Graphic designer whose eye-catching posters drew audiences into the cinema
Bill Gold, who has died aged 97, was the graphic designer responsible for many of the most memorable film posters of the past 60 years, including those for (1951), My
(1976).
Among the directors he worked with were Alfred Hitchcock (Dial M for Murder, 1954), Federico Fellini (81⁄2, 1963) and Clint Eastwood, for whom he designed some 30 posters.
‘‘The first image you have of many of your favourite films is probably a Bill Gold creation,’’ Eastwood wrote in the foreword to a book published in 2000 celebrating the designer’s work.
Bill Gold
By Gold’s own estimate, he created some Graphic designer 2000 posters for b January 3, 1921 films of every d May 20, 2018 genre, including
Dirty Harry, Barry Lyndon and The Exorcist.
Sometimes Gold took the photograph, drew the illustration, designed the typeface and set the colours. Other times he did none of these, instead dictating to his artists. For Camelot (1967) he told the illustrator Bob Peak: ‘‘I want you to do something in a Gustav Klimt design like The Kiss’’, giving Peak a few rough sketches to work with.
Gold recalled being introduced to Eastwood in 1971 by a Warner Bros manager. ‘‘Clint said, ‘I would love you to do a campaign for me on Dirty Harry’. When I delivered the campaign for him a couple of weeks later . . . he said, ‘Don’t change a thing’.’’
Bird (1988), Eastwood’s film depicting the jazz player Charlie ‘‘Bird’’ Parker, presented Gold with an unusual problem because a poster suggesting that it was about a drugaddicted musician would not sell the film to a broad audience. Gold’s solution was to cast Charlie Parker (played by Forest Whitaker) blowing his saxophone in silhouette, with a bird flying away in the top right-hand corner and Parker’s famous nickname spelt out in glittering letters.
Stanley Kubrick was another collaborator, although Gold had to visit him in London because the director refused to travel to the US. ‘‘I stayed at his house for a couple of weeks [working] on Clockwork Orange,’’ he told the Los Angeles Times in 2010. ‘‘I worked on many sketches for him. Many times I went back to New York and sent him more stuff.’’
William Gold was born in Brooklyn, New York, at a time when films were still made in the city. ‘‘I started drawing from the age of eight and never stopped,’’ he said. At high school he won awards for his art work. After studying subjects such as lettering, layout and design at the Pratt Institute, a celebrated art school, he knocked on the door of Warner Bros: ‘‘I knew there was a poster department and it seemed obvious that someone had to be doing them.’’
Gold was unable to see the film for Casablanca (1942), one of his earliest posters, and his first sketches failed to impress the Do you know someone who deserves a Life Story? Email obituaries@dompost.co.nz people from Warner’s, who felt that he made it look too much like a love story. So he put a gun in Humphrey Bogart’s hand.
‘‘It’s a matter of directing the sight of the viewer,’’ he told the Daily Telegraph in 2010. ‘‘Even if it wasn’t exactly the way the movie was, you had to come up with something that marketed it and led the audience to believe that they wanted to see it.’’
About the same time he created the poster for Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring James Cagney. But soon Gold was drafted into the US Army, where he produced wartime training films on aircraft maintenance, only returning to film posters in 1946 with Night and Day, a biopic of Cole Porter starring Cary Grant.
By 1959 Gold had moved to Los Angeles, teaming up with his brother Charlie, who worked on film trailers while he concentrated on posters.
For every poster that was used, there could be eight or more alternatives. He recalled: ‘‘There’s one for Catch-22, a toy aeroplane in a lavatory bowl, shot from above, with the tagline, ‘The first film to put war in its place’. So irreverent. So perfect. The studio nixed it.’’
Six of the films for which he created the poster artwork won best picture at the Oscars:
‘‘The first image you have of many of your favourite films is probably a Bill Gold creation.’’
Clint Eastwood
After creating the poster for Eastwood’s Mystic River (2003), depicting the reflection of three men in icy water, Gold retired to Connecticut. At Eastwood’s request he came back to work on J Edgar eight years later.
In recent years, Gold grew upset about the quality of modern film posters. ‘‘They just have a young art director sitting with a Mac computer and he puts a couple of heads into the screen and he moves them around and puts the lettering down, and that’s the poster.’’
Gold married Pearl Tamases in 1941. In 1989 he married Susan Cornfield, who survives him, with a son and a daughter from his first marriage. – Telegraph Group