No, not Roy Scheider — though he is a movie legend too, very deservedly so. Type of guy whose career was so effortlessly varied that it’s a surprise to realize just how varied it was in the end — you look back over all his roles and get reminded of something new each time. For all that he was iconic in Jaws, I still love his turn in The French Connection more, others that roles’ descendant/analog in The Seven-Ups, and then there was All That Jazz, I haven’t even begun to mention Sorcerer…it goes on. And that was just his prime decade rather than the full career. Lived a full life, died at 75, was acting and working almost up towards the end of his life — deserves all the kudos.
But I’m writing about a near anonymous genius, somebody whose work everybody knows but only a dedicated fanbase would have known by name. In fact it would be wrong to call him simply a ‘movie legend,’ when in fact he was a mass cultural legend — he is part of the framework of mass memory, and at least two or three of his most well-known efforts will likely never be forgotten.
His name was John Alvin and I’d never heard of him before reading his obituary yesterday. But to say he’s already being fondly remembered, as this collection of tributes shows, is an understatement. For good reason.
To quote the obit:
The opportunity that launched Alvin’s career came a few years after he graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in 1971. Alvin was working as an illustrator at an animation studio when a friend invited him to work on a poster for the upcoming Mel Brooks comedy “Blazing Saddles,” which was released in 1974.
The poster was a standout because of its unusual take: It was serious, yet incorporated zany elements of the film. Inscribed on the headdress worn by Brooks as the Yiddish-speaking Indian chief is the phrase “Kosher for Passover,” a joke contributed by Alvin’s wife, Andrea, that took “the edge off what was basically serious art.”
A perfect take, and I remember first encountering the poster when I was small — I was only three when the movie came out so this would have been a rerelease or an HBO ad, which is where I first saw it:
The combination of epic imagery and loopy humor makes this a treasure on its own, but as Alvin said, this was also the door-opener to more work that followed, and the amount of work created — and the quality — leaves me in awe to contemplate. The guy, seriously, was everywhere.
Let me single out three instances, the first two being noteworthy because, in essence, he competed against himself — and in the end won both times. It’s the summer of 1982 and everybody in America — and nearly everybody since then — had this image in their heads:
That’s mass consciousness right there. People not born when this came out know it. Talking about why it’s affecting is almost unnecessary, but it pretty much nails the ‘breathless wonder’ so often ascribed to Spielberg without hitting you over the head with it per se. A starscape, the planet, a recognizably human hand and arm, specifically a child’s, and something else entirely, and that flash of light — it’s the antithesis of something like H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmicism, a transformation of the vast unknown universe into the simplicity of touch and contact. (And even though it might make more ‘logical’ sense for the alignment of the hands to be vertical rather than horizontal — an alien reaching from the sky, a human reaching from the earth — it’s the perfect balance between the horizontal alignment and the vertical scope of the poster that makes the image so arresting.)
But while Alvin did that, there was another equally iconic poster he created that was everywhere, even if the movie didn’t do as well as expected — but with time it became just as much of a cultural cornerstone as that poster:
It’s the combination of three images here that does the trick, and only two are from the movie — there’s Sean Young with the cigarette smoke, maybe a touch warmer with her almost smile, but not quite. There’s also the visual of the buildings with the police car in flight, itself the only image that gives away that this is a film set in a possible future.
But Harrison Ford’s image is the one that’s of the most interest because unless I’m wrong there’s nothing in the film quite like that — for a character so often hesitant, grim, threatened and scared, Deckard in Alvin’s hands becomes just badass enough, striking a cool pose against the backlights that’s at once standard issue and a masterpiece of the take. It helps that Ford looks the way he does — he can carry it off easily — but Alvin intensifies it just so. It’s a masterpiece of artistic sleight-of-hand, of suggestiveness — beyond assumptions of basic tropes, film noir and otherwise (man plus woman on poster = almost always some sort of romantic situation between them), it invites you in and tells you nothing, gives nothing away. (There’s the slogan in the corner, sure, but set that aside.) I still remember seeing this in the local newspaper when I was 11 — a full page ad — and going, “Wow, what IS this?”
Meanwhile, to single out another of his creations, consider this one from the early nineties:
Here again is the perfect blend of the familiar and the unexpected. It’s an animated film from Disney — for an audience at the time, and maybe even now, you expect bright colors, obvious ‘cartoonishness,’ maybe a bad guy looming somewhere in the corner with a henchman or two. Instead, this suffused warm glow — the red of romance, of love, of passion and blood — and this silhouette that is both romantic novel cover cliche and something immediately obvious as beyond the norm. No star voices listed — the bold slogan and the Walt Disney logo serve as the immediate identifiers of content and approach — and it again almost sells itself without having to do anything else. He had already tried this silhouette approach with The Little Mermaid but this works for me even more, the simplest of his posters for Disney’s series of commercial and critical homeruns in the late eighties/early nineties and perhaps the best.
This only scrapes the surface — check this page for even more, to realize how well you knew this guy without actually having known him — and it reminds me of something that I’ve always thought: that to be in a position to have one’s creative skills applied in a way that brings pleasure to a mass audience while not having to deal with the attendant fallout of mass fame at its worst is no bad thing at all. In my own very VERY small way in comparison, I feel a bit like this with my All Music Guide work — read, used, ripped-off everywhere, sometimes credited and sometimes not (I’m not being self-inflating to note this, I see it all the time!), but referred to precisely because it’s been found to be of value, and I’ve received enough kind comments and notes over time to confirm this is the case).
John Alvin worked in ‘commercial’ art, some might sneer, but damned if he didn’t make it his canvas to show more variety than some have ever shown in a lifetime. 59 is too soon to pass, I’d say, and to pass suddenly of a heart attack at that, and so in comparison to Scheider, where his life had been lived to the full and he and his loved ones had time to accept the inevitable, I find Alvin’s death more affecting, more unfortunate. That I only knew his name after he was gone was nothing compared to the fact that I knew his work — and I could see why it worked so beautifully. Rest well.
Ned Raggett Ponders It All 