Cameron Crowe was once regarded as a seminal modern American filmmaker. He spent the ‘80s and ‘90s producing some of the most beloved films of those respective decades. In the 80's Crowe began his film career by adapting a screenplay from his non-fiction book "Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story," a chronicle of the lives of six different teenagers, which Crow secretly re-enrolled in high school at the age of 22 in order to capture.
From there, Crowe took the helm. As writer and director, Crow delivered a string of influential and iconic movies like "Say Anything...," "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous"-then he made "Vanilla Sky."
Midway through the aughts Crowe delivered another clunker with "Elizabeth Town" and subsequently withdrew from Hollywood, choosing instead to return to his adolescent roots in music journalism (his time as an astoundingly young writer traveling for Rolling Stone was the inspiration for "Almost Famous") by directing several music documentaries. Much like "Vanilla Sky" marked Crowe's turn from remarkable to mundane, the advent of Photoshop and digital design in the last two decades seems to have marked the steady decline of the art of movie posters themselves.
As of late movie posters have boiled down to a list of formulaic clichés that, rather than serving as actual pieces of art, leave all the artistic expression out of the equation. They instead simply serve as a subconscious genre symbol, conveying to an audience what they should expect from a flick.
There's the ever popular "close-up of an eye" favored by many horror flicks and thrillers alike-even "Avatar" couldn't resist the cliché. Rom-coms and screwball comedies have their "two people standing back-to-back or otherwise leaning on each other over a white background" standby. Romances and cheesy dramas love their "floating, dramatic heads over a horizon, clouds, a landscape or the sea" staple. No dramatic action flick is complete without at least one "loan dark figure with his back to the viewer"-even Christopher Nolan was surprisingly fond of this cliché with "Inception" and "The Dark Knight." And don't forget the constant stream of Jason Statham and Nicholas Cage die-hard rip-offs that feature a "black-and-white action scene-except for the badass color flames!"
For the most part, they all just seem like disembodied, sort-of-creepy-if-you-think-about-it, floating heads with giant print of the popular stars' names (just in case you didn't notice their giant faces) over a generic background vaguely connected to the film.
It feels as if all the artistry and originality was lost somewhere along the way as the film industry transitioned into the heavily computer-oriented industry it is now. Don't get me wrong-I think computer technology has done a great many wonderful things for moviemaking. But when a passable poster can be thrown together in Photoshop in half an hour, and no one seems to care either way, why waste time creating real art? But thankfully, Cameron Crowe decided to reverse his trend with the poster for his return to Hollywood.
Crowe's new flick "We Bought A Zoo," out December 23 and starring Matt Damon and Scarlett Johanssan, has perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing theatrical movie poster I've seen in quite a long time-and it was a gutsy move. The clever poster, which creates an abstract tree out of a plethora of green paw prints from a variety of creatures, features not a single floating head. It also only features a single actor name-Matt Damon-despite a cast list of several equally famous celebrities. And even Damon's name is relatively low-key in respect to the art of the poster itself.
The poster isn't "Starry Night", nor is it a reinvention of the wheel. But it's something different, something that makes you stop and look at a poster for more than a brief glance. It's an image that also stands as a work of art in and of itself, regardless of the film. And isn't that the ideal standard? Why waste the space and potential for art just because Photoshop makes it easy to throw something bland together that gets the job done and little else?
Will "We Bought A Zoo" mark the turning point into a new era of artistic creativity for Cameron Crowe and, perhaps, movie posters themselves? I can only hope.
Send your questions and comments to David at dcottrell@wisc.edu.
