Film posters now tend to look quite busy. Often their designs are cluttered, with some of the worst examples crowding every character onto the sheet in order to say as much about the film as possible (step forward Dreamworks Animation). The logic is that they must fight for your attention and leave no demographic untargeted. These days they are less the preserve of artists (such as
Drew Struzan or
Saul Bass) and more the cold business calculation of someone in the marketing department with access to Photoshop and some publicity stills. Arguably the switch from the golden age of movie posters to the less romantic world of todays marketing savvy really has its genesis in the 1980s, as movie studios began to be bought up by companies, such as Coca-Cola (who acquired Columbia Pictures for $750 million in June of 1982). This is about the movie poster that is perhaps the bastard child of this crossover period: the poster that in some ways seems to hark back to a simpler, more cherished age of design, whilst also acting as a sign of things to come. In some ways the poster for
Ivan Reitmans 1984 comedy
Ghostbusters was at the forefront of what we now call viral marketing. Yet unlike a lot of the busy, ugly posters which desecrate our cinemas today, the original teaser poster for Ghostbusters was willing to tell you almost nothing. Cynicism aside, it must have been quite something when this poster suddenly hit billboards around the world, especially in an age before widespread internet access. I can imagine (I wasnt born until 1985) the excitement and the intrigue that must have been generated by what remains a very clever, and deceptively simple, marketing image: a black poster emblazoned with a then unknown (now iconic) emblem featuring an image of a white ghost embedded in a red "no smoking" style sign. Underneath read simply: "Coming to Save the World this Summer".
Who is coming to save the world this summer? must have been one of the many questions that came into peoples minds. It was what the Americans would call a watercooler sensation, as people discussed what this meant and what it was for, turning people into mobile hype generators, unknowingly doing the PR departments bidding. Part of the brilliance of this poster is that, save for a tiny Columbia Pictures symbol at the bottom, there is no indication of what it is advertising. Even if you had seen that discreet and uncharacteristically tasteful production company logo and had worked out that it was a film poster: what sort of film was it promoting? You probably wouldnt have any idea that it was a comedy. You certainly wouldnt have known that it was a comedy made by the same director (and by one of the writers) of the hugely successful 1981 comedy
Stripes. You wouldnt have been able to guess that it, like Stripes, would star
Caddyshack and
Saturday Night Live funnyman
Bill Murray. Can you imagine such a move even now? Studio executives would be soiling themselves. Earlier this year,
Nikki Finke of Deadline Hollywood partly put the relative commercial failure of
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole down to the fact that the US theatrical poster didnt boast that it was from the makers of
Happy Feet. Of course, this is no longer possible. The internet means that (thanks to sites like this one) we always know WHO is in WHAT and WHEN way ahead of time. These days an actor can barely break wind on the set of a Will Ferrell comedy and not find it in print somewhere before the smell has had a chance to fade. But in 1984 you could genuinely be teased by a so-called teaser image.
Although later posters for the film (above) would add the names of the cast members to this image, it was probably this initial, very strong branding (along with the superb film itself and the soon-to-be ubiquitous title song) that made Ghostbusters the highest grossing comedy film up to that point and one of the highest grossing movies of the 1980s. Is this poster the last great piece of movie pop art? Or does it represent the beginnings of a more calculated age: of brand awareness; focus groups; and viral marketing? Its interesting, to me anyway. But I dont think it really matters. To my mind the original Ghostbusters poster is an iconic image and easily still one of the most recognisable pop culture symbols of the twentieth century. How many film posters can make the same claim? Im sure youll tell me in the comments thread below