You may not recognize his name, but if you’ve seen a movie poster in the last 40 years you almost certainly know Drew Struzan’s work.
The 67-year-old artist didn't just create some of the most iconic one-sheets in cinema history. He’s also very likely the guy responsible for the image in your head when you think of a beloved movie or actor from the '80s and '90s (particularly if the latter is Harrison Ford). This is true for a ridiculous number of films, from Star Wars and Blade Runner, to Big Trouble in Little China, the Back to the Future trilogy, and The Thing.
As Struzan acolytes like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Frank Darabont, and Guillermo del Toro have pointed out, he has an uncanny ability to capture both the spirit and mood of a film in one static image. Indeed, it’s not uncommon for his posters to surpass the source material. "I had to almost live up to the art that we were later going to ask Drew to create for the poster," admits Spielberg in the 2013 Struzan documentary, Drew: The Man Behind the Poster.
Like a lot of other movie geeks, my first exposure to his work was through Star Wars—specifically, the "Revenge of the Jedi" teaser posters I became infatuated with as a teenager. More than their rarity or the the story behind their last-minute pulling, it was the image that really stuck in my mind. It still seems a near perfect distillation of the movie—to hell with the fact the lightsabers for Luke and Darth are the wrong color.
When I found out the same artist drew nearly all of my childhood movie experiences, I was hooked. It was actually through Struzan that I discovered other masters of the genre, artists like Bob Peak, Richard Amsel, and Roger Kastel.
Struzan officially retired from poster work in 2008, but that retirement has been spotty at best. Over the past six years, he’s continued to produce occasional work for television and movies like The Walking Dead and Cowboys & Aliens. Most recently, he created a pro-bono poster for director Dana Nachman’s Batkid Begins.
Of course, the thing that has everyone’s midi-chlorians strirring is the possibility he’ll come back to work on the next batch of Star Wars films. J.J. Abrams supposedly wants it to happen. And in previous interviews Struzan has more or less promised to do them if asked. So while we wait for official confirmation, here’s a look back at the vast cinematic worlds he managed to capture one image at a time.
