Bill Gold and the Art of the Movie Poster

In the early 1940s, graphic artist Bill Gold designed the one sheet for Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), the first of what would be thousands of movie posters in a career that has spanned eight decades. Throughout, he developed lasting working partnerships with illustrator Bob Peak and directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick and Clint Eastwood, for whom Gold designed his most recent poster, for J. Edgar (2011).

“I know what movie posters should look like instinctively, Gold said in a 2010 interview with The New York Times. “I always found fault with the fact that [the studios] showed three heads of the actors, and that’s about all the concept they would use. And when I started to work I thought, ‘I don’t want to do just a concept with three heads in it—I want a story.’”

Here’s a small sampling of his work, 25 eye-catching creations for some of the most well known movies ever made.

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

Casablanca (1942)

Strangers on a Train (1951)

Dial M for Murder (1954)

Mister Roberts (1955)

Click to read more ...

December 29

Jon Voight is born in Yonkers, New York, 1938. After graduating from Washington D.C.’s Catholic University of America, he headed to New York to embark on an acting career. Stage work led to small roles on TV’s Naked City, The Defenders and Gunsmoke and, in 1967, Voight entered the movie biz with Fearless Frank and Hour of the Gun. It wasn’t until Voight replaced Michael Sarrazin as Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy (1969) that he attracted major attention. Deliverance (1972), Conrack (1974) and The Odessa File (1974) kept him in the limelight, but it was his performance as Luke Martin opposite Jane Fonda in Coming Home (1978) that earned the actor his greatest acclaim. Originally offered to Sylvester Stallone, Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino—all of whom turned it down—the role of the paralyzed Vietnam vet was inspired by Ron Kovic, whose account of his own war experience, Born on the Fourth of July, eventually made it to the screen in 1989 with Tom Cruise in the lead.