The Trailer Master:
Last week my buddy Sam Felder tipped me off that The Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles was doing a retrospective of graphic designer Saul Bass’s work for motion pictures. I’ve been a fan of Bass’s work since reading his obituary in the New York Times magazine over a decade ago. I even wrote a paper on him for a History of Design class in graduate school.
Thing was, the exhibit closed on the day I arrived here to celebrate Passover with my family. And the museum closed two hours after my flight landed. And the museum was due north from the airport on the 405 freeway, an ugly snarl of plodding metal and fumes. I arrived with about 40 minutes to spare, sweating and out of breath. From driving.
Saul Bass was one of the towering figures of American graphic design, the man not only responsible for turning movie credit sequences into an art form (the vertical lines than open West Side Story, the Spiral-in-the-Eye of Vertigo, the cascading marquee lights of Casino, all his) but created some of the period’s most enduring corporate iconography (the AT&T “Death Star” the United Airlines “Tulip” logo). Bass’s posters for movies like Exodus, Anatomy of a Murder and Man with a Golden Arm lined the hall. In a small theater, around the corner, his trailers showed on a loop including his short film Why Man Creates which won an Oscar in 1968. I’d seen portions of it in Middle School so it brought back a lotta good memories.
While watching the trailer loop, a security guard came in and told me the museum was closing in 5 minutes. I told him as soon as he needed me to leave, I would. He then said “You’re the last person to see this exhibit. It closes today.” I thought about the ten years I had admired Ms. Bass’s work, the study, and the research. I thought about finding a copy of Why Man Creates and showing it to my friends, or maybe collecting his movie posters someday and having them line the hall in my house.
I thought that there are few other artists I make this kind of effort to see, if only for 40 minutes and that this was the first thing I did on this trip to Los Angeles.
I thought about all those things, and man, did I feel lucky.