Stout on Getting Out

ARCUDI: Movie posters started going more to photographs because it was so much easier to manipulate the imagery in Photoshop and it costs so much less. You bailed from designing and illustrating movie posters and went into making movies.

STOUT: Well, that happened actually just after I got out of movie posters, thank god. I got sidetracked and shanghaied out of the movie advertising business and began actually making movies themselves. Movie advertising and the making of movies are two completely separate businesses that almost never intersect -- two different worlds. I fell into making motion pictures; that is a completely time-consuming occupation. If you're working on a movie and you're not working seven days a week, 12 to 18 hour days, then you probably shouldn't be working on a film because you're not working hard enough. With that kind of schedule there's no time to do advertising -- or anything else for that matter. Movie poster advertising is sort of like session work for a musician. You can say "No" once, but if you say "No" a second time, they cross you off the list. Suddenly, because I was unavailable due to my working on Conan the Barbarian, I stopped getting the advertising calls. It turned out to be the perfect time to get out of that business; shortly thereafter they stopped using illustrators to do movie posters. In fact, today it's all photography except for Drew Struzan's annual poster for Lucas or Spielberg.

ARCUDI: What a shame.

STOUT: As you said, it's all Photoshop now. It's a shame -- now everything looks the same. It's really boring. When I was working in what I consider the heyday of movie posters, that agency, Tony Seiniger and Associates, was one of the most exciting places an artist could visit. You never knew what you were going to see. I'd walk in there and there would be Pete Palombi's poster for Travels With My Aunt done in the style of Toulouse Lautrec. There would be Drew Struzan's Leyendecker-meets-Mucha stuff, really gorgeous work. Barry Jackson did his first poster there for Escape From New York. Dan Goozee did this great wood block-style poster for Streets of Fire that looked like Russian agitprop. It was a total "Wow!" You never knew what to expect. What am I going to see next? How are we going to promote this film? What kind of visual adventure are we going to have this time? And now it's so dull. It's the same, same, same.

[To read the full version of this interview, please see The Comics Journal Winter 2003 Special Edition.]

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