Saul Bass

Saul Bass (May 8, 1920 – April 25, 1996) was an American graphic designer and filmmaker, most famous for creating motion-picture title sequences, film posters, and corporate logos. Over a 40-year career, he collaborated with major Hollywood directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese. His iconic title sequences include the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict's arm for Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, the credits racing up and down a skyscraper in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and the fragmented text that converges and splits apart in Psycho.

Early life

Born in the Bronx, New York City, on May 8, 1920, to Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents, Bass graduated from James Monroe High School and studied part-time at the Art Students League, later attending night classes with György Kepes at Brooklyn College. He married Ruth Cooper in 1938, and they had two children, Robert (1942) and Andrea (1946).

In the 1940s, he began working in Hollywood, designing print ads for films like Champion (1949), Death of a Salesman (1951), and The Moon Is Blue (1953). His collaboration with Otto Preminger deepened after designing a poster for Carmen Jones (1954); Preminger was so impressed he asked Bass to produce the title sequence, sparking Bass's realization that credits could enhance a film's mood and theme from the start. Bass was among the first to see the creative potential in opening and closing credits.

Film title sequences

Bass gained widespread recognition with the title sequence for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), which tackled heroin addiction, a taboo topic. He used a white-on-black animated paper cut-out of an arm as the central image, creating a sensation. For Alfred Hitchcock, he crafted kinetic typography for North by Northwest (1959), Vertigo (1958, with John Whitney), and Psycho (1960). Before Bass, title sequences were typically static and separate from the film, often projected onto curtains.

In 1960, he wrote an article for Graphis magazine titled "Film Titles – a New Field for the Graphic Designer," considered a milestone in treating credit sequences as design objects. Bass aimed to create a simple visual phrase that captured a film's essence and to make ordinary things look unfamiliar, as seen in Walk on the Wild Side (1962) and Nine Hours to Rama (1963). He used techniques from cut-out animation to live-action sequences.

Sometimes, Bass's titles were considered better than the films themselves. A critic wrote of The Seven Year Itch (1955) that it would have been a good picture if it had lived up to its titles. For A Walk on the Wild Side (1962), over half of New York critics said the titles surpassed the film. In 1962, Variety even suggested Bass might struggle to find work because of the frequent line, "The best thing about the film is the Saul Bass credits."

In 1955, Elaine Makatura joined Bass's Los Angeles office. She began directing and producing title sequences with Spartacus (1960), and they married in 1961, collaborating for over 30 years. They had two children, Jennifer (1964) and Jeffrey (1967).

Together, they experimented with techniques like Bunraku-style maneuvers in Spartacus, live-action in Walk on the Wild Side, and time-lapse photography in The Age of Innocence. Bass's firm also designed major corporate logos, including the Geffen Records logo (1980), the Hanna-Barbera "swirling star" (1979), the sixth Bell System logo (1969), and AT&T's first globe logo (1983). He died from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in Los Angeles on April 25, 1996, at age 75.