His posters capture films’ essential moments
TREVISO, ITALY» Renato Casaro was taking a trip down memory lane, a long journey in a career that extends from the 1950s, when Rome was known as Hollywood on the Tiber, to the last decade, when Quentin Tarantino asked for his help on the 2019 film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”
“I constantly adapted,” said Casaro, who is a few days short of his 86th birthday. “That’s why I kept working when others stopped.”
Over more than six decades, his handdrawn movie posters have hooked audiences into theaters, acting as abridged portends of the delights to come.
“The important thing was to capture the essential: that moment, that glance, that attitude, that movement that says everything and condenses the entire story. That’s the hard part,” Casaro said. “You can’t cheat. You can’t promise something that isn’t there.”
The essential might translate into the tender embrace he depicted on the poster for a 1955 Russian ballet version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Or it could be a terrified eye lit by a candle for the 1969 thriller “The Haunted House of Horror.” Or maybe an impossibly brawny Arnold Schwarzenegger brandishing a sword as “Conan the Barbarian” in 1982.
Although his art has been seen by untold millions, Casaro himself is mostly invisible, his work largely uncredited (save for his neatly printed signature discreetly tucked in a margin). He is known primarily to collectors and to the many producers and directors who sought him out to plug their pictures.
“It’s a bit of a sore spot,” Casaro said during a recent interview in Treviso, the northeastern Italian city where he was born and where he returned to live a few years ago. As far as he knew, he said, he had been credited in the end titles just once, in 1984, by Sergio Leone, for his work on “Once Upon a Time in America.”
But now Casaro is getting his moment in the limelight as Italy’s Culture Ministry and Treviso celebrate his art through an ambitious retrospective: “Renato Casaro. Cinema’s Last Poster Designer. Treviso, Rome, Hollywood.”
“We’re very proud to celebrate the maestro who gave emotions to so many people,” said Treviso’s mayor, Mario Conte. Many of Casaro’s posters had become icons, “forever lodged in our memories,” he said.
The show’s title traces the trajectory of Casaro’s career — from crafting movie posters as a teenager in exchange for free tickets to Treviso’s Garibaldi Theater, to the days when extravagant sword-andsandal films set in ancient Rome were shot in the modern Italian capital, to his brushes with A-list Hollywood actors.
Casaro said he had been “born with a paintbrush in my hand,” a natural talent who got better “with a lot of experience.”
He moved to Rome in 1954, just as it was becoming a favorite of international filmmakers, who took advantage of the city for its unparalleled setting, the production expertise at Cinecittà Studios and the allure of rising local stars such as Sophia Loren.
He found work at a well-known advertising design studio specializing in movie posters.
“You learn on the job,” said Casaro, who eventually went out on his own. “You have to be able to draw everything, from a portrait to a horse to a lion.”
In Rome, he worked constantly. Roberto Festi, the curator of the exhibition, estimated that during this first phase of his career, he was making about 100 posters a year.
To better understand the mood of a film, Casaro often went on the set. Leone wanted him in New York to witness a key moment in “Once Upon a Time in America.”
“They were filming the scene where the youngest boy gets killed,” Casaro recalled, an image that eventually evolved into the movie poster. “It was stunning, and the highlight of the first part of the film.”
The turning point in his career, which brought attention outside Italy, came when Dino De Laurentiis hired him to make the poster for the 1966 blockbuster “The Bible: In the Beginning … .” It was the start of a long-lasting collaboration with De Laurentiis, and the friendship helped put him in Hollywood’s sights.
Casaro drew the posters for the Conan trilogy, breakthrough films for Schwarzenegger, who in 1982 was known mostly as a bodybuilder. For the first film, De Laurentiis, one of the producers, told Casaro to focus on the actor’s face, not just his muscles. “Dino wanted to launch him,” Casaro said. “He knew that Schwarzenegger would explode as an actor.”
Another big star of the day, Sylvester Stallone, loved how Casaro had depicted him in his role as the troubled Vietnam vet Rambo. “Stallone said that I had entered into his soul,” Casaro said.
Casaro’s early style, which he described as “impressionistic,” became increasingly realistic in the 1980s when he began using an airbrush. That made his technique more photographic but also “more magical,” he said.
“When he began working in hyperrealism, that was the big change,” said Nicoletta Pacini, the head of posters and movie memorabilia at Italy’s National Museum of Cinema. “That was pure Casaro, and others began to copy him.”
The artist isn’t sure how many movie posters he created in total but estimates it’s close to 2,000.
Casaro stopped making posters in 1998 when the taste for hand-drawn images had waned in favor of digital and photoshopped renderings.
Then, out of the blue, Tarantino called, asking for posters in a vintage spaghettiwestern style for “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” the director’s love letter to 1960s Los Angeles.
He designed two posters featuring Leonardo Dicaprio, who plays an onthe-way-out actor who goes to Italy to make spaghetti westerns and revive his career. One of the posters is for a fictional film called “Kill Me Now Ringo, Said the Gringo.”
“Those films always had incredible titles,” Casaro laughed.
Tarantino sent him a signed photo of Dicaprio posing for the poster with a message that reads, “Thanks so much for your art gracing my picture. You’ve always been my favorite.”
For Casaro’s admirers, the Treviso exhibition is long overdue.