A video version of this episode is available on Youtube, here.
Before the trailer, before the teaser, before the algorithm started throwing clips at you on social media, there was the film poster: one image, a handful of words and the enormous challenge of making you want to spend your hard-earned money on a film you've never seen.
In this first volume of what will become an occasional Film Utopia series, Steven and Sean each bring 12 favourite movie posters from across the decades, celebrating the designs that have stopped them in their tracks, sold them a film, or simply looked bloody fantastic on a wall.
We dig into what makes a great poster work, whether it's clever marketing, striking graphic design, a perfectly chosen image or simply an irresistible piece of visual cool. We also look at the changing role of the poster itself: from the elaborate painted artwork and giant cinema displays of the past to today's increasingly digital, social-media-driven world, where a poster has to compete with trailers, clips, thumbnails and an endless stream of imagery.
There's plenty of common ground. Our shared love of Art Deco leads us to the magnificent Heinz Schulz-Neudamm three-sheet for Metropolis (1927) and John Mattos' superb one-sheet for The Rocketeer (1991), while the bold propaganda-inspired design of V for Vendetta gets another unanimous thumbs-up.
But our personal tastes take us in rather different directions.
Steven embraces the glorious simplicity of the single-character poster, making a case for RoboCop, Captain America and Army of Darkness, while Sean gravitates towards posters that somehow distil an entire film into one deceptively simple image, with Dawn of the Dead, Jaws and A Clockwork Orange among his choices.
And because a picture is worth a thousand words, we've also recorded a video version of the episode featuring all the posters we discuss, available here.
So grab your imaginary cinema wall, dust off your pinboard and join Steven and Sean for Volume 1 of our celebration of the art of the movie poster.
