Came across this Italian poster from the great Enzo Sciotti for “Samuel” Raimi’s original Evil Dead over at Westgate Gallery. As of this posting, it can be yours for the reasonable price tag of $75.
(Above) Averardo Ciriello’s Italian poster art for Martin Scorsese’s breakout third feature film Mean Streets (1973). Though set around the New York neighborhoods where Scorsese grew up, 20 of the film’s 26 shooting days took place in Los Angeles.
Steven Spielberg made his feature film debut at the age of 24 with Duel, an ABC television Movie of the Week about a mild-mannered motorist’s desert highway battle with a menacing truck. Richard Matheson penned the teleplay from his own short story, which was first published in Playboy. It was Spielberg’s secretary at the time, Nona Tyson, who passed the story along to the nascent filmmaker and suggested it might be a good fit.
Spielberg had just 12 days to shoot the film. A scant 3 1/2 weeks after wrapping principal photography, Duel debuted on ABC in November of 1971. The ratings were so impressive that within a month of Duel’s television premier Spielberg was sent back out to capture additional footage so that the 74-minute running time could be padded in order to release the movie theatrically overseas.
For more Duel info, check out Edgar Wright’s recent interview with Spielberg or Steven Awalt’s book Steven Spielberg and Duel: The Making of a Film Career. You can also find a three-part “Making Of” doc about the film on YouTube. The first part is posted below.
Poster art by Georges Kerfyser. The film’s French title Bande à part was the inspiration for the name of Quentin Tarantino’s former production company A Band Apart.
Top left: Italian release poster by Renato Casaro
Top right: Polish poster by Andrzej Bertrandt
Set in Spokane, Washington, Vision Quest (1985) stars Matthew Modine as a high school wrestler who embarks on a quixotic mission to drop multiple weight classes in order to take on his region’s top grappler.
Madonna makes a brief appearance in the film as a singer at a club crooning “Crazy for You.” That cameo was enough for Italian poster artist extraordinaire Enzo Sciotti to re-imagine the movie as a Madonna vehicle in which Modine also does a bit of wrestling – in a ring.
