Sunday 31 March 2013

Bill Gold - classic movie posters

Who's Bill Gold? you ask. 

Only one of the greatest movie poster designers of all time. He worked for Warner Bros. for 70 years. He's 92 now, and retired, except for doing the occasional Clint Eastwood movie poster. 

The first poster he ever worked on was for Casablanca (1942).

Bill Gold: “We had finished the poster. Warner Bros. looked at it for a while, and after few days they said, ‘Is there anything we can do to make this more exciting? More dramatic? It just kind of sits there.’
And I said, ‘Well, maybe. Let me take it back to the office.’
I brought it back the next day; I had put a gun in his hand.”
He'd left the gun out because Humphrey Bogart didn’t use a gun in the movie until the end, in the airport, when he shoots the Nazi. Gold didn’t want to reveal that until people came to see the film.

In the years that followed, Gold would put a lot of guns in the hands of a lot of leading men, especially Clint Eastwood, for whom he designed some 40 posters.

Learn more about Bill Gold:


1 comment:

Unknown said...

As you suspected, I, like many of your readers, had never heard of Bill Gold. This is why we read Adelaide Screenwriter!