SINCE the dawn of film marketing, studios have relied on posters featuring
"floating heads": as many movie star faces as can be crammed onto a single page.
In 1927, for instance, state-of-the-art ads for "The Jazz Singer" featured two disembodied Al Jolson heads - one in blackface, one without
makeup.
Since then floating heads have become an industry cliché: the formula that
once guaranteed success is now so ubiquitous that posters in that vein are
nearly invisible. So what does it take to get noticed some 80 years later,
especially when you're selling yet another horror film, without the luxury of
big stars?
Surprisingly, the answer may be fine art.
Tim Palen, the executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Lionsgate
- the company responsible for the gory "Saw" movies - was recently looking for a fresh
campaign to introduce "Hostel," a slasher film that is to open on Jan. 6.
Directed by Eli Roth, it is about a group of gullible and horny American males
who find themselves in a Slovakian hostel, where promises of easy sex turn to
gruesome snuff.
Mr. Palen said he figured that a poster with mangled bodies wouldn't do the
trick.
So he dropped by the airy, tastefully decorated Chelsea studio of the
Australian photographer Mark Kessell. A soft-spoken former physician who
practiced medicine in Sydney for what he calls "several unsatisfying years," Mr.
Kessell, 49, now takes pictures of things he's fully aware the larger public may
not appreciate. One collection of daguerreotypes, "Perfect Specimens," shows the
human body in its physical extremes; there are several shots of fetuses and old
people near death.
But it was Mr. Kessell's "Florilegium" (or "collection of floral images")
daguerrotypes that caught Mr. Palen's eye: each image is close-up of a surgical
instrument, so poetically rendered that it seems almost organic. Some of the
macabre implements resemble exotic flowers. One, from a distance, could be
mistaken for the horns of a gazelle. "We were sort of blocked, and all the
pieces fell into place once I saw that image," Mr. Palen explained. A deal was
made to use that daguerreotype, which actually shows a surgical clamp. It now
appears in theaters and on widespread promotions. (Billboards for "Hostel" rely
on a more conventional image of a masked tormentor with a chain saw, which, a
Lionsgate spokeswoman explained, translated more easily to the horizontal
format.)
Mr. Kessell may seem an unlikely choice to sell unapologetic horror to a
large youth audience; he has no interest whatever in popular culture. Over tea
in his loft, the elegantly dressed Mr. Kessell confessed to not having seen
"Hostel" or, indeed, to remembering the last film he had seen.
"It may have been 'Dogville,' " he finally allowed. With a grin, he said that
in selling his work to Lionsgate, "I am prostituting myself." But he added: "The
money has to come from somewhere." And, he said, that money would be poured
right back into an art project. In the process, his work is placed before an
audience of millions.
"I have a lot of trouble as an artist getting people to either look at my
work or know my name," said Mr. Kessell, who generally finds that his pictures
repel as much as they fascinate, much like the horror genre. "I'm interested in
what makes us human," he said, "what makes our sex drive and the drive to
violence the way they are. And what happens at the other end when we die."
Bill Sienkiewicz, an illustrator, writer and director who has worked on movie
posters for more than 20 years, said the tide was turning toward more
provocative designs. "If there are any floating heads, it will have to be a
decapitation," he said by telephone from his studio in Stamford, Conn., where he
was working on a poster for the horror movie "Evil Aliens."
Mr. Sienkiewicz, whose work has included posters for Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" and "The Green Mile" starring Tom Hanks, pointed out that some classic posters, like
the one for Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," found a more artful way to use
actors' faces.
"It had headshots," Mr. Sienkiewicz said of the "Apocalypse" poster. "But it
also had the ambience and the heat of the jungle, and the levels of desperation.
There was lots of information in the poster that set the tone. You don't see
that today."
Universal Pictures' president for marketing, Adam Fogelson, agrees that a
saturated marketplace has forced everyone to think differently about poster ad
campaigns.
"I would say that there is a mistake in equating artistic with distinct," he
said, citing Lionsgate's creative use of two strategically hacked-off fingers to
sell its "Saw" sequel as a good example of an approach that managed to do both.
"Making something different or artistic for its own sake is not the answer I
advocate. I am not in the business of creating art, I am in the business of
creating advertising."
Mr. Fogelson pointed to his studio's use of Steve Carell's incredulous face
for the "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" campaign as an example of a
floating head that worked because of the actor's connection to the audience.
Using fine-art images to promote movies isn't entirely new: the practice has
been common in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland. Charles Evans Jr., a film producer whose credits
include "The Aviator," recently displayed his personal
collection of Polish film posters at the Hollywood Entertainment Museum,
including a prized one for Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" (1968) in which an infant hand is
clearly seen to be demonic - a plot spoiler, which would never allowed in this
country.
In Communist Poland, Mr. Evans noted, poster art wasn't so much about
commerce as about _expression_. "An artist could turn in whatever he wanted," he
said. "They were allowed freedoms the other Eastern bloc countries were not."
By contrast, the current trend in the United States is largely about getting
people in seats. But once trained to expect a more compelling vision on their
billboards and buses, audiences aren't likely to settle for less imaginative,
traditional advertising.
"They'd turn on you like a pack of wolves," said Mr. Palen, of Lionsgate.
"These campaigns are arduous, and finding people like Mark Kessell is harder
than doing floating heads. But it's absolutely
necessary."
