by George Beahm
2009
The best thing that came out of writing Knowing Darkness: Artists Inspired by Stephen King (Centipede Press, 2009) was meeting some of the artists I’d never met before, including Drew Struzan. A mild-mannered and soft-spoken man, Struzan counts Frank Darabont as a dear friend, and in a lengthy introduction written especially for Knowing Darkness, Struzan rendered a portrait of Darabont standing between actors Morgan Freeman (who played Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding) and Tim Robbins (who played Andy Dufresne), both wearing prison uniforms. It’s a heartwarming portrait, and on the right side Struzan wrote, “Happy Anniversary.”
Frank Darabont reviewed and edited my piece on Struzan. I am indebted to Darabont for his eagle eye, which considerably improved the piece. (I’ve rewritten it for its appearance in this book.)
I am also indebted to Struzan for an act of generosity that stunned me and caught me totally by surprise: I had rendered what I considered a small favor to Struzan, and he never forgot it. I considered it a minor intervention on his behalf, and I was glad to be of service. I put it out of my mind, but he kept it in his, and when I visited him at his California studio, he gave me two priceless gifts, which I will keep private. I was overcome by his generosity. At a loss for words, I mumbled my thanks.
The gifts I cherish, but the friendship I cherish even more.
Struzan, who is perhaps best known for his movie posters for George Lucas’s Star Wars movies, is also celebrated for his fine work for Frank Darabont, notably The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist.
I’ve always thought he has the perfect first name for an artist—Drew—and I treasure his art books, which grace my shelves. Check out Drew Struzan: Oeuvre (Titan Books, 2011]); Star Wars: Posters (Harry N. Abrams, 2014); and Drew: The Man Behind the Poster (2013, a documentary about his life and work).
Like many artists, Drew simply loves to paint. “I love the texture of paint made of colored earth, of oil from the trees and of canvas and paper. I love the expression of paint from a brush or a hand smearing charcoal, the dripping of paint and moisture of water, the smell of the materials. I delight in the changeable nature of a painting with new morning light or in the afternoon when the sun turns a painting orange or by firelight at night. I love to see it, hold it, touch it, smell it, and create it. My gift is to share my life by allowing others to see into my heart and spirit through such tangible, comprehensible and familiar means. The paint is part of the expression,” he explained.
It is an important distinction because the film industry traditionally had relied on hand-drawn art for movie posters but now relies exclusively on photography, an expedient and cost-effective but clearly inferior substitute. What has been lost in the process is the magic, the romance, the uniqueness of an art form that had its origins in the silent films.
The 1933 poster for King Kong serves as a metaphor for the eventual downfall of hand-drawn movie poster art: Like King Kong, who stood like a colossus astride a New York City skyscraper to defiantly fight off buzzing biplanes, hand-drawn movie poster art held its own for decades against the relentless assault of photography, but in the end, it fell from its pinnacle, like the mighty King Kong himself.
It was a battle of the titans: the expressive vision of a sole artist up against an army of computer technicians, the beauty of original art pitted against the beastly abomination of computer-manipulated photos.
In the end, it was the beast that killed the beauty.
Bob Peak, Frank McCarthy, Howard Terpning, Richard Amsel, and Robert McGinnis—if you’re a fan of movie-poster art, these names shine bright because, for decades, they gave us memorable, colorful images that drew us into the theater, where we sat in the dark and watched still frames sprocket like a rocket through a film projector at twenty-four frames per second, a visual experience enhanced by an integrated sound system that enveloped us.
Add to that list of artists one more name: Drew Struzan.
Now happily retired from the movie-poster business, though he does an occasional poster—for illustrative, not financial, considerations—he now heads to his custom-made studio to pick up a brush and work at his own pace on subjects of personal interest: mostly figure studies and portraits of his grandchildren.
Drew’s statement upon his retirement made his position clear:
Having been working at not working has produced a guy who could never return to illustration again. It took a lot to attempt the idea of retiring from my 40 years of effort and sacrifice, but now that I have, I am delighting in life as never before. I had forgotten how to rest, to smell the proverbial roses and to see the future as opportunity. I am grateful and honored to have had the opportunity to do all the work I did. I am well pleased to have been able to give a gift of beauty and peace through my artwork to so many throughout the world. Now I have laid down the burden and have peace and happiness as the reward for my day’s labor.
In an introduction to Oeuvre, one of Struzan’s two oversized collections of art, George Lucas explained that “Drew has the talent not only to capture the characters faithfully, but to enrich them with something a little grander, a little more glorious and more romantic than a photograph could ever convey.”
What, one wonders, would Drew do if he were asked for a new commission from his old friend George Lucas? Would he accept it? He might, but only because of their long-standing friendship based on mutual respect.
Drew, who acknowledges that the nature of the movie business is essentially one of compromise and endless frustration, has spent a good part of his working life dealing with the whimsical demands of studio executives in Hollyweird—er, Hollywood. Happily, he no longer endures the aggravation of creating art by committee, a frustrating process that is the norm.
Moreover, on too many occasions, Drew was the “go to” guy when, on short notice, a studio executive panicked because there was no approved art on hand for distribution, and the studio head was clamoring for it—or someone’s head on a platter.
Drew would then get a frantic, pleading phone call, because everyone in Hollywood knows that he always delivers the goods. In one instance, for a remake of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), Drew took on the assignment to produce a painting within twenty-four hours.
In Oeuvre, Drew explained, “A certain amount of insanity is part of my job. I can’t really explain why, but after spending millions of dollars and months of planning in order to launch a major motion picture, I routinely get calls from frantic producers who have two days to ship before a release and no poster.”
Drew has invested four decades of his life into his illustrative career. His impressive body of work includes album covers, magazine covers, limited edition prints, book covers, comics, postage stamps, and collectibles of every kind.
The movie art, though, is what draws in the film crowd: a single, arresting image that catches one’s eye in a print publication, billboard, or outside a movie theater. It’s a promise, a visual invitation to leave your troubles behind and escape to another world as seen through the lens of a film director.
Frank Darabont is messianic about the essential difference between hand-drawn movie-poster art and those cobbled together by computer technicians using Photoshop. Citing Drew’s work, Darabont illustrates the wide gap in perceived quality between two Harry Potter movie posters. “Drew’s art for The Sorcerer’s Stone makes me weep. It is so gorgeous, so evocative, so romantic, so beautiful. It says: ‘Come see the movie.’” But The Half-Blood Prince is “an abomination of movie poster art. It’s the hip, young cast just standing there. What is that—a Gap ad? There’s no art in it.”
In a Time magazine interview, Drew gave us a glimpse of what happened behind the scenes. “A lot of people think I did all the Harry Potter posters, but I only did the first one,” he said. “The studio came to me and said, ‘This is going to be seven movies. So just like you did with Indiana Jones, design the look for it, and then we’ll repeat that look for the other films.’ I did the first one, and when
they hit the theaters, people just clamored for it. But when the second movie came out, they decided to just use photography.”
It’s an important distinction that speaks to the heart of the matter. As Darabont points out, “I find contemporary movie posters to be soulless and sterile. There’s no romance to them at all. No individuality, no love of film as an art form.”
Put simply, Drew’s art is all about heart.
There’s a story Drew likes to tell that underscores his point and reinforces Darabont’s: He and John Alvin were called upon to submit comps for Bladerunner. “The other comp was about the architecture and the modernness, and mine was all about the people. The director, Ridley Scott, loved mine but they went with the other one because the studio wanted to emphasize how much money they spent on the special effects. So for years, that’s what they used. But mine was always Ridley’s favorite, so when the studio came out with its twenty-fifth anniversary edition, Ridley said, ‘Now’s my chance to finally use the art that I think is appropriate for that movie.’ Ridley’s reason was [that] it’s about connecting, because it’s the human experience we value, not the architecture.”
Which brings me, finally, to Stephen King.
It seems altogether fitting that of the numerous movies and teleplays adapted from Stephen King’s work, Frank and Drew teamed up to give us their visual interpretations of three of King’s most memorable stories: “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” from Different Seasons; The Green Mile, a serialized novel; and The Mist, a cautionary tale of “the technology of fright,” as Dr. Tony Magistrale writes in his book, Hollywood’s Stephen King.
THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
The Shawshank Redemption is often called a “prison movie,” but it’s more accurate to characterize it as a prisoner’s movie. The prison itself is merely the backdrop, the setting. The interaction among the characters, notably the relationship between Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins) and Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding (played by Morgan Freeman), is the essential story.
With its unusual, and awkward, title—one that King himself doesn’t care for—and its nonhorror story line, the film is one that catches many moviegoers by surprise when they are told it’s by Stephen King. Because they associate him exclusively with horror films, they’re surprised when he doesn’t fit in their preconceived notions—clearly, theirs is a failure of imagination.
Typically, a movie-poster artist will draw several comps, each a different approach, to give the studio as many choices as possible. The comp finally chosen will then be used as the basis for rendering the final art, the nucleus of the studio’s marketing campaign for a movie.
Take a good look at the movie poster for the tenth-anniversary release of The Shawshank Redemption. It doesn’t feature the original poster’s photo; instead, it’s an illustration by Drew, drawn from one of the comps.
In lieu of the art, here’s descriptive text of the comps:
One captures Red and Andy behind barbed wire, illuminated by a full moon. It is simple and stark, but there’s more story elements that can be conveyed.
Another one arranges “snapshots” of the characters. It draws one’s eye from the upper left of the image to its lower right: Behind bars, Red has a wistful expression, and Andy a determined one; a small picture of Rita Hayworth in lingerie, the wet dream of convicts barred from sexual congress; the implacable warden, his face symbolically deep in shadow; a prison guard, his arms crossed, his gimlet eyes fixed straight ahead; the weathered face of Brooks Hatlen (named after King’s mentor, Burton Hatlen), bearing a wistful, resigned expression; and finally, Red and Andy sharing a private conversation in the prison yard.
Yet another comp incorporates elements of both: Set against a black background, Red’s hopeful expression contrasts sharply with Andy’s determined one. On its left side, tight close-ups of an unyielding prison guard named Byron Hadley and his hardened boss, Warden Norton—their faces, appropriately, are in shadow; counterbalanced on the right, the face of a young man named Tommy, whom Andy takes under his wing, and the world-weary face of Brooks Hatlen.
The faces—from Red’s to Norton’s—combine to frame the climactic scene of the movie: Andy Dufresne, his arms outstretched, bathed in light and showered by rain, symbolizing his freedom.
Looking back at his art for The Shawshank Redemption, Drew observed, “When you think of the movie, do you really think of the setting? That’s not what it’s about. It’s about good old-fashioned storytelling. It’s gritty, it’s harsh, it’s mean, yet the two main people, Red and Andy, are very quiet and not angry.”
Long after the prison itself recedes from one’s mind, the characters remain, haunting us to linger forever.
THE GREEN MILE
When Darabont took the helm for a second King film project, it would be, ironically, another movie set in a prison—The Green Mile, based on King’s serialized novel. As King explained in “Foreword: A Letter” (The Green Mile, Scribner, 2000), it would be “a story that could be written the same way it would be read—in installments. And I liked the high-wire aspect of it, too: fall down on the job, fail to carry through, and all at once about a million readers are howling for your blood.”
It would prove to be a King story ideally matched to Darabont’s deeply held storytelling values—one with heart that could translate to a film worth the two years of his life and the commitment necessary to bring it to the screen with fidelity. As Darabont told Patrick Lee, film directing is punishing work to meet a demanding schedule. “It’s too hard.… So I was waiting. And wading through lots of Die Hard rip-offs that were being sent my way.”
The Green Mile shares much in common with the film version of The Shawshank Redemption. Both focus on a first-person recounting of the story to highlight the principal characters; both significantly and symbolically use a prison as a backdrop; and both are about character, not plot.
What happens to the characters is what makes all the difference. It’s a shared perception among Stephen King, Frank Darabont, and Drew Struzan. It also speaks to why each excels at his chosen craft.
The painting that was used for the DVD release of The Green Mile is suffused with green light. We see actor Tom Hanks as prison-ward superintendent Paul Edgecombe, stern but obviously humane. We see two guards: a giant of a man with the ironic nickname “Brutal,” who, in fact, is anything but a brute, and a small man (in every sense of the word) who flanks Edgecombe and inmate Eduard Delacroix. Significantly, at the center of the picture is John Coffey (played by the late Michael Clarke Duncan), whose palms-up hands emanate an otherworldly light. On the right, we see an electric chair, “Old Sparky,” and Delacroix’s pet, a mouse miraculously brought back to life by John Coffey—note his initials: J.C.—who is clearly much more than what he appears to be: a giant-sized, uneducated black man with murder in his heart.
Drew Struzan, once again, encapsulates the story of The Green Mile in a single, poignant image. Though The Shawshank Redemption celebrates the triumph of hope over fear, The Green Mile is not so celebratory: Man’s “justice” is done, but Edgecombe’s faith is shaken to its very core at the cosmic injustice of how God could countenance the destruction of one of His divine creations at the lesser hands of mortal man. John Coffey, clearly, is a divine power in mortal form.
Struzan captures the telling moments through the character’s expressions: the expression of doubt and wonder on Edgecombe’s face, the kind and gentle look on Brutus “Brutal” Howell’s face, the backward and dismissive glance of prison guard Percy Wetmore, the animated face of Eduard Delacroix, and the ethereal beauty of John Coffey’s face shining in wonderment.
The combined arts of the writer, the filmmaker, and artist come together to show us the enduring power of the human heart.
The Mist
This archetypal King story, with ordinary people in a pressure-cooker environment, is one in which the depiction of monsters is best left to the imagination, which is the approach Struzan wisely employed in his m
ovie poster and DVD cover for The Mist. He knows our imaginations can conjure up monsters aplenty. Struzan’s job, simply, is to convey the story’s claustrophobic atmosphere and sense of dread: A strange mist rolls in and blankets Maine, bringing with it hellish creatures presumed to be the unforeseen result of the Arrowhead Project, government experiments conducted at a local army post near Bridgton, Maine. Its nearby residents take refuge in a Federal Foods supermarket, where they make a stand: Some stay, and some venture out, and all share the certain knowledge that the world has suddenly gone mad.
Struzan’s art shows us the palpable fear in the eyes of the beleaguered, terrified townsfolk. Empty, darkened cars sit abandoned in the parking lot, outlined against the supermarket, a magnet for monsters who seek easy prey.
A man’s face, partially obscured by his hand, tells its own story: He doesn’t want to look but is compelled to do so. But whatever is out there in the mist is being drawn in by the lights of the supermarket, where the monsters seek food. The man’s solitary eye harbors a look of bewilderment and unmistakable fear.
The rules of order, of civilization, no longer apply. The distraught man can offer no answer, no explanation, nor can he find sanctuary from the unremitting horror of his situation. He is, simply, prey.
Struzan’s work is seen not only on the DVD packaging but in the movie itself. The central figure in The Mist is David Drayton, an artist. Using Struzan’s Pasadena, California, studio as a model for Drayton’s studio ensured authenticity. Darabont also included “prop” paintings by Struzan, drawn from his own movie work: art for The Thing, The Shawshank Redemption, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Green Mile.
Keen-eyed King fans also saw in the studio sequence a painting depicting Roland the gunslinger, flanked by the Dark Tower and a single rose; Roland’s image deliberately suggests Clint Eastwood, whom King had in mind when he wrote the series. The painting, measuring thirty-by-forty inches, prompted Dark Tower fans to write and inquire about prints for sale. Struzan explained that it was intended as a prop painting only, and not as a basis for prints. (The original now resides in King’s collection.)
