, from the slightly off-kilter angle of the stars to their names in slim white font above their head, balanced by the film's title at their feet. It sells two actors we know very, very well, and, in Hoffman's stiff bearing and Cruise's sunglass cool, makes us curious about what they're doing here.
Alvin relocated from LA to upstate New York in later years, but even as the commercial market for movie posters began to ebb, he kept busy designing fine art posters for the big franchises: "Harry Potter," "Pirates of the Caribbean," "The Lord of the Rings." He was only 59 when he died of a heart attack at his home. Like his breathtaking poster art for "Ironweed" (1987), Streep and Nicholson kissing with hats obscuring their faces, Alvin kept himself in shadow while showing just enough to lure us into the dark.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
