DREW STRUZAN
During a promising career doing record album covers in the early seventies Drew Struzan got noticed by the movie industry. At that time there was a great interest in using portraits in movie posters, so Drew seemed the right man for the job. He left the record business and started a small company with a friend who came out of the movie industry, a collaboration that lasted for eight years. In those early days Drew mainly did artwork for B movies till he got asked in '77 by a colleague Charlie White III to help him out doing the portraits for the rerelease poster of 'Star Wars'. It was that colleague who introduced the airbrush to Drew and he started using it himself for most of his work since then. It's also that 'Star wars' poster that eventually lead to getting more and more commissions for bigger movies.
A great deal of what he's done can be seen in these pages. A huge amount of work for all different kinds of movies: adventure, comedy, horror, drama and the genre that made him most of all popular: fantasy and science fiction. All of these genres he provided with his gorgeous artwork. In the eighties he delivered the main body of his work doing more than 10 pieces a year. Due to the growing interest in photographic posters during the nineties, his poster rate has gone down extensively. Aside from his other work in the commercial business he's doing more limited edition posters these days. Let's hope we still get to see many more new posters of him in the future. They may not come as frequently as they did, but if they do, they stay the most attractive ones in the business.
View all his movie poster here
THE LOGO
At the beginning of his movie poster career many people didn't let Drew sign his work, so he created a logo. It shows an 'S' (for Struzan) in a rectangle and can be seen on many posters till the early eighties. For admirers of his work it was a difficult puzzle to solve, especially because he also kept signing his artwork with Drew, all depending on wether or not the studios let him sign it that way.
Salvation came in '81 when he signed his artwork for 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' both ways, thus linking the logo to his name. About '83 he stopped using the logo and because of his popularity, he could sign his work just Drew. In the nineties his name was left out of many posters,but luckily we, the admirers, have learned to recognize his work over the years, and can identify it quite correctly. Drew has done a lot of pieces for the movies that he has forgotten about over the years, so there may be many more 'unknown' posters in movie poster land out there. Who knows when they'll be rediscovered, some of them will, but surely others will stay in oblivion forever.
Be sure to visit Drew's own website. Apart from a selection of movie poster artwork, there's a great deal of artwork for bookcovers, collectibles, gallery art, etc. It also has tons of information about everything he does, with the latest news in a special section.
