Saul Bass: The Main Title

The opening minutes of a movie have always tried to get your attention. They started back in the silent days as simple title cards, accompanied by live orchestra. The music put the audience in the right mood for the movie that was about to begin. Once the main title sequence in Hollywood films were standardized, from the late Twenties on through the mid-Fifties, they came to be called “the credits” because the cast, crew, and top executives are listed on screen. The names you were looking at were just the visual wallpaper behind the music. Then one man sparked a mini-revolution, changing the ways a movie can begin, making it so compelling that, for many, his opening sequences have become some of the best moments in their films. His name was Saul Bass.

Saul Bass was not the only graphic artist or animator to change the look of how feature films begin, but he was one of the very earliest, and until his death four decades later, he remained one of the best in the world.

Bass first came to Hollywood’s attention in 1955 with the bold, jagged animated design that began Otto Preminger’s controversial The Man with the Golden Arm, the screen’s first look at heroin addiction. Bass would continue his association with Preminger, and soon he’d also begin working with Alfred Hitchcock, creating credit sequences for movies like Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959) that are admired to this day.

To get a sense of how much film credits changed and how quickly, there are YouTube clips of the openings of two of the most successful films of their time. There’s nothing wrong with the way Paramount began The Ten Commandments in 1956, but it could be the generic credits to any prestigious Technicolor film from the late Thirties on. Now look at a leap forward: Saul Bass’s dynamic, dramatic opening for Spartacus (1960), Stanley Kubrick’s first big hit, accompanied by a great musical score by Alex North. Designs of fragments of crossed swords, ancient sculpture, and text on Roman walls are not only eye-catching, but they’re evocative of the film’s story: A woman’s slender hand holds a vase. The credits of actors playing Roman politicians are depicted with the outreached hand of the orator, or the clenched fist of the dictator.

One of my favorite Saul Bass title sequences is in the 1960 Ocean’s Eleven, with Count Basie’s music fronting images of blinking lights that echo computers, and funny, flamboyant Vegas motifs of cards, slot machines, a lothario on the make and a skywards-floating cartoon drunk wearing a Mad Mad-era coat and tie.

A more serious history is foreshadowed by the opening of Nine Hours to Rama, a thriller about the last nine hours before the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Indian sitar and tabla music is the background, with the first notes showing the intricate mechanism of a watch coming to life, wheels turning within wheels, transforming expertly into the spinning wheels of a locomotive as the rhythm builds, like history itself inexorably carrying Gandhi onwards to an inevitable fate—a Hindu outlook, suiting the film.

Other Saul Bass title sequences have no animated elements, but use real photography, like the cats and the catfight in the black and white Walk on the Wild Side, or multiplied close ups of surging throttles and ticking stop watches in Grand Prix, breathtakingly huge (and loud) in Cinerama, directed by John Frankenheimer, who also recruited Bass to do the credits for Seven Days in May. Those Seven Days in May opening minutes, accompanied by military drums, are a great example of making a credit scene meaningful, not just beautiful.

By now, of course, Saul had plenty of competition. The James Bond series kicked off with the modern design of credits by Maurice Binder, who’d do many of the Bond openings in the decades to come, evolving a distinctive Bond style that audiences around the world came to expect and enjoy. Other spy movies like Our Man Flint got into the jazzy-looking credits spirit, as did science fiction like Fantastic Voyage.

American-born, British based animator Richard Williams created inventive, funny openings for What’s New Pussycat and the 1967 Casino Royale, full of visual puns and inside jokes. But his greatest work may be in 1968’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, where he not only did the credits, but provided several minutes of animated historical maps and cartoons, done in brilliant tribute to 1855-era newspaper caricatures. Today’s Ukraine skeptics and defenders alike should ponder the lasting historical questions posed by this biting commentary, about how, 168 years ago, sensationalistic newspapers and political rhetoric drove public opinion towards a Crimean war with Russia.

Film credit scenes, like television credit scenes and even, at their best, TV commercials, had become noticed, anticipated little films of their own. It was around then that a few feature film directors began to push back, reclaiming some precious screen time from the title guys. They didn’t want other filmmakers to make the first impression on an audience.

Stanley Kubrick would continue to work with Saul Bass, valuing his work on the advertising art, posters and logos of movies like The Shining, but beginning his own films his way, moving nearly all of his films’ credits to the end, after the fade-out. 2001: A Space Odyssey famously opens with one single shot, a line-up of the Moon, Earth, and Sun, a special effects shot that wasn’t even originally intended to begin the film. Three years later, after a perfunctory title card, A Clockwork Orange immediately shocks you into a strangely violent, oversexed future world.

From the Seventies on, most films put most of their credits at the end, while audiences were walking out of the theater. Theaters liked that; it gave them a final shot at selling concessions. Soundtrack albums were a much bigger source of income than they’d been in the Fifties and earlier; long end credits gave the composer a second shot at playing the main themes at full length.

Not every film followed the usual formats, then or now. Star Wars doesn’t even have a “Directed By” credit at the head, just the title and a famous, iconic text scroll, inspired by the credits of Destination Moon (1950). Rocky III split its credits, the ones at the head of the film playing over a crowd-pleasing montage of the rise of Rocky Balboa, contrasted with the growing rage of would-be challenger Clubber Lang. Fantasia, as released in 1940, has no artist credits at all, either beginning or end, just the film’s title.

Periodically, Saul Bass-inspired film openings come back into fashion. The rom-com Intolerable Cruelty begins with flowery, Victorian-era Valentine illustrations; the backgrounds to the credits of the dark-humored satire Thank You for Smoking are drawn from the elaborate artwork of classic cigarette packs.

But the animated title sequence of Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Catch Me if You Can, done by a pair of young French animators, is a step above, proof that the spirit of Saul made it into the 21^st century with classiness and verve. Its Sixties-styled credits are a perfect fit for the plot of the movie. In the final moments of the iconic and witty sequence, as the image fades, the animated silhouette of a detective follows his suspect literally to the ends of the Earth, a perfect visual metaphor.

Back to Saul Bass. I always wanted to meet him, and it finally happened in December 1987, when he and his wife Elaine were in Spain for the Bilbao film festival, where Saul and I were judges. It was a wild week of non-stop films, food, and fun. He was both an insightful genius of filmmaking, and a remarkably unpretentious man in real life, gallant and practical. Saul doted on Elaine, bringing the breakfast tray to their hotel table each morning. He enjoyed telling backstage stories about the stars and directors, but generally only positive ones. This is by no means a universal trait in Hollywood.

Now that I knew him, back home in Los Angeles it was an honor to play host to a major tribute to him at the Cineplex Odeon Cinemas in Century City, one of the biggest theaters in Los Angeles. I’d concentrated on the films he’d worked on, but it was humbling how much I didn’t know. Saul Bass was also a visual consultant. In practice that meant he drew storyboards advising directors how intricate action should be broken up into shots. On Spartacus, he helped Kubrick with the geometrically precise, lethal visual “choreography” of Roman battle formations. He also helped Hitchcock with designing the shower scene in Psycho. Not the happiest assignment but it certainly got noticed. The tribute also showed us just what a key role Bass had in creating logos and brand images for corporate America: United Airlines, Continental Airlines, AT&T, the United Way, Dixie Cups, Quaker Oats, Kleenex, you name it, he designed it.

Although Saul had an Academy Award, he’s always likely to be remembered as someone whose imaginative graphic sense often made his three-minute opening one of the best things in the movie. From the time of his debut with Carmen Jones in 1954, when Bass was still in his mid-thirties, the greatest filmmakers of his day sought him out as a creative partner, because he was, after all, one of them too.

 

Side notes:

Why are there so many people listed in movie credits? Part of it is the tremendously greater involvement of special visual effects and their armies of technicians. Another reason has to do with a major change in Hollywood since the Golden Age. Before the mid-Sixties, films were made by full-time, year-round studio employees. Except for the very top of each department, they weren’t credited. But since then, almost all films are made by freelancers. Their ability to get more work is based in part on getting into film credits. Studios would rather hand out credits than raises.

The new wide-screen formats that started in the Fifties looked ultra-modern and designers loved to run screen credits right to the edges of that rectangle. But there was a problem: TV. When those films ran on television, the squarish picture cut off many of the words. To correct the problem, studios enforced “TV safe area”—anything vital had to be centered in the picture. TV stations also used “pan and scan”—the TV image could move up and down and side to side to catch the missing names. Movies like The Cardinal and Nashville made it tough by putting their credits in motion along the edges.