Saul Bass was an American graphic designer and Oscar-winning filmmaker, best known for his design of motion-picture title sequences, film posters, and corporate logos.
25 Facts About Saul Bass
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Saul Bass designed Continental Airlines' 1968 jet stream logo and United Airlines' 1974 tulip logo, which became some of the most recognized airline industry logos of the era.
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Saul Bass died from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in Los Angeles on April 25,1996, at the age of 75.
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Saul Bass was born on May 8,1920, in the Bronx, New York, United States, to Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents.
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In 1938, Saul Bass married Ruth Cooper and they had two children, Robert in 1942 and Andrea in 1946.
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Saul Bass began his time in Hollywood in the 1940s, designing print advertisements for films including Champion, Death of a Salesman and The Moon Is Blue, directed by Otto Preminger.
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Saul Bass was one of the first to realize the creative potential of the opening and closing credits of a movie.
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Saul Bass became widely known in the film industry after creating the title sequence for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm.
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Saul Bass decided to create an innovative title sequence to match the film's controversial subject.
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Saul Bass chose the arm as the central image, as it is a strong image relating to heroin addiction.
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Saul Bass once described his main goal for his title sequences as being to "try to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story".
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The average lifespan of a Saul Bass logo was more than 34 years as of 2013.
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Saul Bass created the sculpture which each of the World Food Prize laureates receive.
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Saul Bass designed emblematic movie posters that transformed the visuals of film advertising.
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Saul Bass created some of his best known posters for films directed by Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Stanley Kubrick among others.
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Saul Bass's last commissioned film poster was created for Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, but it was never distributed.
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Saul Bass received an unintentionally backhanded tribute in 1995, when Spike Lee's film Clockers was promoted by a poster that was strikingly similar to Bass's 1959 work for Preminger's film Anatomy of a Murder.
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Designer Art Sims claimed that it was made as an homage, but Saul Bass regarded it as theft.
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Saul Bass designed five Academy Award Presentation posters and the Student Academy Award for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
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Saul Bass has the unusual credit of "visual consultant" or "pictorial consultant" on five films.
21.
For West Side Story Saul Bass filmed the prologue, storyboarded the opening dance sequence, and created the ending title sequence.
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Saul Bass claimed that he participated in directing the highlight scene of Psycho, the tightly edited shower-murder sequence, though several on set at the time disputed this claim.
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Krohn concludes that Saul Bass did not literally direct the shower scene, proving Hitchcock's presence on the set throughout the shooting of that scene.
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Saul Bass introduced the idea of using a montage of fast cuts and tight framing to render a violent, bloody murder as an impressionistic and nearly bloodless one.
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The moving image collection of Saul Bass is held at the Academy Film Archive and consists of 2,700 items.