POP CULTURE: The Oscars Recognize Drew Struzan
By Dan Brown Drew Struzan’s name cropped up at the Oscars on Sunday. He’s a guy who never got a nomination in his 78 years, but surely deserved an award for his lifetime of service to Hollywood. Struzan – who was mentioned during the ever-expanding In Memoriam segment – defined movie imagery for a generation of film fans like me, even though he never made or appeared in a motion picture himself. He died last October in Pasadena. We may never see another cinema artist who has as vast an influence as Struzan did. If you grew up geeky in the 1970s or 1980s, you knew his work — even if you had never met him or didn’t know what he looked like. He was billed at the Academy Awards telecast as a poster artist, which doesn’t sit well with diehard movie enthusiasts who considered him a visionary genius. As a kid, I thought the right word to describe his work was “photorealistic,” but his trademark style was actually the result of airbrushing, which was much in vogue in the 1970s. Especially if you owned a Chevy van. Perhaps the first work of his I came across wasn’t on a poster, but the cover of a paperback edition of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The publisher took Struzan art from Blade Runner and used it as the front, since the Dick novel was the source material for Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi feature. I remember looking at that cover, eyeing the likeness of Harrison Ford closely, and thinking, “This can’t be a drawing or a painting, it’s too detailed. This must be a photo.” That was my first awareness of Drew Struzan. I was 13 years old. I was already in love with movies, and movie posters. Struzan began his career with one-sheets for such drive-in fare as Empire of the Ants and Food of the Gods, then caught a lucky break helping a fellow artist with a poster to announce the re-release in 1978 of Star Wars. The result of their collaboration was a meta-poster: The painted composition looks like an old circus poster plastered on the plywood fence around a construction site. It was also the beginning of his long partnership with George Lucas. Even after Struzan ended his career, he would come out of retirement to help the Star Wars creator with art for such movies as The Phantom Menace. His other posters included E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Risky Business, Coming to America, the Goonies and the Muppet Movie. He could produce intricately crafted images, and he could so on a tight deadline: He painted the poster for John Carpenter’s The Thing remake literally overnight. For a generation of geeks like yours truly, Struzan’s posters defined the look of motion pictures. He brought aliens, adventurers, weirdos, muppets and Tom Cruise to life when young people weren’t sitting in a theatre. To understand his influence, you have to remember the context he was working in: VCRs were scarce back then, so you could see movies only in theatres, or occasionally on network TV. Posters were the main representation in the public’s mind of any given film because trailers weren’t as omnipresent as they are now. We had no YouTube to watch them on. Believe it or not, there was a time when people decided to see one film over another based solely on the posters outside the theatre, and Struzan deserves a golden statuette simply for the fact he sold countless movie tickets in his decades-long career. (For all I know, the Oscar folks may have tried to give him an honorary Oscar, but his family turned them down; Struzan suffered from Alzheimer’s in his later years.) Drew Struzan was one of the all-time greats, and is a personal favourite of mine, along with Nick Cardy. We may never see Struzan’s like again. All these decades later, I’m amazed Hollywood is still using movie posters to advertise their products. The artistry of posters persists, but this form of art could be living on borrowed time, along with movie houses themselves. We can only hope future generations of film fans recognize the artistry that’s involved, and keep demanding posters rendered exclusively by human hands. Our responsibility is to help educate those future geeks, making sure the names of creators like Drew Struzan don’t pass entirely from the collective memory. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Still No Stunt Oscar
By Dan Brown It’s 2026. The world changes every day. And yet there’s still no Academy Award for stunt performers. In fact, the stunt-design category for the Oscars won’t be handed out until 2028, which marks one century of the bloated Hollywood awards show. By then, those who literally put their bodies on the line to create convincing movie action scenes will have waited a full 100 years to be recognized by the Academy. I was thinking about this when the Oscar nominations were announced last week. You may have heard or read something about this year’s nods. The biggest headline emerging out of the press conference was that a vampire flick, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, got 16 nominations – making it the most-nominated film in the history of Hollywood. That’s more nods than Titanic ever got, or The Godfather or Ben-Hur. It sounds like an impressive achievement until you look a little more closely. Although fall guys and gals won’t get much-deserved recognition until two years from now, the Oscars did add one new category this time: The honour for best casting. So with one extra category, the odds of ANY film breaking the record for most Oscars went up a bit this year. Sure enough, one of the nods for Sinners is in the casting division. I’m not saying casting directors don’t work hard or don’t have an impact on a movie’s success. But the fact the stunt Oscar has been delayed for so many years tells you a lot about Tinseltown’s priorities. Compared to other awards shows, the Oscars are way behind the times. According to a report in the Guardian, the Actor Awards (formerly called the Screen Actors Guild Awards) already have a stunt-ensemble trophy for both film and television. And the Emmy Awards give prizes to both the outstanding stunt coordinator and outstanding stunt performer. As no less an authority than Jason Statham once said, it’s an injustice that “poncy actors” standing in front of a green screen get rewarded for their onscreen fakery while stunt performers remain anonymous. These folks jump from buildings, get set on fire, make fights look authentic, yet they toil in obscurity. It’s almost like the Hollywood elite don’t want them to become household names, alongside the actors they represent on the silver screen. Stunt workers are cinema’s second-class citizens despite the crucial role they play. You might even think actors and actresses don’t want to share the glory by the way they continue to perpetuate the fiction that A-list stars do their own stunts. If you’ve seen a motion picture lately, more than likely it has scenes that called for stunt work – even in this age of computer-generated imagery. Yet when was the last time you heard a big-name star boast in an interview, “Do my own stunts? Are you kidding? No way am I putting my butt on the line!!!” Besides, it’s not like the insurance company would let them. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
