His Art Seems Film-iliar!

Drew Struzan is not exactly a household name, now is it? I would guess that very few people reading this have any idea who Drew Struzan is, but I’m also confident that every one of you is a Drew Struzan fan. Eh, where does my cocky confidence come from? How can I be so sure? It’s easy: I have never met anyone who didn’t have a great appreciation of and a great love for the work of Drew Struzan. Drew is in fact just flat out the best at what he does; he redefined our notion of what his area of expertise can be. He has been practicing his art, honing his skills, for 30 years and in that time has become the grand master of his special domain of art.

Drew paints posters for motion pictures. Long before you‘ve seen a single frame of celluloid projected on a screen, before the trailers have made their way to the front of your current movie experience, Drew whets your appetite for a concept or a hero. They leap out at you from the one-sheets, the posters that line the walls of your neighborhood theater. They call to you, entice you. They make your heart beat faster and send your blood surging though your veins. Drew is the master of painting heroes.
Drew’s painting introduced us to Marty McFly and John Rambo, to Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker, to Peter Pan and Harry Potter.

I saw Drew a few years ago at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena where he was signing and discussing of his new book, The Movie Posters of Drew Struzan, a 120-page compilation of some of Drew’s most famous work. After a short foreword by George Lucas and a biography of Drew by Jessie and Amy Horsting, we get to the real meat and potatoes of the book: Drew’s glorious posters, almost 100 of them. If you’re a fan of movies, of pop culture or of art, this book has something to delight you. Each page is a stunning piece of American pop, pictures you know and love.

There were only 35 or so people at the event, prompting Drew to note, "Looking at the turnout, maybe art is dead in America." He noted that he had spent a lot of time recently in Japan and that in that country "people are raised with an appreciation for art that is just missing in America."
Drew Struzan is quiet and soft-spoken. "I'm an artist, not a writer or a speaker, so I really don't know what I'm doing here. I don't have anything to say, but if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them." And so he did, for the next 45 minutes.

Drew was asked what he is currently working on and responded, “That’s kind of a problem; I can’t tell you. The people I work for create marketing plans and when they want you to know what I’m working on, they will let you know. Until then, it’s a secret.” Drew did say that he had recently received a call from John Wayne’s son who was so pleased by the work Drew had done on the recent John Wayne postage stamp and that they “may work on something together in the future.”
When asked if he sees a movie before doing the poster, Drew responded, “Sometimes, but most times, no. I may see photos or a trailer. I usually get the script to read and I may see an incomplete film.” A follow-up question was did he ever see a finished film and want to re-paint the poster. Drew said “yes,” and someone yelled out ”The Name of the Rose.” Drew laughed, “That one is not my fault.”

“The producers had this really dark movie about monks and murder and were terrified of it. They had no idea how to market this film, so they told me to paint the poster as if it were a comedy. It wasn’t a comedy, but I gave them what they wanted, a totally inappropriate poster.”

Drew was asked if he ever looked at a film and turned down the job. He responded, “No, I have to eat. I have turned down work when I was too busy, but only then. When I was younger, and not so smart, I would work on two or three projects at a time; but not any more. I like to sleep and spend time with my family.”
Drew said it takes him two days to complete a painting, “though I will tell them it will take two weeks. And, sometimes it does, but most of the time I really only spend a couple of days on it.”

Drew’s finished paintings are done the size of a one-sheet poster, approximately 27x40 inches, because “this is the size most people will see.”

I asked Drew about his unique technique, mentioning that for years I thought his work was done in pastels because of its gritty properties, and had only recently read that he works in acrylics and colored pencils. “Yes, I work in acrylics and colored pencils; next question.” I asked how he came up with his technique and he explained that the nature of the business dictates the technique.
“I learned very early on in this field that the people who make films work very long and hard on them. Sometimes they may have worked twenty years to get their film made; they have a very high-level of investment in it. But they don’t have any idea how to make a hit film or how to market one, if they did, all films would be hits. So these people are searching for the correct formula, but are unsure. They change their minds, a lot. If I worked in pastel or watercolor, both of which I am quite capable of doing, I could never change a painting without you knowing I changed it. I can erase colored pencil right off the canvas. I can even erase the dots of the airbrush and you won’t know I did it. If I rub hard enough I can take the acrylic paint right off, reapply the gesso and paint in a new figure and you will never know I did it.”

Drew went on to describe how the producers of Back to the Future III wanted Michael J. Fox’s outfit changed on the poster and how Drew was able to completely erase the Fox figure and paint in a new one and you can’t tell he ever touched it.
When asked if it bothered him when his artwork was not used on the foreign release of a film, Drew said, "No, not really. The nature of the business is that they can use any artwork they like and usually do." Drew went on to mention an exception to this rule that he is quite proud of. "With the Phantom Menace, George Lucas had all the foreign distributors sign an agreement that my poster was the only art they could use and that, other than the text, it could not be modified in any way." Given that the film was released in nearly every country on the planet, it is believed that Drew's poster is the single most viewed piece of art in history.

I asked Drew about his work before he got into the film business, doing record album covers. I had only recently become aware that he did albums. I asked how many he had done and he said it was a lot. I asked if it was enough for a book and he replied, "Oh, yeah, I did hundreds of them. It's all I did for five years."

Drew did two of my favorite covers, both for Alice Cooper. The first was the cover to Welcome to my Nightmare, voted one of the top 100 Album Covers of all time by Rolling Stone Magazine. The second is the cover to Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits, which features the band as 30s-style gangland thugs.
You can see more of Drew's wonderful work and read more about him in a number of places on the web. The sites below are just the tip of the iceberg:
Drew’s own website
The Drew Collector’s Page
Echo Station: Interview with Drew Struzan