Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design

493 Pages·2014·8.09 MB·English

by  Jan-Christopher Horak

Saul Bass

Saul
B aS S
anatomy of
film DeSign
Jan-Christopher horak
Copyright © 2014 by The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky,
Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown
College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,
Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky
University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of
Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.
Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky
663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008
www.kentuckypress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Horak, Jan-Christopher.
Saul Bass : anatomy of film design / Jan-Christopher Horak.
pages cm. — (Screen classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978-0-8131-4718-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)—
ISBN 978-0-8131-4720-8 (pdf)—ISBN 978-0-8131-4719-2 (epub)
1. Bass, Saul—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PN1998.3.B377H68 2014
741.6092—dc23 2014020826
This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting
the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Member of the Association of
American University Presses
Contents
Introduction: Qui êtes-vous, Saul Bass? 1
1. Designer and Filmmaker 33
2. Film Titles: Theory and Practice 71
3. Creating a Mood: Pars pro toto 129
4. Modernism’s Multiplicity of Views 191
5. The Urban Landscape 227
6. Journeys of Discovery: Seeing Is Knowledge 265
7. Civilization: Organizing Knowledge through
Communication 305
Acknowledgments 357
Filmography 361
Notes 369
Selected Bibliography 421
Index 441
Illustrations follow page 225

introduction
Qui êtes-vous, Saul Bass?
The Forty-First Academy Awards ceremony took place on 14 April 1969
at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, on what used to be Bunker Hill in
downtown Los Angeles. It was the first Oscar ceremony to be broadcast
worldwide and the first held at that location. As usual, it was a star-stud-
ded affair. Katharine Hepburn was nominated as best actress for the sec-
ond year in a row, this time for The Lion in Winter, an award she would
have to share with Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl—the only time there
has been a tie in this category. Saul and Elaine Bass, too, were present at
the awards ceremony, since the designer was nominated in the best docu-
mentary short category for Why Man Creates (1968). The couple rode to
the Chandler in a rented limousine together with USC graduate student
and Bass advisee George Lucas, who had been an assistant on the produc-
tion. Bass’s competitors were The House that Amanda Built (Fali Bilimo-
ria), The Revolving Door (Lee R. Bobker), A Space to Grow (Thomas P.
Kelly Jr.), and A Way out of the Wilderness (Dan E. Weisburd). Given his
longtime work in the film industry, Bass was heavily favored to win. At the
ceremony, Bass sat in an aisle seat at stage left, ten rows from the podium;
Elaine was next to him in a light-colored chiffon dress. Actors Diahann
Carroll and Tony Curtis read out the names of the nominees for best doc-
umentary and best short documentary, respectively. When Tony Curtis
called out Bass’s name as the winner, he bounced up to the stage, despite
the wooden cane that preceded his every step. Curtis handed the Oscar to
Bass, who was wearing a traditional tuxedo, in contrast to Curtis’s mod
outfit. Bass took the Oscar in his right hand while balancing his weight
with his left hand on the cane. He bent over the microphone and, in an
uncharacteristic moment of brevity, said, “Thank you, thank you very
much.” Then he quickly walked offstage.1 No thanks to his staff, no
thanks to his wife, no thanks to the Academy. More important, Bass failed
1
Saul BaSS
to mention Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation, the film’s spon-
sor and original producer, causing mini-scandal to erupt at corporate
headquarters. Did Bass just forget, due to nerves or under pressure to
keep his acceptance speech short? We will probably never know. The over-
sight may not have been accidental, however, given the huge fights with
Kaiser over the film’s final structure, laboratory costs, and even the title.
Bass hated the title because he thought it promised more than he could
deliver.2
In hindsight, we can see that Bass deserved to win for what would be
his greatest cinematic achievement, although his largely avant-garde work
certainly challenged the Academy’s notions of genre. Indeed, the cate-
gory “Best Documentary, Short Subjects” hardly describes Bass’s free-
form essay, a hodgepodge of film notes that asks many more questions
than it answers. And what makes it a documentary? The film includes sev-
eral forms of animation and mostly staged sequences. In fact, it is a mod-
ernist romp, at moments seemingly incoherent and yet also brilliant in its
open-endedness; its fragmentation forces the viewer to engage in the con-
struction of meaning, thus fulfilling the promise of every modernist work
to make the audience an active participant. In addition to the Academy
Award, Why Man Creates won numerous film festival and other awards, as
well as being placed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Con-
gress in 2002, designating it a national treasure.3
But the somewhat tortured production history of the film also points
out the pitfalls of having a corporate sponsor for such a personal and
highly idiosyncratic project. In Bass’s most cynical evaluation of the film,
he admitted to a group of AT&T executives: “I think now—that the most
creative thing about the film was that I found a rationalization that enabled
me to convince the client, to allow me to make the film.”4 Even if the film
was not a direct advertisement for Kaiser, the company covered all the
production costs, and the corporate executives and Bass often had vastly
different ideas about what kind of film they were financing. The designer
usually argued that because sponsored films didn’t have to sell anything,
they were preferable to commercials or industrial film productions, where
the filmmaker was at the mercy of the client. But Bass wanted to have it
both ways: complete freedom to produce artistic work, and complete
financing by a corporate sponsor that would pay all the bills, including a
substantial honorarium to support Bass’s office. Unlike most other avant-
garde filmmakers, Bass was not willing to self-finance or to take on con-
2
introduction
tract work to pay for his own personal films. After all, Bass had grown up
in the Hollywood film industry, where no one invested their own money.
Paradoxically, despite the insider status that an Academy Award seemingly
represented, Bass remained an outsider in the movie industry, for several
reasons. First, he was a graphic designer who had essentially created his
own job description in a highly regulated system of film production. Sec-
ond, his own aesthetic ambitions to bring high art to an often resistant
Hollywood industry set him apart. Third, he sought the company of like-
minded professionals, mostly producer-directors who had declared their
independence from the classic Hollywood studio system.
Seen from our perspective in the twenty-first century, Saul Bass seems
to define an era. As a designer of studio publicity, movie posters, title
sequences and montages, commercials, and corporate logos from the
1940s to the 1990s, Bass heavily influenced the look of both film advertis-
ing and Hollywood films. Bass’s poster designs and his credit sequences
for Hollywood feature films were extremely innovative in terms of their
formal design, use of iconography, and narrative content. His graphic
work resembled no one else’s in Hollywood, and his film credits changed
forever how audiences looked at the opening minutes of a film. Simulta-
neously, all his film-related work incorporated aesthetic concepts bor-
rowed from modernist art, translating them into new commercial modes
of address and thereby transforming film industry conventions that had
remained relatively stagnant for decades. Bass’s designs influenced not
only other studio publicity designers and filmmakers but also a whole gen-
eration of young designers that he personally trained in his studio. Among
those who started their careers with Saul Bass were Thurston Blodgett,
Paul Bruhwiler, Vincent Carra, John Casados, Morton Dimondstein,
Vahe Fattal, Augustine Garza, Joel Katz, Karen Lee, Henry Markowitz,
Michael Mills, Dave Nagata, Ted Piegdon, Gay Reinecke, Clarence Sato,
Arnold Schwartzman, Mamoru Shimokochi, G. Dean Smith, Jay Toffoli,
Todd Walker, Don Weller, and Howard York.
At a time when Hollywood’s Taylorized system of film production
called for extreme specialization within the work flow, Saul Bass was,
uniquely, a generalist. He burst onto the creative floors of the film pro-
duction factory and argued for the importance of the designer in the pro-
duction process. Because of his aesthetic influences and the particular
moment of his arrival in a changing Hollywood, Bass was able to cross
over into other fields of film production, from designing advertising and
3