An Innovative Movie Poster Artist on His Wild Creations for 'RoboCop' and More
Jay Shaw’s movie poster designs are often as strange, unique, and unearthly beautiful as the films they depict. The 37-year-old Colorado-based designer is one of the top artists for Alamo Drafthouse’s Mondo art boutique, a design line that commissions wildly creative prints for lesser-known new movies as well as fondly-remembered famous ones. Shaw’s work for Mondo has led to commissions for the Criterion Collection and the Weinstein Company, among other places.
His lifelong love for film and film art goes back to his childhood and weekly movie outings with his mom. “She had a really strict policy at not looking at the newspaper beforehand to see what was playing,” he tells Yahoo Movies. “So we would just look through all the posters in the lobby and pick something.” He graduated from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., and worked as a designer until the dotcom bust. He’s held jobs as varied as a bike mechanic and record-store manager, before returning to posters several years ago. Shaw is especially influenced by vintage, mid-to-late 20th century Polish posters, whose bold designs represent the boiled-down essence of a film, and are less concerned with marketing than with being works of art.
He took Yahoo Movies on a tour through some of his most evocative designs. You can also check out more of Shaw’s work online at Kingdom of Nonsense.
Killing Them Softly (2012)
The Weinstein Company teamed with Mondo to release an alternate poster for the 2012 crime drama starring Brad Pitt as a mob hit man.
"That was quite a learning experience. If you look at the poster you’ll notice it’s an American flag with bullet holes, and there’s a kind of blood stripe coming out of it. That was the original concept. We kind of stitched the actors in, as if they’re patches on top of the original art. That was my first time going back and forth with a studio where they said, ‘Well, this actor’s head needs to be this size, and this actor’s head needs to be that size.’"
Friday the 13th Part III (2012)
Mondo commissioned this print for a special screening of the horror classic at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. It was part of a series to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the summer of 1982, or as the Drafthouse tag line put it: “The greatest summer of movies…ever.”
“Part III is very, very goofy. It’s the 3D one, so parts of the movie are just terrible 3D gags: At one point, they’re juggling and the camera’s above them, and it’s just so that the balls can fly out into the audience. But that’s the one where Jason finds the hockey mask and puts it on for the first time. So if you had to boil it down to, ‘What’s the film about?’ it’s about Jason finding a mask that will go on forever and ever and ever. I just thought, if that’s really all the movie is about, let’s just use the mask.”
Superglina (RoboCop) (2013)
In 2013, Shaw was watching the original Robocop, Paul Verhoeven’s ultra-violent 1987 flick about a dead cop reanimated as a crime-fighting cyborg, and he was moved to whip up this Polish-inspired design and pitch it to Mondo.
"I have a really strong affection for old Polish movie posters, and I remembered the Polish title for RoboCop being something odd. I looked it up, and it was Superglina, and I thought, ‘Wow, there couldn’t be a goofier name than RoboCop except for Superglina!’ This one started on paper, and from there I moved onto the computer. I was basically just looking at a photo of Peter Weller [the star] for reference. Most of it is just negative space silhouette, so I was just trying to get the mouth close. The red tear is a little corny, but it’s the punch line.”
A Field in England (2013)
Drafthouse Films asked Shaw to create this trippy poster for director Ben Wheatley’s hallucinogenic historical drama about 17th-century Englishmen looking for treasure in a field.
"It’s almost hard to boil that film down into a thematic essence, which is what I do for almost everything. So I just concentrated on the aesthetic of the film. And so all of the psychedelic imagery and everything to do with their journey in this field — their trip into this field — I had to go from that angle. It was like, how weird and psychedelic can I do this and pull some elements directly from the film?"
Seventeen (2013)
Jack White’s label, Third Man Records, hosts a screening series in Nashville called The Light & Sound Machine that shows overlooked or hard-to-find titles. Among them: Seventeen, an infamous 1983 documentary about high schoolers that PBS banned.
"There’s this really crazy racial tension going on [in Seventeen] between the white kids and the black kids, and they ended up capturing all of it on film. It’s one of the most fascinating documentaries I’ve ever seen, because you don’t usually get that intimate a look into the really seedy lives of teenagers. I wanted to use the eyes of the main protagonist for the design, so I paused the movie and pulled a screenshot from there and drew on top of it. The concept there is very simple: This girl is a product of a bigoted environment, and I wanted to have the title covering her mouth because when you see her, the things coming out of her mouth aren’t her thoughts. This is something that came from her upbringing. She’s a mouthpiece for the generation before her.”
Nashville (2013)
Criterion asked Shaw and fellow designer Rob Jones to come up with a cover design for the tricked-out DVD and Blu-ray release of Robert Altman’s 1975 classic.
"We wanted to do an American flag, because this movie is drenched in Americana — it’s Altman’s love letter to this country. And you have so many characters looking [to become a] star. So we started off up top with the most-likely-to-succeed characters in the film. We tiered it down to the point where at the bottom you get the characters who are the least likely to [succeed]. We thought it would be the easiest gig ever, because you just go, ‘Well, this is great. We’ll use whatever cool source materials they have and we’ll just build this American flag out of it.’ Unfortunately, there really isn’t a whole lot from Nashville to go on. They didn’t take a lot of production stills. We had to cobble together all this stuff. It was a gargantuan task just to get this very simple cover to work.”
Repo Man (2013)
Shaw and Jones also worked together on the cover for the Criterion release of this punk-rock sci-fi 1984 classic, starring Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez.
"The movie has a really clear punk-rock aesthetic, and the introduction has that really great glowing Los Angeles street map. A lot of times when you’re doing this stuff, you don’t necessarily have a conscious road map in mind. Something looks good, and then you try and tie it back to the film."
Cooties (2014)
Shaw was hired to do this poster for the movie’s Sundance premiere. A gross-out comedy, Cooties is about elementary school kids who are turned into flesh-eating monsters.
"I instantly just started looking through posters for really great horror comedies of the ’80s, because that’s the aesthetic you want to draw from. One of my favorites is a poster for the movie House, and it’s just a disembodied skeleton hand ringing a doorbell. And I remember seeing that as a kid at the video store and saying, ‘I wanna watch this movie!’ and my mom saying, ‘No, you’re not watching this, whatever that is. No way on earth.’ So that stuck with me.”
High-Rise (2014)
Wheatley’s latest movie is still in preproduction, but was in need of some evocative promo art. The movie, which will star Avengers villain Tom Hiddleston, is based on J.G. Ballard’s brilliantly disturbing sci-fi novel about a fancy apartment building that devolves into chaos and violence.
"I looked back at some of the other covers that had come out for J.G. Ballard novels, and it turns out they’re brilliant. Every cool idea with a big building, every idea with rich people in the building — somebody had done it 30, 40 years ago, and it was like, Gah! I actually remember just laying down on the couch and thinking to myself, ‘Well, I don’t know if I can come up with anything.’ And 10 minutes later, I thought, ‘I’ve got it!’ The entrance to the building is on the top third— the lower class can’t get in, [but] the monsters inside can’t really get out either.”
Mood Indigo (2014)
For one of his newest designs, Shaw was hired by Drafthouse Films to create a poster for Michel Gondry’s magical French love story that’s hitting U.S. theaters this summer. Audrey Tautou and Romain Duris star as a couple whose beautiful future grows dim when she’s diagnosed with a mysterious lung disease that — in true Gondry fashion — can only be held at bay with fresh flowers.
“We all together came up with this idea where they’d be sitting on the park bench and then we would flood the foreground with flowers. I found these couple-hundred-year-old books full of really wonderful floral etchings, and I went through and did a collage. There’s probably 1,500 different images that are overlaid, and then I went through and colored them myself. Gondry is one of those directors who are so assured visually that it’s almost daunting to be the poster artist. The [cinematic] art is just so wonderful. And you think, ‘What am I going to do for that?’”
Photo Credits: Alamo Drafthouse, Mondo, The Weinstein Company, Criterion Collection, Hanway Films, Spectrevision Films, The Light & Sound Machine/Third Man Records
