Desperately Seeking Good Movie Posters

For all of you 80s film buffs, movie poster enthusiasts and/or Madonna fanatics out there, My Life as a Blog has a terrific behind the scenes retrospective of the making of the Desperately Seeking Susan poster. From someone who was directly involved at that.

Movie fanatics often like to bitch about the lack of illustration and graphic design in today's movie posters but even the photography-based movie posters, rarely are pulled from photo-shoots these days. They just do quick slapdash photoshopping of different images of the actors or blow up their faces from stills and work around that.

It's so depressing. Especially when a movie poster that's illustrated or photographed separately merely using the movie as inspiration can be so iconic and worth loving apart from the movie they're attached to.

I Could Go On Bitching.

Reid writes...

Nowadays photo shoots like these are a big deal, with limos for talent, and a gaggle of publicists and studio executives, but the only people from the movie were me and the wardrobe supervisor Melissa Stanton (who brought the jackets, costumes and accessories), Herb’s crew, and Madonna and Rosanna, who cabbed over themselves. [Why am I so sure they didn’t get cars? Because afterwards Madonna complained that she couldn’t take the subway anymore. She had only recently reached the level of fame where people hassled her on the trains...]

I've always really loved this poster and it's hilarious to read that studio executives were worried that people would think it was a lesbian movie. GASP.

Rosanna and Madonna had a peculiar relationship. On one hand they were friends and even hung out together outside of work, but on another… Madonna had a way of sucking all the air out of the room. It’s my understanding that the movie was greenlit because Rosanna, red-hot after “The Executioner’s Song” and “Baby, It’s You,” had agreed to be in it. Rosanna was unquestionably the lead and worked practically every day, while Madonna’s role was much smaller in terms of actual scenes. But there was no denying that Madonna was Madonna and she was “Susan,” in a movie called “Desperately Seeking Susan.” Once, when somebody on the street asked who was in the film, I heard Rosanna say, “Madonna.”

Madonna sounds incredibly bitchy in this article (as she often does in such anecdotal evidence) but I love her all the same. She's like an inextracticble  part of my soul.

Podcast: Sexy Interlopers. Oscar Role Play

New Podcast!
The gangs all here. Nathaniel, Nick, Katey and Joe were too full of the Awards Season spirit to squeeze into the alloted time so this one comes to you in two parts (part two tomorrow). We're bursting with chatter about the nominated actors in particular and the post BAFTAs King's Speech climate. So we decided to play The Film Experience's favorite hypothetical award season game: Which nominated roles do you think would have been interesting or totally different with the another nominated actors playing them? But that's not all...

Topics covered include

• Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell in The Eagle
• Queens of (Reaction Shot) Shade: Miranda Richardson and Anjelica Huston
• Nicole Kidman at the Grammys
• David Fincher "behind enemy lines"
• Aronofsky's homage to Natalie Portman
• Supporting Actress free for all. Who to predict?
• Role Play Switcheroos. Which actors would be most interesting in each other's roles? Helena Bonham Carter gets quite a vocal/psychological workout and Mark Ruffalo's Sexy Interloper in The Kids Are All Right finds plentiful sperm-donor competition.

Recent articles briefly cited: Nick's Annette Bening piece, Nathaniel's review of The Eagle, Joe's 1990 Oscar retrospective.

 LISTEN IN. We'd love to hear your comments. Especially about the annual Film Experience Oscar game. Switch the roles around. What'cha got?

Podcast: Post Bafta Climate and Sexy Interlopers

The Hard Sell

Was this really necessary?

I mean they're already going to win a slew of Oscars. (see final predictions and vote on reader polls). Honestly I thought this was a parody of a hard sell Oscar campaign / movie commercial for the first few seconds. My favorite part is either the woman with long hair who actually cries while participating in a movie commercial or the guy in St Louis with the yellow shirt.

The King's Speech reminds us that we're all human.

Uh, I hadn't actually forgotten but... thanks?

Thanks to Glenn for pointing this out. And I know it's splitting hairs but isn't a smidgeon dishonest to claim you're THE most acclaimed movie of the year when another movie has won more prizes than any movie usually ever does and yet another is actually the best reviewed of the year?

Here's Jude With Your Coffee

Start your work week fully caffeinated.

You take it with cream and sugar, right?

Zoinks! Nicole + Cate, Holly + Anna

Aussie actresses Nicole and Cate are fans of each others. We shouldn't be surprised and perhaps we already knew but have forgotten. The March issue of In Style asked four Oscar winning actresses Nicole Kidman, Anna Paquin, Hilary Swank and Susan Sarandon to name their "Oscar Inspiration" and they chose Cate Blanchett, Holly Hunter, Jessica Lange, and Vanessa Redgrave respectively.

This photo has a certain imaginary Film Experience spark as it's an actress (Kidman) that readers tend to think I'm rather too scarily devoted to combined with an actress (Blanchett) that I tend to think readers are rather too scarily devoted to. ;) Not that they both aren't great actresses, mind you.

The article may well have been titled "Airbrushed Inspirations" because all of the photos are way way glossy. But it's a fun concept. Here's what Cate said about her Oscar win for The Aviator.

I was frankly relieved when I won -- relieved I wouldn't have to answer all the questions about what it feels like to lose, and relieved because, playing Katharine Hepburn, you can't but disappoint some people. You have to throw caution to the wind when you take on those real-people roles; you can't think of the outcome.

I don't see this info at In Style's official site but here is a photo-set. The Hilary Swank/Jessica Lange photos are fun but the one that just thrilled me, for the sheer nostalgia, was seeing The Piano's mother and daughter Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin reunited.

The Piano (1993) is among my all time favorite movies and who wouldn't want such a reminder. Anna is apparently now taller than Holly! Although one reason I object to the super processed/airbrushed photo shoots that are the norm these days is that in the age of Photoshop when a photo looks too plastic, I just assume no one was in the room together. Let me see an errant hair or a wrinkle or a weird pucker of cloth, or some PROOF that these are flesh and blood people in a room together.

The other thing I think of when I look at this photo is: DOES HOLLY HUNTER WATCH TRUE BLOOD? Heh. I do. I wonder.