The film then details the rise of bland video cover art in the ‘90s that necessitated a much smaller space to be eye-catching to a passerby in which highly-detailed art looked far too busy on the tiny, VHS-sized canvas, effectively ending the wonderfully painted art of traditional movie posters. It’s a fascinating segment, and one that could easily support a documentary on its own.

WOMAN is as much a part of the film’s notoriety as the movie itself) and studio artists like Bob Peak ( APOCALYPSE NOW, MY FAIR LADY), John Alvin ( BLAZING SADDLES, BLADE RUNNER) and Richard Amsel ( RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, THE STING), with the issues they had in both the politics behind creating the posters and getting credit for them detailed. With interviews with friends and fans, the film then discusses some of the unheralded masters of iconic posters, such as B-movie specialist Reynold Brown (whose work on ATTACK OF THE 50 FT. It’s a fascinating story, one that manages to touch on both the history of poster art itself (and the undercredited artists behind some of the most memorable cinematic images of our time) and the issues regarding going back to a time when the poster could be part of the film’s general identity.ĭivided into several parts, the 24×36 opens with a brief history of the movie poster and an identification of the various sizes, a handy resource for a poster neophyte like myself who hadn’t known why a “one sheet” was called as such. This change in movie poster art sensibilities, along with the subsequent rejection of bland, nondescript art by today’s cult film fans, is chronicled in 24X36: A MOVIE ABOUT MOVIE POSTERS, a new documentary by Kevin Burke that received accolades at film festivals last year and makes its exclusive streaming debut today on Tribeca Shortlist. The methods of promoting films via two-dimensional marketing pieces, however, have changed throughout the years, moving from basic posters that emphasized the stars to custom-painted posters that attempted to sell the entirety of the film’s tone, and, more recently, to hastily put-together (often via Photoshop) works that placed the film into an easy-to-understand context of genre with the performers front and center that could be read easily in the confines of a videocassette box or, at this point, an icon on a streaming app. The history of the movie poster is as old as the history of the movie itself – since the dawn of film, promoters needed to determine a way to get audiences to be convinced that their offering was the best way to spend their hard-earned nickel.

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