The Forty-First Academy Awards ceremony took place on 14 April 1969 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, on what used to be Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles. It was the first Oscar ceremony to be broadcast worldwide and the first held at that location. As usual, it was a star-studded affair. Katharine Hepburn was nominated as best actress for the second year in a row, this time for The Lion in Winter, an award she would have to share with Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl—the only time there has been a tie in this category. Saul and Elaine Bass, too, were present at the awards ceremony, since the designer was nominated in the best documentary short category for Why Man Creates (1968). The couple rode to the Chandler in a rented limousine together with USC graduate student and Bass advisee George Lucas, who had been an assistant on the production. Bass’s competitors were The House that Amanda Built (Fali Bilimoria), The Revolving Door (Lee R. Bobker), A Space to Grow (Thomas P. Kelly Jr.), and A Way out of the Wilderness (Dan E. Weisburd). Given his longtime work in the film industry, Bass was heavily favored to win. At the ceremony, Bass sat in an aisle seat at stage left, ten rows from the podium; Elaine was next to him in a light-colored chiffon dress. Actors Diahann Carroll and Tony Curtis read out the names of the nominees for best documentary and best short documentary, respectively. When Tony Curtis called out Bass’s name as the winner, he bounced up to the stage, despite the wooden cane that preceded his every step. Curtis handed the Oscar to Bass, who was wearing a traditional tuxedo, in contrast to Curtis’s mod outfit. Bass took the Oscar in his right hand while balancing his weight with his left hand on the cane. He bent over the microphone and, in an uncharacteristic moment of brevity, said, “Thank you, thank you very much.” Then he quickly walked offstage.1 No thanks to his staff, no thanks to his wife, no thanks to the Academy. More important, Bass failed to mention Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation, the film’s sponsor and original producer, causing mini-scandal to erupt at corporate headquarters. Did Bass just forget, due to nerves or under pressure to keep his acceptance speech short? We will probably never know. The oversight may not have been accidental, however, given the huge fights with Kaiser over the film’s final structure, laboratory costs, and even the title. Bass hated the title because he thought it promised more than he could deliver.2
In hindsight, we can see that Bass deserved to win for what would be his greatest cinematic achievement, although his largely avant-garde work certainly challenged the Academy’s notions of genre. Indeed, the category “Best Documentary, Short Subjects” hardly describes Bass’s free-form essay, a hodgepodge of film notes that asks many more questions than it answers. And what makes it a documentary? The film includes several forms of animation and mostly staged sequences. In fact, it is a modernist romp, at moments seemingly incoherent and yet also brilliant in its open-endedness; its fragmentation forces the viewer to engage in the construction of meaning, thus fulfilling the promise of every modernist work to make the audience an active participant. In addition to the Academy Award, Why Man Creates won numerous film festival and other awards, as well as being placed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2002, designating it a national treasure.3
But the somewhat tortured production history of the film also points out the pitfalls of having a corporate sponsor for such a personal and highly idiosyncratic project. In Bass’s most cynical evaluation of the film, he admitted to a group of AT&T executives: “I think now—that the most creative thing about the film was that I found a rationalization that enabled me to convince the client, to allow me to make the film.”4 Even if the film was not a direct advertisement for Kaiser, the company covered all the production costs, and the corporate executives and Bass often had vastly different ideas about what kind of film they were financing. The designer usually argued that because sponsored films didn’t have to sell anything, they were preferable to commercials or industrial film productions, where the filmmaker was at the mercy of the client. But Bass wanted to have it both ways: complete freedom to produce artistic work, and complete financing by a corporate sponsor that would pay all the bills, including a substantial honorarium to support Bass’s office. Unlike most other avant-garde filmmakers, Bass was not willing to self-finance or to take on contract work to pay for his own personal films. After all, Bass had grown up in the Hollywood film industry, where no one invested their own money. Paradoxically, despite the insider status that an Academy Award seemingly represented, Bass remained an outsider in the movie industry, for several reasons. First, he was a graphic designer who had essentially created his own job description in a highly regulated system of film production. Second, his own aesthetic ambitions to bring high art to an often resistant Hollywood industry set him apart. Third, he sought the company of like-minded professionals, mostly producer-directors who had declared their independence from the classic Hollywood studio system.
Seen from our perspective in the twenty-first century, Saul Bass seems to define an era. As a designer of studio publicity, movie posters, title sequences and montages, commercials, and corporate logos from the 1940s to the 1990s, Bass heavily influenced the look of both film advertising and Hollywood films. Bass’s poster designs and his credit sequences for Hollywood feature films were extremely innovative in terms of their formal design, use of iconography, and narrative content. His graphic work resembled no one else’s in Hollywood, and his film credits changed forever how audiences looked at the opening minutes of a film. Simultaneously, all his film-related work incorporated aesthetic concepts borrowed from modernist art, translating them into new commercial modes of address and thereby transforming film industry conventions that had remained relatively stagnant for decades. Bass’s designs influenced not only other studio publicity designers and filmmakers but also a whole generation of young designers that he personally trained in his studio. Among those who started their careers with Saul Bass were Thurston Blodgett, Paul Bruhwiler, Vincent Carra, John Casados, Morton Dimondstein, Vahe Fattal, Augustine Garza, Joel Katz, Karen Lee, Henry Markowitz, Michael Mills, Dave Nagata, Ted Piegdon, Gay Reinecke, Clarence Sato, Arnold Schwartzman, Mamoru Shimokochi, G. Dean Smith, Jay Toffoli, Todd Walker, Don Weller, and Howard York.
At a time when Hollywood’s Taylorized system of film production called for extreme specialization within the work flow, Saul Bass was, uniquely, a generalist. He burst onto the creative floors of the film production factory and argued for the importance of the designer in the production process. Because of his aesthetic influences and the particular moment of his arrival in a changing Hollywood, Bass was able to cross over into other fields of film production, from designing advertising and publicity posters to creating title sequences and montages and eventually directing a Hollywood feature film. Bass’s career trajectory thus exemplified a trend in 1950s Hollywood and beyond that allowed designers to raise their status in the caste system that pervaded the Los Angeles film studios. Bass’s intervention into the Hollywood film production process through creative titling complicates our notions of who is responsible for the filmic text in the still rather structured Hollywood system: the director or a collective? But it also complicates our ability to read that text, given that its muddled authorship opens it up to multiple narrative interpretations. Bass’s high art sensibility in all his work for the American studios demands attention, particularly because his strategy of elevating a production’s aesthetic value furthered product differentiation in the marketplace, which became a necessity once the Paramount Consent Decree ended studio control of the movie theaters. In fact, Bass’s career can only be understood within the context of the breakdown of the old Hollywood studio system, which was eventually replaced by a system of freelance artists under contract. Bass, as an outsider, was at the forefront of this development.
Saul Bass presents a particular challenge for film studies because his work in Hollywood has fallen through the cracks to some extent. Academic studies focus mainly on directors, screenwriters, and occasionally cinematographers—those considered central to the creative process of filmmaking. Technical specialists, whether costume and set designers or designers of film titles and montage sequences, such as Saul Bass and Slavko Vorkapich before him, only occasionally come under scrutiny. Reading film texts as semantic constructions independent of any authorial intentions, genre, semiotic, and structuralist studies have been unable to account for such specialists. This study takes the position that Bass, as a designer and filmmaker who intervened in film texts signed by others, demands a more nuanced approach involving both cinema studies and art history methodologies. This book is therefore neither a biography nor an analysis of individual films; rather, it proposes to read Bass’s work in its totality as a metatext, defining the public screen persona of Saul Bass the designer, regardless of whether his chosen medium was advertising, titles, or independent films. Just as actors develop screen identities that are an amalgamation of screen images and the public discourse around them, Bass developed a designer persona. I refer to this persona as the Bass brand, regardless of whether he or his office staff actually held the pencil or pen on any particular design. Such an approach demands a high degree of cross-disciplinary analysis, which is why the present project is structured neither chronologically nor by medium; instead, it attributes formal and intellectual commonalities to the Bass brand across media.
The morning after the Oscars, Bass arrived late at the Saul Bass & Associates office on La Brea. The staff had gathered to congratulate the boss and themselves on their success, which, it was hoped, would move Bass’s filmmaking career to a new level. Bass noticed that Art Goodman, his right-hand man for more than ten years, was signing reproductions of sketches for staff members, since he had drawn the “Edifice” animation sequence for Why Man Creates. Saul took his trusted designer aside and told him that he couldn’t sign his own name to the sketches: he worked for Bass, and only Bass was allowed to sign artwork.5 A day later, an anonymous cartoon of Bass with his Oscar and Moses’ tablets appeared in the office, probably drawn by Goodman. Bass is shown saying, “Voice of whom?” implying that even God had to make an appointment. Goodman, who was as mild-mannered as they come, worked for almost forty years in the Bass office. Bass was the front man for some of Goodman’s best work, but Art never complained about the slight.
Indeed, even though Bass was known to be a screamer, there were few fights between Bass and Goodman, because Art always deferred to Saul as the head of the design studio. That’s the way it was. This was not Hollywood per se, where one’s last credit was often the only way to get one’s next job. This was an American commercial design studio, where it was common practice for only the head designer to sign the work. A British designer-filmmaker who worked briefly for Bass noted that he was shocked by the practice until he realized that’s the way it was in America.6 Bass had his reasons for insisting on a Los Angeles street address for the office, which was nominally in “Hollywood.” He always thought of himself as a designer with interests far beyond the film community. And Bass was nothing if not a master at creating and controlling his own brand. It was the key to his success.
In terms of his movie titles, Bass has been acknowledged to the point of cliché as the master innovator. Even in the twenty-first century, filmmakers and title designers pay homage to Bass’s achievements. For example, producer Matthew Weiner’s opening credits for the cable television series Mad Men, about a Madison Avenue advertising firm in the 1960s, is a specific tribute to Bass and North by Northwest (with a little Casino thrown in). As noted by Steve Fuller, creative director for Imaginary Force, the firm that designed the title sequence: “I’m a huge Saul Bass fan . . . I like to think that it’s kind of an update of Saul Bass.”7 New York title designer Peter Himmelstein suggests that title designers study “every title sequence Saul Bass ever did” to educate themselves about the medium’s history: “Bass had this integrity of design from project to project, regardless of theme or content.”8 Likewise, Ty Mattson’s titles for season 8 of the television series Dexter are another homage to Bass: “The poster series that I created for Dexter was inspired by mid-century modern design and particularly the work of Saul Bass.”9 Mattson actually “borrows” an almost exact replica of the disembodied hand from the titles to Bass’s The Facts of Life (1960). Other modern film titles influenced by Bass include Ed Wood (1994, Tim Burton), Se7en (1995, David Fincher), Bad Education (2004, Pedro Almovodar), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005, Shane Black), The Kingdom (2007, PIC Agency [Pamela Green, Jarik Van Sluijs]), Zombies, Zombies, Zombies . . . (2008, Jason Murphy), and Argo (2012, Ben Affleck), to name only a few. Kyle Cooper, who has been called the new Saul Bass of movie titles, created titles for Se7en, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996, John Frankenheimer), and Donnie Brasco (1997, Mike Newell), among more than seventy others.10 Like Bass, Cooper insists that title sequences are an integral part of the movie.11 For Catch Me If You Can (2002, Steven Spielberg), the French design firm Kuntzel & Deygas created another specific homage to Bass; the film, like Mad Men, takes place in the early 1960s, when Bass was at the top of his game. Modern title designers have a huge technical advantage over Bass, however; they can use digital tools to create many of the effects Bass had to create painstakingly in the analog era.
Posters also reflect Bass’s influence. For instance, Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) was designed by the Los Angeles–based advertising agency Coldopen after producer Mark Urman told Lumet he wanted “something Saul Bass-y . . . something simple and strong with lots of room for review quotes.”12 Another recent poster that riffed on Bass is A Huey P. Newton Story (2001, Spike Lee), designed by Art Sims; earlier, Sims had “plagiarized” the Anatomy of a Murder poster for Spike Lee’s Clockers (1995). Other posters that play with the Bass style include Burn after Reading (2008, Ethan and Joel Cohen), designed by P+A/Mojo; In the Loop (2009, Armando Iannucci), designed by Crew Creative Advertising; Precious (2009, Lee Daniels) and Buried (2010, Rodrigo Cortés), both designed by Ignition Print; and, most recently, the pre-release poster for Django Unchained (2012, Quentin Tarantino), designed by BLT Communications. These random selections attest not only to the longevity and distinctiveness of the Bass brand but also to the fact that twenty-first-century Hollywood design firms have embraced that style when it suits their purposes.
Given his multidimensional talents and unique ability to bring together high art and commercialism, Bass represents a long-standing reality in the Hollywood industry—namely, that artists fight for aesthetic issues and sometimes actually succeed, thereby establishing their independence, or, when they lose, they compromise and salvage what they can. In the case of Bass, this meant either signing his name to the work or taking his name off the design, but getting paid and working steadily nevertheless. Bass often accompanied his signature with a stamp of the Bass logo: a fish (a bass) with the designer’s physiognomy. It is both a playful and a literal image (designed by Don Weller). Bass became Hollywood’s most prominent designer precisely because he jealously guarded his brand—a brand so tied up with his own personality that Bass/Yager & Associates was not sustainable after the designer’s demise.
In interviews, Saul Bass liked to say, “I always knew I was going to be Saul Bass, commercial artist.”13 But what did that mean, and how did it work? In an article on creativity, Bass related a funny anecdote about his Jewish mother, who asked him what he did for a living. She, like most laypersons, had little concept of what commercial design work entailed. Bass showed his mother an advertisement he had designed and explained that he had done neither the photography nor the typography, which confused her. Finally, he said, “Well, you see, I conceive the whole thing, and then I get all these people together and get them to carry out the process.” His mother responded, “Oh—you devil!”14 In other words, a designer didn’t necessarily create an actual advertisement or brochure or billboard or logo; he or she created the concepts and then assigned others to physically carry out the tasks. A design office might have many designers and technicians working in it, but at its head was the designer whose name was on the door. It was that individual who conceptualized ideas, talked to clients, approved designs, and established the firm’s identity. Designer Lorraine Wild has connected this strategy to the post–World War II movement of young American modernist designers, trained mostly by German Jewish émigré designers-artists from the Bauhaus, to legitimize their work in the commercial arena of American capital: “They found that a most efficient way to connect to their clients as consultants was to tie their own identity as artists and individual creators (or ‘stars’) to the work that they produced. Like movie stars or famous artists (figures more easily understood by commercial/popular culture), their work was increasingly championed on the basis of personal authorship (even if the work was actually the product of a 30-person office), rather than for its merits.”15
In other words, no matter how many designers worked for Bass, he was the controlling intelligence who defined the look and the brand, because clients insisted on star quality. A consistent brand not only guaranteed quality, as far as clients were concerned, but also allowed them to know exactly what they were paying for. Individual designers could make significant contributions, but they worked for the firm. Bass himself explained his design team as follows: “So it’s not ‘Saul Bass & Associates’ like a company, but Saul Bass and his associates . . . I have a whole group of guys who are all up to our ass in all kinds of interesting things.”16 Or, as an unpublished official biography put it: “Rather than trying to be a never-diminishing font of symbols, a kind of superhuman Trademark Man, Bass shares the creative doodling with a bullpen of designers, acting as a combination competitor, editor, nudge, shaman, gadfly, guru and fearless leader. His success as an inspiration and constructive arbiter of the ideas of others is almost as important to the trail of trademarks he has laid down over the years as is his own originality.”17
Bass utilized a ruthless process of elimination, whittling down possibilities and always keeping his eyes on the prize, which was to produce a consistent product that met the client’s needs. Art Goodman characterized the collaborative process similarly: “A lot of what ifs, out of which Bass will eventually coax a solution. No matter how nutty an idea may sound, Saul encourages people to say it. To me Saul has always been a true editor. He can find something that others don’t see.”18 Arnold Schwartzman described the process as designers throwing out ideas until Bass decided, “Let’s work on that.”19 Another employee who worked for Bass in the 1960s, Mike Lonzo, noted that Bass could be completely oblivious to others when he worked, even if they were contributing ideas. He was obsessive about work, and although he could be extremely generous on a personal level, he rarely thanked anyone for their design work. As far as he was concerned, it was their job.20 Bass usually worked until late at night, and staff members were expected to do the same. Although he considered Bass a mentor and a friend, Schwartzman left the office after only six months because he couldn’t work through the night, as Saul required.21 Designing at Saul Bass & Associates did not occur only during normal business hours. As Bass himself noted, creativity “cannot operate from nine to five every day and not at any other time.”22
Bass’s own office was meticulously neat, filled with armies of ancient stone figures and animal fetishes, organized like a mini–museum exhibit; his awards, including the Oscar; and examples of his work and family photographs hanging on the wall. The rooms were usually kept at near-frigid temperatures, whether winter or summer, because Bass thought if it was too warm, the staff might be lulled to sleep. If anyone complained about the temperature, Bass would throw him or her a sweater from a pile in the corner.23 Many of Bass’s employees remember him fondly as a friendly and brilliant raconteur, but also as a nervous nail-biter and an occasional screamer. Not surprisingly, most designers eventually left to set up their own design firms if they had any ambition, the exception being Art Goodman.
Goodman, despite being an unbelievably talented designer, stayed because he felt comfortable. Both he and Bass were former New Yorkers who shared a Jewish upbringing and sense of humor, and they often played practical jokes on each other. Both loved pre-Columbian and other forms of “primitive” art, and they undoubtedly shared a common design aesthetic. Goodman treated Bass like a father figure, while Bass treated Goodman like a brother. Goodman worked on numerous corporate identity and packaging campaigns and developed many of the logos that Bass became famous for; he also drew movie and event posters. Because Bass’s hand was apparently unsteady, Goodman prepared many of the final storyboards for Bass’s animated titles and films. According to designer Mamoru Shimokochi, “Art’s drawings were unique and extraordinary, always characterized by humor and a strong simple message.”24
When he first moved to Los Angeles after World War II, Goodman worked for Hal Friedman and then opened his own office. Goodman joined Bass’s firm initially as a freelancer and then as a full-time designer—at less pay than he had been making. The advantage for Goodman was that he didn’t have to run his own office; he was uncomfortable with the business, hustling side of design work. Naturally shy and reticent, and self-conscious about a war wound that had crippled his writing hand, Goodman would get stage fright with clients.25 Bass, in contrast, was a master at communicating ideas to clients and could sell them almost anything. Lou Dorfsman, a longtime friend and colleague, was in awe of Bass’s ability to make the pitch. This is how he described Bass’s conversation with Kodak executives during the planning stages of the 1964 New York World’s Fair:
Saul and Will Burtin—a superb thinker and designer—were both working for Eastman Kodak projects. Burtin gave a presentation of what he was planning, and there was a big yawn from the board of directors. . . . He talked in highly abstracted aesthetical and philosophical terms. Then Saul came on with the kind of know-how that moves people—Americans. He was talking about the cash register. He was talking about aesthetics and beauty—and the cash register! The cash register they all understood, and they lit up. I watched Saul at work, and I learned more from watching him: I know how to talk to CEOs and presidents of companies because of my observations of Saul at work. He was fabulous, so convincing. Those people could hear the cash register ringing from the sales of film—and Saul got through.26
After Herb Yager joined the firm, he became a major force in the company, not only finding new clients but also paying attention to the bottom line; he managed the corporate design work, ensuring that certain standards of quality were maintained, even on smaller projects that did not necessarily warrant Bass’s valuable time. Yager had previously worked for Carson Roberts, but when that firm was bought by Ogilvy Public Relations, Yager was forced to look for new opportunities. A friend of his had interviewed for the job of business manager with Bass, but when he learned what the salary was, he declined and recommended Yager. During their interview, he and Bass discovered that they had attended the same elementary, middle, and high schools in the Bronx, only fifteen years apart. It was as if Yager were already family. Yager agreed to take the salary but proposed that after a year’s probation, he would become a co-owner of the firm. Bass reacted with a comment about chutzpah, but Yager said that in a year’s time, Bass could decide—yes or no, in or out.27 Yager must have significantly increased revenue, because the firm’s name was soon changed to Bass/Yager & Associates. Thereafter, Yager kept the firm profitable, even if it meant subsidizing Bass’s filmmaking with corporate design work.
Another important personality in the Bass office, especially in the 1980s and at the end of Bass’s career, was his second wife, Elaine Makatura. When she was hired as a secretary, Bass was still married, but she soon won his heart. In the late 1970s she became a steady collaborator on films and film title work and actually received codirector credit with Bass, although she was never involved in any of the graphic design and identity campaign work that constituted the center of the business.28 Their fights in the 1980s were legendary, although they perceived the bickering as part of the creative process.29 Indeed, by the 1990s, when Bass was becoming fragile, Elaine Bass moved into a position of greater authority and may have taken the lead on later titles such as Age of Innocence, Mr. Saturday Night, and Cape Fear. She brought a level of feminine sensuousness and tactility to the Bass brand that had previously been absent. Saul was all geometry, whereas Elaine introduced curves and undulations, like the glistening water’s surface in Cape Fear, as well as long takes that contrasted with Bass’s montage technique.
Some argue that Elaine’s contributions to Saul’s work from the 1960s onward cannot be underestimated and that in some cases she was responsible for the product.30 The creative relationship between husband and wife has been characterized as equal to that of Ray and Charles Eames, a comparison that former employees in the Bass office have described as overstated. It seems doubtful that, in her position as an assistant, Elaine would have had much influence on design decisions in the early years, and later she was present at the office only intermittently, having taken on the responsibility of raising their two children.31 Not that there aren’t traces of Elaine, even early on. In the credits of West Side Story, Bass inserted the initials “SB-EM,” barely visible on a wall of graffiti, but took sole credit for the title work. A Bass office press release from 1979 notes that Elaine assisted on the titles for West Side Story and Walk on the Wild Side and on the films From Here to There and The Searching Eye.32 Once the children were older and required less attention, “she felt there was more time available to devote to filmmaking and returned to more active involvement.”33 According to a staff member who worked in the office in the late 1970s, Elaine continually pressed Saul for full credit on film work, which may explain why the 35mm theatrical release of The Solar Film credits only Bass as director, whereas the Pyramid nontheatrical version released later credits both of them.
However, until the late 1970s, Bass never mentioned his wife as an equal collaborator in any published interviews. Elaine’s name did not come up in Bass’s 1978 interview film, Bass on Titles, nor in an American Film Institute (AFI) seminar in May 1979, despite the fact that the subject of the seminar was filmmaking.34 According to Owen Edwards, who interviewed Bass extensively for a book in the late 1980s, he never sensed that Elaine was important to the office’s design work; nor was she present at the interviews, other than to serve tea.35 Furthermore, in the estate collection, there are no surviving staff photographs of Elaine. In a 1980 interview, however, Bass acknowledged: “That is why my collaboration with my wife Elaine in the film work is so important to me. She is the only person that I completely trust in terms of her judgment, and her sense of appropriateness—and this has been tested over a long period of time.”36 Indeed, after 1979, Bass more consistently mentioned Elaine in connection with their film work, but the corporate identity and design work remained Saul’s exclusive purview. This is substantiated in an unpublished official biography from 1993, which quotes Saul: “Elaine is not an aggressive, confrontational person, while that sort of thing is very easy for me on a movie set. So we have an understanding when we’re shooting. I tend to be the mouthpiece, I’ve got the loud voice, and if there’s any yelling to do I’m the one who does it.”37
It seems clear that, given his relationship with his other designers (even Art Goodman), Saul Bass never relinquished artistic control because he was protecting his brand. As Yager conceded, Bass had great difficulty sharing credit with any of his designers, including his wife. Until the late 1970s, Elaine Bass’s contributions in the film arena must therefore be considered in the same light as those of all the other designers who worked in the Bass office and never received credit, even if her actual influence as a sounding board was not insubstantial. After 1979 the Bass brand, at least in the filmmaking arena, evolved into “Saul & Elaine Bass.” This book therefore attributes credit to “Saul Bass” not as the biological and biographical individual but as a design entity, a consistent brand, a label. The number of employees in Bass’s design office fluctuated, depending on the work, but he may have employed as many as forty individuals at any one time, none of whom received credit.
After Bass moved to the West Coast in 1946, he quickly learned that relentless self-promotion was not only the rule in Hollywood; it was also a necessary survival skill. If Bass wanted to create a design brand that appealed to Hollywood’s self-styled artistic elite, he needed to constantly market himself and his office. Such promotion included a show reel that had to be kept up-to-date for potential clients, press releases, attendance at design conferences and lectures, continuous submissions for Art Directors Club awards, occasional articles authored by the designer, and, most important, articles about Bass by “objective” third parties. One staff member in the Bass office was responsible for promptly sending out photo materials requested by journalists, magazine editors, and clients. Sample reels also kept changing, depending on Bass’s latest work and on the evolving master narrative of his career.38 Even in his own films, Bass promoted his own work. For example, in a 1969 AT&T corporate film, he used his own Continental, Westinghouse, and other Bass-designed corporate logos to illustrate points he was making about good logo design, in an attempt to sell his new corporate identity campaign to the rank and file. Indeed, much of the published work on Saul Bass was orchestrated to some degree by Bass himself through interviews, visual materials, his own essays, and company public relations materials. In this way, Bass maintained the integrity of the brand while creating an official Saul Bass biography and mythology.
Bass’s success in keeping his name in the public eye is illustrated by the sheer number of articles about him in the highbrow design and art press. Profiles of Bass began to appear in the early 1950s and provided a level of legitimacy, class, and visibility that he required to attract corporate and Hollywood clients. Between 1954 and his passing in 1996, more than sixty-five articles or profiles on Bass, almost always including quotes from the designer, were published in European, Japanese, and American design and art journals such as Communication Arts, Design Week, Graphis, IDEA, Industrial Design, Gebrauchsgraphik, and Print. Since the 1920s, foreign art journals such as the Berlin-based Gebrauchsgraphik had not only propagated Bauhaus art and design principles to the American design community (it included English translations) but also enhanced the respectability of commercial art, a fact not lost on Bass.39 Even an informal survey of these art journals indicates that few, if any, other American designers received as much attention as Bass did.
As early as November 1948, Bass published a cover design for the prestigious journal Arts & Architecture. In a blurb accompanying and explaining his contribution, Bass wrote: “Man’s conflicts are expressed by the confusion and indirection of the background against which is projected the highly integrated nature-machine, the egg; a symbol not only of order but also of purposeful growth.”40 It might as well have been a manifesto for the evolving Bass brand: keep the design simple, utilize geometric forms, and don’t overload the background with information that becomes only “noise.” In 1953 Bass published a short, heavily illustrated article on movie advertising in the Swiss design journal Graphis,41 which would become one of his biggest supporters. Founded in 1944, the trilingual (English, German, and French) journal was a Bass stronghold for decades; it published more than fifteen Bass-themed articles, including what were essentially promotion pieces on Bass written by Yager and Bass’s friend Henry Wolf.42 In 1954, two years after going independent, Bass was profiled in the storied journal American Artist. The author emphasized the designer’s high aesthetic aspirations, even when working for hire: “For him there is no conflict of ‘commercial’ vs. ‘fine art.’ He has simply chosen an area of activity which enables him to communicate with many, rather than with a few.”43 Three years later, in a lengthy article on West Coast designers, Industrial Design highlighted Bass, writing: “Equally at home in the abstract world of ideas and the tangible world of the eye, Saul Bass has become an undisputed leader in the western graphics world with work that is fresh, lithe, charming.”44 What is most striking in these articles is the degree to which Bass is positioned as something more than a commercialist. Like the field of design as a whole, which in post–World War II America was demanding academic respectability, Bass was consistently stylized as an intellectual, a thinker, and an artist.
Bass was getting this kind of attention not only because of the quality and originality of his work but also because he had been busy establishing contacts in the field. In particular, his involvement in the Art Directors Clubs of New York and Los Angeles made the field take notice. Bass won his first New York Art Directors Club award in 1945 for an advertisement for Tylon Cold Wave, which he may have produced as a class assignment in Gyorgy Kepes’s design seminar at Brooklyn College. Through the New York club, Bass later made contact with modernist designers Herbert Bayer, Alexey Brodovitch, Will Burtin, Herbert Matter, and Paul Rand.45 From 1948 until 1962, examples of Bass designs—whether produced for commercial or movie clients—appeared year after year in the New York club’s Annual of Advertising and Editorial Art and Design. In 1949 Bass was involved in a serious car accident on the way to the Los Angeles Art Directors Club awards ceremony, where he was to receive a gold medal and two certificates of merit.46 Over the next ten years, Bass would win dozens of awards from Art Directors Clubs in New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In 1981 he won the prestigious AIGA Medal “in recognition of his exceptional achievements in the field of design.”47
Meanwhile, Bass also became involved in the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA), joining its program committee in 1953. The conference had been founded in 1951 by Walter Paepcke of Container Corporation of America, the most high-profile supporter of modernist design among America’s corporate CEOs; Paepcke had underwritten Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus School in Chicago in 1938. The conference’s stated goal was to bring designers and business leaders together to discuss the value of good design, but also to make contacts. Bass was a featured speaker at the 1954 conference, when the topic was “Planning: The Basis of Design”; other speakers included Richard Neutra, Russell Lynes, Burns W. Roper, Edgardo Contini, and Robert Saudek.48 Bass attended the conference virtually every year until his death, becoming one of the éminences grises of Aspen, whether as a speaker or as a filmmaker presenting his work at the Wheeler Opera House at evening screenings. By the 1970s, he was a longtime member of the IDCA’s Board of Directors, and he sometimes conducted workshops at the conference. For example, at his 1991 workshop titled “Bare Bones Filmmaking,” his students produced a spoof of the ape sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.49 In 1996, two months after his death, the IDCA (which was focusing on the history of German design that year) organized a tribute for Bass.50
In reference to his film work in Hollywood, Bass took pains to remain visible in industry trade journals, sending notes to Variety about his activities. After 1956 and the success of The Man with the Golden Arm, Bass became a vocal proponent of what Variety termed “the avant-garde approach to film ad and title design.”51 Never shy, Bass had no qualms about attacking conservative distributors, exhibitors, or heads of studio publicity departments for their reluctance to try anything new. By the 1960s, Bass’s name and illustrations of his work were also appearing in film journals. The designer’s business strategy in Hollywood was to create something new that would make waves in the trades but could be marketed again and again, establishing an iconic Bass brand. In other words, there was a constant push and pull with the film industry—attacking when strong, then compromising. In this regard, it is interesting to examine which images Bass chose when sending out samples of his work to journalists.
His most published work by far, whether in art journals or film magazines, came from The Man with the Golden Arm; examples of the poster or titles appeared in at least sixty publications.52 This makes sense, given that Bass dated the beginning of his Hollywood career with this film by Otto Preminger, despite the fact that he had already designed a number of titles and had already worked in movie industry advertising for eighteen years. Title stills or posters from Anatomy of a Murder, Bonjour Tristesse, and Exodus—all of them Preminger films—were also popular, appearing in more than thirty publications. The inclusion of Bonjour Tristesse is a bit surprising, given the film’s failure at the box office, but of course, Bass’s association with the famous producer-director and with a well-known French novel added to his own prominence. Preminger was considered serious and highbrow by the industry and the press. Indeed, illustrations from all the Preminger titles Bass worked on, including Saint Joan, The Cardinal, Bunny Lake Is Missing, and Advise and Consent, were published at least ten times. Surprisingly, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest merited fewer than five published illustrations, while Psycho was seen in at least twenty publications and Vertigo in twenty-five or more. Only four other films (not including Bass’s own films Why Man Creates and Phase IV) achieved double digits in terms of frequency of publication: Storm Center, West Side Story, Spartacus, and Walk on the Wild Side. The number of illustrations for his other film work falls off dramatically, seemingly based on Bass’s submission of whatever he happened to have finished at the moment, rather than on an attempt to build the Bass brand. Once he was established as a title designer, Bass stopped sending samples of his movie advertisements from before 1956, including his first poster for Carmen Jones, possibly because he felt the Bass brand was not pure enough in this early work. Thus, Bass supplied the same images to countless publications in an effort to establish his brand, while simultaneously attaching his name to films and directors who were considered legitimate auteurs, with Preminger trumping Hitchcock in this regard.53
The centrality of The Man with the Golden Arm to the Bass brand is connected to the construction of what might be termed the official biographical narrative of Saul Bass. In countless interviews, Bass claimed that before his work on that film, he had previously worked only as a graphic designer. After becoming the self-styled father of modern film titles, Bass decided to make his own films in the mid-1960s, while also designing corporate logos. Later, he and his wife Elaine returned to filmmaking and film titles in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, respectively. The narrative of Bass’s professional journey from graphics to live-action film to corporate design is seen in its purest form in the self-produced film Bass on Titles. At an AFI seminar, Bass stated: “My entry into the film world grew out of my graphic work. When I came to California, I began to design symbols for motion pictures, for Otto Preminger on The Man with the Golden Arm. . . . So, I was well established in my career as a graphic designer before I began working in film. . . . I began my film experience by pushing graphic design stuff around and then got more immersed in the idea of live action and became, in a sense, a filmmaker via that route.”54 He later admitted in some oral histories that he actually began working in film advertising in 1938, more than fifteen years before his “official” start in the business. However, Bass’s own chronology from posters to film credits to films to corporate identity breaks down: he was directing commercials and industrial films long before his first official film, The Searching Eye, and his corporate identity work dates from the early 1950s, immediately after he opened his own design studio.
Interestingly, given Bass’s obvious desire to manipulate and control his own life story, two authorized biographies were commissioned in the last years of his life, neither of which was published. Bass had approached a representative of Harry Abrams & Company about a book as early as 1980.55 Bass initially wanted Herb Yager to write his biography; Yager had authored the Graphis article (1978), had been heavily involved in the special Bass issue of the Japanese design magazine Idea (1979), and had acted as interlocutor in Bass on Titles (1978). But Yager thought he would be seen as too biased, given that he was Bass’s business partner.56 In the late 1980s Owen Edwards, the founding editor of American Photographer, was commissioned to write a long essay for a heavily illustrated book about Saul Bass as part of a new projected series on photographers and designers.57 After he completed the piece, Edwards got a call from Bass stating that he would not approve the essay because it “didn’t go deep enough.”58 The manuscript, which amounted to less than a hundred pages, quotes Bass extensively, as well as Art Goodman, but Bass’s editing of his own quotes indicates he was not particularly happy with what he had said to Edwards during their interviews.59 The project was quickly abandoned by the publisher, who refused to pay the author more than 25 percent of his advance.
Bass and Yager must have decided that the time was ripe for a Bass book, however, because a short time later they hired NPR film critic Joe Morgenstern to write a biography. Morgenstern’s first draft was completed in April 1994.60 The 150-page manuscript is broken down into twenty-five chapters with titles such as “A Subway Scholar Finds Betty Grable,” “Saul & Elaine,” “Seeing Things Fresh,” and “Personal Handwriting.” The brevity of both Morgenstern’s and Edwards’s manuscripts indicates that they were meant to be accompanied by numerous illustrations in a coffee table–style book. Although Morgenstern focuses on Bass’s film work, including the two phases of his title-making career, the author also dedicates chapters to corporate campaigns such as those for Celanese, Lawry’s, United Airlines, Getty, Avery, and the Girl Scouts.
Publishers, however, were not buying it, even after the second draft, with changes by Yager and Bass, was completed. Don Congdon Associates, a literary agent, noted in October 1994 that the manuscript needed work, and a rejection letter from Simon and Schuster soon followed.61 Yager continued to shop the manuscript around, but Abrams, Viking Studio Books, John Macrae Books, W. W. Norton, and Universe Publishing all sent their regrets. In all likelihood, the problem was that Morgenstern had basically ghostwritten an autobiography in the guise of a biography; in other words, Morgenstern’s manuscript was based solely on his interviews with Bass and papers and other materials provided by Bass’s office. Meanwhile, Yager and Morgenstern got into a major tussle. In April, Morgenstern had been promised payment for his work.62 But in July, Yager told Morgenstern he was withholding the writer’s $5,000 fee because the manuscript was only a draft, additional changes needed to be made, and it was six months late. In the same letter, apparently sent in reaction to Morgenstern’s complaints about not being paid, Yager noted acrimoniously: “Your letter amazed me. I am embarrassed. In one bizarre and completely unnecessary overreaction, you obliterated our friendship. As for Saul, he deserved better.”63 By then, Bard College professor Pat Kirkham had started her own Saul Bass research project with a published interview with Saul and Elaine Bass in April 1994. Thus, the decision was made (probably sometime in 1995) to hire her to write the biography. Bass continued to work on the layout and selection of images for this book until his death.
Bass’s official biographical narrative was finally published posthumously in 2011. Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design is a richly illustrated tome that covers all facets of Bass’s career—his film title designs, corporate identity campaigns, and independently produced films. The most original portion of the book is Pat Kirkham’s well-researched essay on Bass’s childhood and early career. Apart from the survey of Bass’s career, this large-format volume includes hundreds of illustrations, a listing of the design studio’s projects for hire, and a bibliography. The book does not highlight the work of any other designers in the Bass office (except for Elaine Bass), yet for any Bass scholar, it is a rich source of documentation, even if it perpetuates much of the Bass mythology.
No other full-length book study has been published, although Andreas A. Timmer’s 1999 dissertation, “Making the Ordinary Extraordinary: The Film-Related Work of Saul Bass,” deserves mention. After discussing modernist graphic design and Bass’s application of those principles to film titles, Timmer focuses on Bass’s collaborations with Preminger, Hitchcock, and Martin Scorsese, presenting close readings of some Bass title sequence images but largely ignoring Bass’s use of typography. He then discusses Bass’s work as a visual consultant on Psycho, Spartacus, and Grand Prix, followed by analyses of Bass’s Why Man Creates, Notes on the Popular Arts, and Phase IV. However, Timmer is a bit too telegraphic in his discussion of Bass’s work, which may be why the dissertation has not been published. Timmer concludes:
Following his model Kepes while simultaneously establishing his own approach, Bass describes himself as a “visual communicator” and not an artist with a capital A. What does this mean for a designer working in the context of the entertainment industry? In terms of high concept advertising it means art with a practical and informational purpose. Bass succeeded in keeping titles functional while at the same time elevating them into an art form. Many of his credit sequences have a poetic quality that both serves and transcends their functionality. What makes Bass a master in his field is his ability to combine highly original designs with popular appeal.64
Popular articles on Saul Bass have been limited to brief biographical narratives, with only one short, formal analysis of a few Bass-created title sequences in the mix.65 Other articles and interviews available on the Internet do not go beyond the kind of hagiography Bass consistently encouraged. One exception is Emily King’s master’s thesis, “Taking Credit: Film Title Sequences, 1955–1965,” which includes chapters on The Man with the Golden Arm, Vertigo, and Spartacus, as well as Maurice Binder’s From Russia with Love and Richard Williams’s What’s New Pussycat. Although King recognizes and celebrates the revolutionary aspect of the title designs created by Saul Bass and others, she remains ambiguous about their long-term influence:
While title sequences which translated static graphic idioms onto the screen were commonplace in the 1960s, they never became the dominant mode of movie titling, nor were they ever completely displaced. From the late 1960s until now there has been huge variety in styles of movie titling, from Woody Allen’s theatre-style “cards” to the innovative computer animation in films such as Superman (1978). Rather than either reflecting a shift in the conventional relationship between Hollywood and modern design, or amounting to a new element in the vocabulary of the mainstream film-maker, the titles sequences addressed in this thesis were part of the widespread changes in film-making which were eventually to render any single Hollywood formula redundant.66
There has been little academic research on the history of film studio publicity campaigns, the marketing of film products, or Hollywood titling practices, all of which could provide context for Bass’s work. Most publications have, in fact, centered on issues of censorship and exploitation.67 Although Emily King’s A Century of Movie Posters: From Silent to Art House devotes several pages to Saul Bass, it is concerned mainly with film directors rather than poster artists.68 Finally, a number of collectors and fans have published books of movie posters for the nostalgia market. These may be good visual resources, but they hardly constitute serious academic analysis.
Bass’s film career challenges our theoretical assumptions about authorship on a number of levels. Whether one designates the director, the producer, or some other authority figure as the auteur of a film, Bass’s titles or other interpolated sequences represent the only minutes of a film for which an entity other than the “author” can claim sole credit for the text. But even if we have given up on the notion of an author or the existence of a single film text, as structuralist and post-structuralist theory articulates, the question remains, how do we evaluate Bass’s contribution as a designer? As Ross Melnick recently posited, not only is the issue of a unified film text in question; film historians must also consider those elements that can no longer be recuperated, such as the actual live performance.69 Meanwhile, film historians and theorists often conflate the physical film and all other texts surrounding it (publicity, posters, trailers, advertising), reading them as a master text guided by the producer, the director, or both. But I argue that Bass’s intervention into that master text—whether titles, advertising, television commercials, posters, or trailers—represents a unified vision, outside that of the implied author’s master text. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the controversy surrounding Psycho, which continues to this day.
Uncontested is the fact that Bass is credited in the film for the titles and as “visual consultant,” having acted in that capacity not only for the opening credits but also for the storyboards for the infamous shower sequence. When François Truffaut asked Hitchcock about Bass’s participation in the production of Psycho, Hitchcock replied that Bass had delivered sketches for the murder of the detective and had actually shot the montage of him going up the stairs, but Hitchcock subsequently discarded it all. He said not one word about the shower sequence, which by the mid-1960s had made Psycho famous.70 Possibly in reaction to Hitchcock’s niggardly apportionment of credit, or possibly because he was now a feature film director himself (Phase IV) looking for credibility, Bass dropped a bombshell in an interview with the London Sunday Times: “When the film came out everyone went wild about the shower-bath murder which I’d done, almost literally shot by shot, from my storyboard. And then Hitchcock had second thoughts.”71 Since then, endless printer’s ink has been devoted to the issue, and even Bass’s own statements are somewhat of a moving target. At an AFI seminar in 1979, he all but took credit for directing, without saying it outright: “I storyboarded it, and literally supervised the shooting of it. Hitchcock was on the set, and I thought Hitch was going to direct it. But when I came to the set, he was very generous and insisted I direct the shots. I got a short course with Hitch on that picture.”72 Bass later insisted that Hitchcock had directed the sequence: “But the truth of the matter is, it was and is Hitch’s film. It’s all his, no matter what I did.”73
Unfortunately, all the eyewitness accounts, many of which have denied any Bass involvement in the direction of the shower sequence, are unreliable, since all were articulated long after the fact.74 Here, I briefly summarize the major positions and offer my own take on the subject. Stephen Rebello has criticized both Hitchcock and Bass for overstating their positions, but he ultimately comes down on the side of the film’s director.75 Interestingly, in the recent Hitchcock biopic based on Rebello’s book, Bass has been all but written out of the story.76 Pat Kirkham, in contrast, makes a forceful case for Bass’s authorship of the shower sequence; although it seems very convincing, it is based more on speculation and formal design than on any hard evidence.77 The late Raymond Durgnat skirts the question altogether, commenting on Bass’s titles but analyzing the shower sequence from an auteurist-formalist and psychoanalytic perspective, without even mentioning the authorship controversy.78
Based on evidence from various sources, I believe that Bass may have set up a few shots under Hitchcock’s supervision, and Bass did design the storyboards, almost all of which ended up as images in the final edit. Hitchcock also allowed Bass to shoot 16mm tests, which Bass describes with some precision, as well as suggest an edit. As far as directing, Bass later conceded that Hitchcock invited him to set up the first and second shots, but probably no more than that.79 Thus, it is likely that Hitchcock hired Bass to create an Eisensteinian montage for the first murder because he envisioned a shockingly sudden demise for his leading lady and needed a montage specialist, which he decidedly was not. But in the end, Alfred and Alma Hitchcock worked out the final edit after the first previews, so Psycho was ultimately not only Hitchcock’s financial risk but also very much his own work.
So why did Bass start this controversy? One must wonder whether it was a public relations ploy, since Bass made no claims about directing the shower sequence until he had become a feature film director himself with Phase IV. Maybe the publicity was just too good to turn down, given that Bass could, with some credibility, challenge the authorship of one of the few film directors who was truly a household name in America, and given that his business was starting to go south. Or was it merely a casual remark that got out of hand? We will never know, but I’m assuming that for Bass it was a branding issue, in the sense that he wanted to reestablish his expertise as a director and a montage specialist, having previously designed or produced sequences for Stanley Kubrick, Vincente Minnelli, Carl Foreman, and John Frankenheimer, among others.
Like these directors, most of Bass’s Hollywood clients were or wanted to be seen as auteurs. As I argue here, Saul Bass (and the role of the designer) came into prominence as the studio system was crumbling and independent producer-director hyphenates were on the rise. These independents, whether Otto Preminger, Stanley Kramer, Billy Wilder, or Stanley Kubrick, had high artistic aspirations for their films and employed Bass to give their work cachet. That was possible because of the gradual breakdown of the studio system and the ebbing of power held by studio production and publicity departments. Nevertheless, Bass’s style and techniques were still considered avant-garde by many in the industry, and his efforts to realize his design ideas were always subject to pressure from the more traditional elements in the Hollywood system.
Rather than seeing any artistic production within the commercial film industry as “selling out,” and thus substantiating the romantically inflected dichotomy between art and commerce, newer film and media histories have advanced the notion that it was possible to work in Hollywood but still participate in avant-garde practices. David James notes that avant-garde filmmakers and Hollywood have always had a symbiotic relationship: “Even when the concerns of minority cinemas are quite specific, often their expression creates cultural forms whose difference, more or less reworked, can be productively assimilated by other groups or by the industry. But this function of the avant-garde as the research and development branch of the cultural industry is reciprocated in the latter’s utility for the avant-garde. Minority practices are inevitably framed by the dominant industry and determined by its overall structure.”80
With regard to Bass’s commercial design work, whether in movie publicity, filmmaking, or advertising, I would characterize it as a modernist avant-garde practice constituted within Hollywood rather than in opposition to it. This seems not only advisable, given the formal innovation and consistent branding apparent in all of Bass’s work, but also necessary, given the designer’s education. Directly indebted to teachers who had studied and worked at the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany, Bass translated the Bauhaus ethic and aesthetic into an American idiom, just as Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Gyorgy Kepes transplanted Bauhaus ideals to Chicago and New York in post–World War II America. Indeed, the central Bauhaus notion of art and design having both aesthetic and functional applications was put into practice in 1920s Germany and 1950s America.
To illuminate not only how that process of aesthetic translation worked but also its historical and cultural coordinates (specifically in terms of Saul Bass, and generally in terms of high modernism’s infiltration of American cultural practice), it might be productive to invoke a concept such as vernacular modernism. As Miriam Hansen notes, “modernism encompasses a whole range of cultural and artistic practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon processes of modernization and the experience of modernity, including a paradigmatic transformation of the conditions under which art is produced, transmitted, and consumed. In other words, just as modernist aesthetics are not reducible to the category of style, they tend to blur the boundaries of the institution of art in its traditional, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century incarnation that turns on the ideal of aesthetic autonomy and the distinction of ‘high’ vs. ‘low,’ of autonomous art vs. popular and mass culture.” Hansen argues that the high modernist canon—with its specific “single-logic” genealogy from “Cubism to Abstract Expressionism,” from Brecht to the theater of the absurd, from Eisenstein to Godard or Walter Ruttmann to Stan Brakhage—essentialized the role of the artist while denying modernism’s infiltration of many commercial genres and “vernacular” forms of cultural practice entailing “connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability.” What Hansen is getting at here is that many forms of mass culture, whether Hollywood film narratives or their advertising, communicate in a dialogue with diverse and divergent consumers. And while I’m hesitant to accept Hansen’s notion that all Hollywood narrative cinema in its classical phase imbricates with the modernist project, I agree that the very act of constituting what is almost always a partial or overdetermined discourse in Hollywood resulted in varying degrees of self-reflexivity; further, this awareness of engaging in a discourse is the raison d’être of modernist art. As Hansen writes: “The reflexive dimension of Hollywood films in relation to modernity may take cognitive, discursive, and narrativized forms, but it is crucially anchored in sensory experience and sensational affect, in processes of mimetic identification that are more often than not partial and excessive in relation to narrative comprehension.”81
Saul Bass’s film work, whether titles created for independent producer-directors or his own films, must therefore be seen as a continual effort to bring avant-garde practices to Hollywood. His design elements exude modernism not only because of the Bauhaus influence but also because Bass himself preferred a more fragmented approach that left interpretive spaces open, allowing the audience to read film texts subjectively.
According to Pat Kirkham, Bass saw and loved Maya Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon (1945), as well as other avant-garde films. Over the course of his career, Bass consistently worked with American avant-garde filmmakers such as. the Whitney brothers and Pat O’Neill. Bass’s personal films contributed to the essay film genre pioneered by Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, but with precedents in Dziga Vertov.82 Indeed, Bass films such as The Searching Eye and Why Man Creates question audiences directly and provide possible but not definitive answers; they consciously communicate knowledge through vision. Jean-Pierre Gorin’s dictum regarding the essay film certainly pertains to these Bass titles: it is “the meandering of an intelligence that tries to multiply the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected).”83 And just as montage is central to the aesthetic of the essay film, with the hand of the editor crafting a way of seeing and hearing, the visual tropes of the eye (vision) and the hand (creating form) are central to the Bass brand.
As early as 1957, we see Bass utilizing pure abstraction in his credit sequence for Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. This sequence is all the more striking because its relationship to the narrative is as abstract as abstract art. Was Bass thinking of the New York City brownstones that are the locale for the film’s action? What interests me here is the way Bass limits his color palette to black, white, and various hues from red to brown, making the sequence nothing if not a study of a limited corner of the color wheel. The sequence recalls both the American abstract expressionists (who were being recognized in the 1950s as the most avant-garde artists in the world) and the German painters of and around the Bauhaus school, such as Paul Klee.
Paul Klee’s Flora in the Sand is one of a series of paintings by the artist that reduce topographies to various squares and rectangles of color. It is this concept of using flat planes of color to visualize geographic space that connects this 1927 painting to Bass’s titles for The Seven Year Itch. And while it may be foolhardy to make a direct link between these two works, as I have here, the possibilities are rich in terms of comparing the works of many Bauhaus artists with Bass’s work. Certainly, Bauhaus art courses and aesthetics theorized that geometry and abstraction were central elements of composition within the two-dimensional frame, even if the objects depicted were less abstracted or even photographic. Photography was, of course, taught in the basic Bauhaus art course, and Bauhaus photography workshops were extremely active. Almost all Bauhaus artists took up photography at one point or another, and Moholy-Nagy was possibly the most active of the group.
Abstraction thus became a major design element in the photographic work of the Bauhaus artists. Lotte Beese’s 1927 photograph of a loom (Anni Albers ran the textile workshop at the Bauhaus and would become one of the most famous textile designers in America) reduces the machine to an abstract play of light, line, and form. Indeed, its original function as a loom is completely lost in the photographic image. However, what we do see is an image that, despite its abstraction, manages to create a sense of depth and the impression of a machine, even if we don’t know what that machine does. Compare this image with Saul and Elaine Bass’s title sequence for Casino (1995; see chapter 5), which frames Las Vegas neon in such a way as to create nothing more than abstract patterns of light, making it virtually impossible to identify. The sequence becomes a cacophony of light and color, revealing neither the content (specific casino signs) nor the locale but nevertheless conveying the sense of endless activity that is Las Vegas. For Bass, the formal design elements, the use of circles, squares, and lines of movement, were the heart of any design.
Saul Bass’s design work in cinema and film publicity must be seen first and foremost as a graphic art, evolving from his training as a graphic artist. As the following chapters show, Bass conceptualized film as a two-dimensional space, composing his images for a frame rather than for the window into the world theorized by André Bazin and other realists. His title sequences, as well as his films, communicate meaning through composition, creating graphics in motion that are astounding today because they were produced with analogue technology rather than digital, computer-generated programs. Indeed, Bass’s designs in film presage cinema’s return in the twenty-first century to animation and painting, as theorized by Lev Manovich: “The manual construction of images in digital cinema represents a return to nineteenth century pre-cinematic practices, when images were hand-painted and hand-animated. At the turn of the twentieth century, cinema was to delegate these manual techniques to animation and define itself as a recording medium. As cinema enters the digital age, these techniques are again becoming the commonplace in the filmmaking process. Consequently, cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a sub-genre of painting.”84
Bass’s interest in Bauhaus design elements also led him to become a film montage specialist. One can argue that Bass’s designs incorporated montage before he ever touched a foot of film. By the 1950s, he was working closely with editors to learn about editing. Bass loved the endless possibilities of montage, of putting together a syntactic unit of film images; he loved thinking in terms of montage. As a result, camera movements in Bass’s film titles and films are few and far between, even in his later films such as The Solar Film and Quest. It was not until the 1980s, possibly due to the influence of Elaine Bass, that camera movement became more prominent in his titles; for instance, the titles for War of the Roses and Mr. Saturday Night both feature long, horizontal camera tracks, exploring landscapes. In contrast, Art Goodman’s animation sequences in Why Man Creates and The Solar Film are explorations through time, but they are constructed as camera movements through space, based, of course, on the illusion of movement through animated images.
Camera movement implies a journey, and journeys through time and space were central to the Bass universe. His end title sequence for Around the World in 80 Days was the first of many quest narratives Bass would design and execute. The quest, whether intellectual or physical, became the structuring presence in many of his own films: From Here to There, The Searching Eye, Why Man Creates, Phase IV, and Quest. Like the quests of classical mythology, visual metaphor transforms these journeys into a search for knowledge. Indeed, vision and sight become synonymous with knowledge, especially when the communication of knowledge is visual rather than verbal.
Bass created more than modernist designs; he consciously created a brand that was recognizable to both industry professionals and laypersons. The work of Saul Bass & Associates must be understood as a brand created by a design office with numerous contributing individuals, even if Saul (and later Elaine) was the controlling intelligence behind that brand. The Bass brand was rigorously maintained by limiting the design palette to a certain number of techniques and design elements. Regardless of whether he was working on movie advertising campaigns, film titles, short films, corporate logos, or corporate identity campaigns, the integrity of the Bass identity had to be maintained. Incorporating modernist and avant-garde designs into the Bass brand, however, did not imply improvisation. In fact, quite the opposite was true: nothing was left to chance. Once a concept had been agreed on, often after endless discussion, the Bass office or often Bass himself storyboarded everything, down to the blocking of actors.85 Even if the titles and films were supposed to look like they had been spontaneously constructed, the product of experimentation or fiddling around, as Bass called it, they were always consciously developed and executed.
Saul Bass’s designs have been held in high esteem for decades by his peers, as well as by specialists in other fields, yet the time is ripe for a critical reevaluation of all of Bass’s work. Certainly, his designs were valued in the commercial marketplace, where he commanded fees that might have priced him out of the Hollywood market, at least until he made a comeback in the late 1980s. Now, more than fifteen years after the designer’s death, it is time to measure Bass’s contribution to the field, beyond some of the mythologies associated with him. My historical analysis of the Saul Bass legacy seeks to contextualize his work within the historical coordinates of Hollywood film production and movie publicity—specifically, the evolution of film posters from the earliest days to the present, his advertising work, his film titles, and his films. Finally, Bass must be seen in the context of the larger social developments in post–World War II America—namely, the increase in intellectual respectability among the design profession, its recognition by society as a legitimate profession, and the upward mobility of designers in the financial hierarchy of rewards and withholdings. As previously demonstrated by others, it was the influx of European-born or -trained designers (many of them German-Jewish exiles) into 1950s America that vastly expanded the palate for and the palette of acceptable design in this country. Furthermore, I contend that Bass was keenly aware of the pioneering role he played in his chosen field, sometimes even relishing his part as agent provocateur in Hollywood’s conservative guild system, yet producing seminal aesthetic work that largely conformed to the system’s needs. The designer can truly claim a place next to the greats of mid-twentieth-century American design: Ivan Chermayeff, Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, Ikko Tanaka, and Henryk Tomaszewski.86
In the chapters that follow, I analyze the design work of Saul Bass & Associates as it pertained to the film industry. Although I quote Saul Bass, when relevant, to indicate some form of intentionality, my ultimate goal is to define the designer through his work. Therefore, my analyses often begin with a formalist approach, presenting what is actually on the page or on the screen, then bringing in larger social, political, or contextual issues. As a result, the portrait that evolves may have little to do with the flesh-and-blood human being who was Saul Bass. Rather, I’m interested in the way his work created design standards in the film industry that are still valid today, more than fifteen years after his death. The Bass brand, as I argue, has a tangible existence in the work that survives, as well as in the work of designers who followed him.
Chapter 1, “Designer and Filmmaker,” begins with a brief biography of Saul Bass and then pursues the intellectual and aesthetic roots of the Saul Bass brand. It is not enough to simply invoke the Bauhaus, as other writers have done. Instead, I demonstrate how Bass appropriated and internalized Bauhaus concepts as articulated by Moholy-Nagy and Kepes, primarily through the visual examples published in the seminal work of both these designers. Given that Bass spent at least fifteen years involved in movie advertising, I then present a short history of the field to tease out what was different about Bass’s designs once he began to find his own voice and create what would become the Bass brand. I conclude first with definitions of the Bass design style and brand, focusing finally on the many recurring visual motifs in his design work.
Chapter 2, “Film Titles: Theory and Practice,” focuses on the history and practice of producing film titles or credit sequences. Arguably, this is where Bass’s influence was most strongly felt. After briefly analyzing Bass’s titles for That’s Entertainment II, his own informal history of titles, I lay out the technical and aesthetic development of titles in Hollywood and then turn to the theories underlying all titling. Unlike virtually every other commentator on Bass’s title work, I initially privilege typography and the role of the modernist design grid as an aesthetic precept in his titles. I next turn to the many production strategies employed in his title work. Although some titles were purely graphic in design, others utilized various forms of animation or photographic montages, yet almost all referenced modern art. Indeed, Bass was consciously incorporating not only European modernist design standards but also contemporary American art (e.g., Abstract Expressionism) into his work in an effort to raise the bar in Hollywood.
Chapter 3, “Creating a Mood: Pars pro toto,” digs deeper into the Bass methodology, particularly his penchant for creating pithy symbols for his posters and film publicity—logo-like forms that functioned symbolically like his corporate identity designs. I also present a brief history of movie posters to illustrate what was revolutionary about Bass’s designs. Then I demonstrate how his posters, especially those created for Otto Preminger, consciously quoted modernist art and artists in order to imbue his movie publicity campaigns with a seriousness of purpose. Next I tease out not only the formalist aspects of his movie design work but also recurring thematic elements, as expressed in selected film title designs. Interestingly, for all his modernist aspirations, Bass was equally drawn to an almost mystical conception of signs, the elements of fire and water, and the concrete world of objects and landscapes morphing into abstract notions of the mind.
Chapter 4, “Modernism’s Multiplicity of Views,” moves from the single image to Bass’s construction of meaning through montage. The designer’s penchant for dissecting and then reanimating body parts comes into play almost everywhere in his work—the disembodied hand being an almost obsessive visual trope—but particularly in his titles for Anatomy of a Murder. Bass’s methodology for constructing meaning in film was based on Eisensteinian concepts of montage, whereby the body of a film consists of a stitching together of countless moving images. In this connection, I first analyze Bass’s previously neglected work in television commercials, where he cut his film production teeth. Then I discuss title sequences based on montage and the way they contribute to the initial impression of the film. The chapter concludes with a close reading of his independently produced environmental film The Solar Film, which largely functions nonverbally through a montage of images.
Chapter 5, “The Urban Landscape,” explores what I believe to be one of the ur-sites of modernist art and avant-garde films: the modern cityscape. Bass’s titles here move from modernist abstraction and graphics to documentary montages, as developed in the avant-garde city films of the 1920s and 1930s. I then analyze another ubiquitous visual trope in Bass’s work involving the urban environment—namely, city lights, as articulated in film titles and his first short animated film. I conclude with the image of the city in Bass’s commercials for National Bohemian Beer.
Chapter 6, “Journeys of Discovery: Seeing Is Knowledge,” further explores the notion of travel and the quest as forms of knowledge, based on visual perception. A number of Bass’s film titles are structured as journeys, yet for the most part, it is the audience that experiences intellectual growth, not the characters engaged in the journey. That position changes radically with Bass’s independent short films, which are all structured as journeys during which the audience learns to see and perceive what lies beneath the surface. What is also apparent in his short films, especially The Searching Eye and Quest, is the way Bass has transformed himself from an urban Jewish modernist into a California nature enthusiast with seemingly mystical and spiritual leanings.
Finally, Chapter 7, “Civilization: Organizing Knowledge through Communication,” highlights Bass’s work as a communicator of ideas and history, whether in his opening credits, montage sequences, or films. Beginning with his previously unknown promotional film Apples and Oranges, which visualizes the findings of an important study comparing television and magazine advertising, I then discuss his animated short, 100 Years of the Telephone. Next, I analyze what I perceive to be his magnum opus, Why Man Creates, which encapsulates many of Bass’s ideas about art and civilization and is presented in a form that gives the viewer freedom to contribute to the film’s meaning. In other words, it is a truly modernist work of art. I conclude with his lone feature film, Phase IV, which, despite its unhappy production and release history, has been celebrated as a complex science fiction film that in many ways explodes notions of genre while asking the question, what makes us human?