Harry Potter, Star Wars, More

This is my personal favorite of all Struzan’s paintings, and the one that hangs on my wall (a half-size comp, rendered in colored pencil, since I don’t have the $125,000 the oil painting depicted here cost). If fans only knew how many designs Struzan tried for each finished poster, exploring seemingly infinite permutations of how to pose the characters. With this beauty, we get a scene that isn’t in the movie, but captures the erotic chemistry between Miles O’Keefe and Bo Derek as the sensitive ape man cradles Jane in his arms. In his free time, Struzan painted vivid portraits of jungle animals (wild cats mostly). This assignment allowed him to place a majestic elephant at the center of the frame — not that anyone’s eye goes there, when you have such gorgeous stars astride it. So why wasn’t this painting used? Struzan explained to me that Derek specifically wanted another artist, cheesecake painter Olivia De Berardinis, to do the poster, and since it was Derek’s husband John Derek who was directing the movie, she got her wish. It’s a pity, since De Berardinis’ painting features just Jane (a Tarzan movie with no Tarzan on the poster!?), whose face looks nothing like the actress’.

Perhaps the main reason Struzan’s paintings cost so much is that they’re associated with some of the most popular films of all time (it doesn’t hurt that Spielberg and Lucas have been willing to pay top dollar to own certain Star Wars and Indy originals). But some of his best work has been for less successful films, which get a boost in our imagination from the way he depicts them. “Hook” is a great example: His painting can’t be blamed for the movie’s middling box office performance, since Struzan’s poster wasn’t released until a week into the film’s release, but it conveys the playful spirit Spielberg was going for in his tale of a grown-up Peter Pan (Robin Williams) who returns to Neverland. The tattered map motif recalls Struzan’s treatment for “Cutthroat Island” (another flop with a killer poster), while the expressions on the faces of Williams and Dustin Hoffman — the latter playing the eponymous captain — capture the inner life of those characters. In his book, Struzan describes showing up at Hoffman’s house: “he answered the door in a bathrobe, eating a gallon of ice cream with a spoon.” The Method actor didn’t think Struzan had captured his character, so the artist did another “take.”

Harrison Ford has reportedly said that no artist captured him better than Struzan (though the actor didn’t meet him until a dozen years ago, during the making of the 2013 documentary “Drew: The Man Behind The Poster”). That doesn’t necessarily mean that no one painted Ford more accurately. Rather, Struzan had a gift for infusing a portrait with an actor’s personality — or better yet, that of the characters they played. Struzan painted Indiana Jones more times than you can imagine over the years, for movie posters, pulp novels, videogame covers and even the theme park ride. He wasn’t the main artist on “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or “Temple of Doom” (though he did posters for both), but had become the franchise’s official artist by the third movie, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” and it’s the best of the lot. We get the character’s insouciance in the foreground and his father’s disapproving look (I imagine Sean Connery saying, “We named the dog Indiana!”) over his shoulder. It’s all framed within ancient columns (reminiscent of Richard Amsel’s design for “Raiders”), which pose an almost M.C. Escher-like illusion, containing Indy’s coat, but not his hat. Front and center is an action sequence, which comes charging off the page.

Every artist puts themselves into their work, but few do it as literally as Struzan. Since he rarely had more than photos of the lead actors’ faces to go by, when Struzan needed a specific pose, he would ask his wife to photograph him “in character,” then rush the film to a rapid developer so he could use the snapshots as reference. (Boy, did artists work differently in pre-digital days!) Nearly anytime you see hands in Struzan’s work, they’re the artists own, and in the case of Robert Zemeckis’ time-travel classic, the whole body belongs to Struzan, right down to the sneakers. In this case, what that demonstrates is how well he understood the spirit of the movie, creating an iconic image — Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, checking his watch as he stands with one foot in the DeLorean — that sticks in our heads even more indelibly than the parking-lot scene it evokes. Funny enough, nearly every other comp Struzan produced for the poster was dominated by giant clocks, but here, a less literal approach worked best, focusing on how the movie makes us feel. For the sequels, he placed other characters in line behind Fox.

Two qualities define Struzan’s work: First is the luminous inner glow with which he imbues each of his posters. Long before mall-store hack Thomas Kinkade discovered how to make his cottage paintings look as though they were lit from within, Struzan was using his airbrush to make movie stars’ eyes shine and skin glisten. Director Frank Darabont recognized that when he asked Struzan to design the cover art for a 10th anniversary re-release of his best-loved film, “The Shawshank Redemption,” which includes a nod to the original image of Tim Robbins standing with arms outstretched in the rain, rendered almost iridescent in Struzan’s signature style. But the best example may be the special edition DVD cover for Darabont’s other (lesser) Stephen King adaptation. Look how Tom Hanks seems to gleam, or the inner light coming from Ving Rhames’ cupped palms. The painting itself is quite dark, but it practically radiates with the same uplifting supernatural energy that makes the film so effective for its admirers. The artist brought a similar light to his treatment of “Pan’s Labyrinth” for Guillermo del Toro (another director who adores Struzan’s work), though the studio ultimately passed on using it as the poster.

Even more important among Struzan’s talents was his skill for making inanimate figures look alive, which was never more important than when handling the posters for Jim Henson’s Muppets. Technically speaking, the characters were little more than felt puppets being manipulated on camera — something that’s all too obvious in most photography of the “cast.” But in Struzan’s hands, they came to life. Just look at his art for “The Muppet Movie,” in which every one of the characters crammed into that old jalopy is bursting with personality, to the point you can practically hear their voices. The image of Miss Piggy holding Kermit in her arms is not just funny (shouldn’t he be the one holding her?); it dispels the idea that they’re anything less than the frisky critters kids believed them to be. It’s not easy for a movie poster to make you laugh, though Struzan did it a few times with the “Police Academy” movies. Henson so loved how Struzan depicted his creations that he asked the artist to design the posters for all their feature-length adventures (the one of the gang bursting through the paper for “The Great Muppet Caper” is another classic).

If you want to understand how a movie poster artist worked in the 1980s, look no farther than Struzan’s comps for “The Goonies.” The finished poster depicts the treasure-hunting ensemble dangling from a stalactite, but before arriving at the final order in which the characters appear (lower right, with Josh Brolin at the top and poor Martha Coolidge all but disappearing in the distance), he mocked up several other possibilities. It’s important to note that this trait is what sets a commercial artist like Struzan apart from the blue-chip set whose work is designed for galleries and collectors: Struzan did his work on commission, revising and refining according to what the client wanted. He may have been a trained painter, working on gessoed boards that gave his final passes a dramatic three-dimensional quality, but the studio marketing departments called the shots, and many of his compositions are full of compromises. One might look down on that, but I actually see it as a strength: He had enormous technical skill and the discipline to overhaul designs dozens of times, if needed. What’s revealing about his process on “The Goonies” is that practically any of these options could have worked.

So much changed about the “Harry Potter” franchise between the first movie and what followed: The films got darker, the kids got older, and the magic got increasingly digital as the series went on (as did the posters used to promote them). I credit two artists with giving the rich world J.K. Rowling had invented the personality it found on screen: First was composer John Williams, whose theme imbued Chris Columbus’ original entry with just the right sense of enchantment. But Struzan comes in a close second for this beauty of a one-sheet. All these years later, we forget what made it such a tough assignment: Every child who’d read the book had conjured what Harry, Hermione and the other characters might look like in their own minds, and the poster had to convince audiences that this was the right cast. Looking back, it’s remarkable (and frankly, unprecedented) to see nearly the entire ensemble accompany the franchise to the end (except poor Richard Harris as Dumbledore). If only Struzan could have done the same, sparing us all the unimaginative-looking posters that followed.

Struzan had been given an impossible challenge with “The Thing,” asked to design a poster without any indication what the freaky extra-terrestrial entity might look like in the movie, and so he painted a glowing spacesuit reminiscent of Klaatu from “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Many consider it to be his most iconic poster, although his painting for a later John Carpenter movie is actually a far better work of art. Struzan would be the first to admit that the composition is essentially a mish-mosh of too many elements from the film, and yet, that’s precisely why it works. “Big Trouble in Little China” is a wild movie, and Struzan’s poster communicates so many of its qualities: humor, romance, martial arts, a monster truck, supernatural intrigue and a certain amount of self-aware silliness — as indicated by the broken CB radio cord in Kurt Russell’s hand. As we’ve already established, that’s no more Russell’s hand that it is his body (once again, Struzan served as his own model, personally striking the pose so many now associate with the character).

Struzan didn’t do the poster for the original “Star Wars” (that was Tom Jung, while twins Greg and Tim Hildebrandt did the Boris Vallejo-style one of Luke raising his lightsaber with Leia at his feet), but he eventually became the artist most associated with the franchise. In 1997, when George Lucas re-released the original trilogy, he commissioned Struzan — who had designed the most collectible of all “Star Wars” posters, the red and black teaser for a pre-title-change “The Revenge of the Jedi” featuring Darth Vader in silhouette — to paint an all-new set of posters. Struzan designed them as a triptych that could be displayed side by side to form a single horizontal panel. Much darker than most of his work, the art marks a clean break from Struzan’s slightly dated ’80s style and would go on to define the prequel trilogy that immediately followed (his “Phantom Menace” poster depicts the movie audiences wanted it to be, making effective use of Darth Maul’s facial markings and minimizing Jar Jar Binks’ presence). Unlike most posters, Struzan’s re-release set wasn’t designed to lure audiences into theaters so much as to give fans an image that captured their love for the original films.