Saul Bass

Anatomy of Film Design

Jan-Christopher Horak

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813147192
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito artistico

Iconic graphic designer and Academy Award–winning filmmaker Saul Bass (1920–1996) defined an innovative era in cinema. His title sequences for films such as Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), and Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955) introduced the idea that opening credits could tell a story, setting the mood for the movie to follow. Bass's stylistic influence can be seen in popular Hollywood franchises from the Pink Panther to James Bond, as well as in more contemporary works such as Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can (2002) and television's Mad Men.

The first book to examine the life and work of this fascinating figure, Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design explores the designer's revolutionary career and his lasting impact on the entertainment and advertising industries. Jan-Christopher Horak traces Bass from his humble beginnings as a self-taught artist to his professional peak, when auteur directors like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Aldrich, and Martin Scorsese sought him as a collaborator. He also discusses how Bass incorporated aesthetic concepts borrowed from modern art in his work, presenting them in a new way that made them easily recognizable to the public.

This long-overdue book sheds light on the creative process of the undisputed master of film title design—a man whose multidimensional talents and unique ability to blend high art and commercial imperatives profoundly influenced generations of filmmakers, designers, and advertisers.

1

Designer and Filmmaker

One of the most striking aspects of Saul Bass’s epically successful career as a designer was that he was essentially an autodidact without formal academic training. While his official biographies note that he studied with Howard Trafton and Gyorgy Kepes (the latter a superstar designer in his own right), the fact was that Bass’s “studies” were limited to a handful of night-school courses. Bass was always very modest on this point, reminding interviewers that there were few opportunities to study graphic design in America at that time because “commercial art” was considered a lowly profession.¹ Though it is true that some colleges were offering degrees in graphic design, the economic pressures of the Depression played a role in Bass’s decision to enter the workforce rather than attend college. Not surprisingly, Bass was skeptical about the value of an academic education: “I don’t see artists as engaging in esoteric activity, but as a worker, engaged in a particular kind of skill.”² Bass certainly never played the role of an intellectual; rather, he epitomized the engaged craftsman of quality, which may have been why he fit into the classical Hollywood paradigm so well: there, almost everyone learned by doing rather than by attending school. As Bass noted in 1990: “I guess what makes me uncomfortable is the word ‘philosophy.’ For me design is a ‘craft.’ And I try very hard to be a good craftsman.”³

Like many Hollywood practitioners (and many commercial designers), Bass later affected an aversion to any kind of theorization or analysis of his work. In interviews he threw out a few theoretical bones, such as his notion of revitalizing clichés or a theoretical explication of reductionist modes of creativity, but they were part of his official narrative. Any analytic discussion of the formal characteristics of a particular work got sidetracked into whether the design caught anyone’s attention. Douglas Bell, in a regrettably unfinished oral history, tried valiantly to engage Bass in a dialogue about the formal elements of his campaign for The Champion (1949), an early example of what would become the Bass brand. Bell kept suggesting meanings, which Bass lobbed right back without comment, focusing instead on the incredible impact his advertising campaign had had in Hollywood. When Bell mentioned Kepes’s concept of “dynamic iconography” as a theoretical tool for understanding Bass’s unconventional use of graphic space in The Champion campaign, Bass retorted that such terms are “so general as to be meaningless.” Unperturbed, Bell tried another tactic and got this response: “Well, you could read a lot into it.” Finally, Bass got curt: “You have to be careful about theories and about so-called principles. I don’t know what the principles are, Doug.” He then explained that when he was younger he had been insecure, but now he believed only in intuition. Bass closed the discussion with a coup de grace: “Fruitless to speculate about it, except that it’s amusing to talk about it. But you can’t deal with it seriously, other than as sort of an intellectual arabesque.”⁴ Sounding a bit like John Ford in his famous interview with Peter Bogdanovich,⁵ Bass was not about to reveal his trade secrets or intellectualize his own work. When another interviewer questioned his philosophy of design, Bass shot back: “Theories are very dangerous, and philosophy is theory. God help you if you do your next piece based on a theory, you are lost.”⁶

Ironically, early in his career, the Hollywood community perceived Bass as somewhat of a New York egghead. And he was not averse to intellectual discussions about design. According to Al Kallis, Bass loved to discuss theory and process, engaging in endless philosophical and aesthetic debates about why it was better to lay out an ad one way or another.⁷ Bass was not lying about his intuitive grasp of good design. But then, Bass learned by intuition. A year before his death, a profile on Bass noted: “The self-knowledge he has from all the years of practice is that his art and craft, so often praised and followed, is not a science, but something more intuitive.”⁸ Bass’s burning ambition in life was to become “Saul Bass,” so he consumed art and design with a vociferous appetite. Asked about his influences, he mentioned one of his mentors: “I watched Paul Rand, five years my senior, like a hawk.”⁹ Rand, for his part, was worried that Bass was copying him.¹⁰

Saul Bass: A Brief Biography

Bass was born in the Bronx, New York, on 8 May 1920 to Jewish, Yiddish-speaking parents who had emigrated from the Romanian-Ukrainian shtetl. He graduated from James Monroe High School at age fifteen, already winning awards for his art and draftsmanship.¹¹ A precocious child, Bass was fascinated by the Egyptian exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Indeed, archaeology and ancient cultures would become a lifelong fascination; the designer, who believed in reincarnation, thought he either had been an archaeologist in a former life or would become one in the next life.¹² Bass began working for a freelance designer in an entry-level position—getting coffee, picking up supplies, and the like. He also received a scholarship from the Art Students League, and in September 1936 he enrolled in an evening class, Layout and Design for Industry, taught by Howard Trafton; Bass continued to take art classes at night until at least late 1940.¹³ Trafton focused heavily on fine art, but he also gave his students training they could use in commercial art, being a practitioner himself. As Bass stated to biographer Joe Morgenstern: “Intuitively, I understood that if I wanted to come to grips with design, i.e. with so-called commercial art, I really had to understand the principles that made fine art work.”¹⁴

Meanwhile, in 1938 Bass moved to a small New York firm that produced trade advertisements for United Artists and then for Warner Brothers (for twice the money). He married Ruth Cooper and had two children: Robert in 1942 and Andrea in 1946. In 1941 Bass was promoted to 20th Century–Fox as a layout man; he earned excellent wages but had little freedom to design advertisements that deviated from the depressing norm.¹⁵ According to Pat Kirkham, Bass was so unhappy with the movie publicity business that he quit in 1943 and took a job at half pay at an advertising agency, Blaine Thompson Company, “with the proviso that he not work on movie studio ads.”¹⁶ However, when the agency ran into trouble with its Warner Brothers account, Bass was brought in to help.¹⁷ Thus, Bass received an extensive apprenticeship in film advertising that lasted more than ten years. He learned not only the standard practices of the day but also what he, as a designer, did not want to do. By this time, Bass had already joined the Screen Publicists Guild, participating in June 1942 in a Civilian Defense Information Bureau demonstration at Macy’s as a quick-sketch artist.¹⁸

Sometime in late 1944 Bass discovered Gyorgy Kepes’s The Language of Vision.¹⁹ According to another early interview,²⁰ Bass first read Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision: From Material to Architecture.²¹ In any case, Bass learned that Kepes was teaching around the corner at Brooklyn College and apparently enrolled in his class. Kepes, a former collaborator of Moholy-Nagy’s, had studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany before being forced by the Nazis to immigrate to the United States via London. Kepes and, by extension, Moholy-Nagy would exert an enormous influence on Bass, turning the budding adman’s vague artistic aspirations into a concrete set of goals and principles that would become hallmarks of the Bass brand. When asked in an interview how Kepes had influenced him, Bass noted that his work had become more dynamic and abstract: “I began to deal with non-illustrative formal elements in addition to the formal elements . . . it was a very dramatic step for me.”²² Bass was particularly struck by an exercise Kepes had his students do after a discussion of Mondrian and the tension between color fields moving forward or backward. Bass stated: “His classes changed everything for me. In a way, I was trying to open the door, pulling and pushing the knob. Kepes said, ‘Turn it,’ and I stepped through.”²³

In 1946 Bass was lured away by Buchanan & Company, the fifth largest advertising agency in the United States. He was hired to be an art director in its newly established West Coast offices, where Paul Radin was creative director. (As a producer, Radin would later hire Bass to direct Phase IV.) Buchanan handled the substantial Paramount Pictures account, as well as the advertising for other major American firms, so the twenty-six-year-old Bass moved to Hollywood. As he noted in a 1981 interview: “I decided that New York was not only very cold but very dull and that I needed to warm up.”²⁴ His first West Coast workplace was the fabled “Garden of Allah,” at the southwest corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights. In a May 1947 advertisement in Variety, Buchanan & Company announced its new address on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills and its staff, which included John Krimsky as manager of the motion picture division, with Radin and Bass reporting to him.²⁵ Bass later claimed there were two reasons for his preference for California: one was the movie business, and the other was that the corporate business culture in California was “primitive,” meaning “there has been little time for the stifling institutionalization and stratification which strangles creativity in many, very old or established business.”²⁶ Bass understood that his chances of breaking into the commercial design business were far greater in California than in New York, where long-established WASP design firms dominated Madison Avenue.

In February 1949 Bass was involved in a terrible automobile accident in Pasadena on his way to Art Directors Club awards ceremony, where he was supposed to pick up one gold medal and two certificates of merit. Instead, he ended up at Temple Hospital with a shattered hip.²⁷ A subsequent infection caused his hip to become necrotic, and he suffered from the aftereffects for the rest of his life.²⁸ Given that such injuries tend to be adversely affected by cold and dampness, the warm California weather was an added incentive to stay in the West.

By July 1950 Bass was Buchanan’s executive art director, handling, among other things, the United Artists account.²⁹ Although much of the film advertising he did was still ho-hum, Bass began to push the boundaries, especially when working with the independent producer-directors who would soon help upend the studio system. They allowed him to incorporate new ideas about advertising design into his work. But Bass knew the studio system too well, and he understood that studio politics rarely changed: “Once you work for a studio you get caught up in the ‘group decision’ mentality. Nobody wants to take the responsibility for anything, so everybody plays it safe and criticizes.”³⁰ Most of his United Artists clients were independents, including Stanley Kramer Productions, for which Bass designed advertisements and premiere invitations for Champion (1949), Death of a Salesman (1951), and The Sniper (1952), among others.³¹ He worked simultaneously with directors Mark Robson and Edward Dmytryk, who would both later hire him for movie title work, as would Kramer. He also created advertising designs for Joseph Mankiewicz’s No Way Out (1950) and All About Eve (1950), Fred Zinnemann’s The Men (1950) and High Noon (1952), and Anatole Litvak’s Decision before Dawn (1951), all of which displayed elements of the evolving Bass style.³² As an employee, Bass was not yet signing his name to his work, unlike Paul Rand, whose poster for No Way Out demonstrated the lockstep in design concepts between the two men.

Meanwhile, Bass continued to design advertisements and selected print material for other Buchanan clients, including Rexall Drugstores, Reynolds Aluminum, and Western Airlines. By August 1951 Bass was ready to move on again and took a position at Foote, Cone & Belding; the advertising agency was going through a major reorganization after the departure of one of its founders, Emerson Foote.³³ Bass was brought in to handle the account for RKO, a movie studio owned at the time by eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. Bass enjoyed relating anecdotes about midnight meetings with the reclusive Hughes in limousines. Once he got Hughes’s approval on RKO’s advertising campaigns, Bass would be unceremoniously dumped on a street corner and left to find his own way home.³⁴

Bass worked for Hughes until late 1952, when he quit after allegedly being denied a salary raise. Bass then founded his own firm, and over the next several years he designed mostly from home as he attempted to establish his brand, sometimes bringing in other freelancers. He earned a steady income from his freelance movie ads and tried to break free of the conventions that demanded every square inch of ad space be filled with content. With Bass, it was all about designing clean, legible, unique material. Although Bass had done his own lettering and calligraphy during his years of apprenticeship, he used other artists once he became an art director. According to Al Kallis, who worked with Bass for several years in the mid-1950s, Bass conceptualized the layout and design, while Kallis drew the art and Maury Nemoy handled the typography and calligraphy.³⁵ Another steady collaborator on film titles was Harold Adler, who created the lettering for Carmen Jones, Man with the Golden Arm, The Seven Year Itch, and the Hitchcock titles.

Bass continued to maintain an office at Foote, Cone, & Belding for a while. Then he shared digs in Hollywood (at Highland and Franklin) with Maury Nemoy and another freelance designer, Phyllis Tanner, with whom he also collaborated, before finally setting up his own design office at 1778 Highland Avenue.³⁶ However, Bass worked largely from home in the mid-1950s, and a contemporary article on West Coast designers mentions Bass splitting his time between Hollywood and an Altadena studio, the latter in his home.³⁷ Meanwhile, his wife Ruth raised the two children and worked on a PhD in physiology at the University of Southern California. In 1959 Bass’s firm moved to 7758 Sunset Boulevard, which was a small house that had been converted to office spaces. The two-car garage doubled as a film studio, with a 16mm Steenbeck, projectors, and a white wall for screenings. In 1965 Saul Bass Associates moved to 7039 Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, which included a larger warehouse space in the back. By then, about ten to twelve people worked in the office. The front office was always “neat as a pin,” and the walls were painted, at Bass’s insistence, ocher and olive green.³⁸ Bass was particularly meticulous about his little menagerie of pre-Columbian fetish statues, which could not be moved under any circumstances.³⁹

In 1957, shortly after moving to Highland Avenue, Bass hired Elaine A. Makatura as his secretary.⁴⁰ After divorcing his first wife, Ruth, Saul and Elaine were married on 30 September 1961 and eventually had two children, Jennifer and Jeffrey. Other longtime employees who joined the Bass team in 1960 included artist-animator Art Goodman, who had started working as a freelancer for Bass in 1956 and became his “right hand man.”⁴¹ Photographer George Arakaki and production manager Nancy von Lauderbach also worked for Bass. Morrie Marsh, a former printing company salesman who had known Bass professionally since the early 1950s, became Bass’s business manager, a position he maintained until he was—in his opinion—ruthlessly pushed aside by Herb Yager.⁴² Numerous other filmmakers and photographers worked on individual projects on a freelance basis, including the Whitney brothers, Bill Melendez, Pat O’Neill, Herb Klynn, Jules Engel, Bob Willoughby, and Jerry F...