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)