Drew Struzan passed away on Monday after living with Alzheimer’s for several years. If you don’t know the name, you certainly know his work; Struzan illustrated a staggering percentage of the best-known and most iconic movie posters of the last 50 years, some of which I’ll include here.
I was lucky enough to meet Drew a couple of times, and he was a gracious and down-to-earth person, simultaneously confident in his abilities and incredibly humble, almost surprised at his own popularity. At this moment, Facebook is full of posts by people talking about his generosity, not only in giving away artwork to friends, creating paintings as gifts, but also being incredibly generous with his time in supporting and mentoring young artists, many of whom can’t help but reveal his influence in their own work.
In 1983, my friend Wally was working at a print shop that did a lot of movie posters (he had a whole roll of posters for Revenge of the Jedi that were supposed to have been destroyed after Lucasfilm changed the title), and one day he gifted me a gigantic (about 40′ x 80″) poster from The Sting II, the anemic sequel to the iconic Redford/Newman film. The single best thing about The Sting II was the poster, which hung in the hallway at my home for years. I loved the expressive portraits of Jackie Gleason, Mac Davis, Karl Malden, and Teri Garr, and the vintage styling, evocative of J. C, Leyendecker (though I didn’t yet know who that was). Eventually I noticed the name “Drew” placed discreetly in the background. I started looking for that name whenever I saw a movie poster I liked. I found it a lot. Eventually I could recognize his work on sight, but I didn’t know anything about the man.
Then, in 2015, I was invited to Floyd Norman’s 80th birthday party at Disney’s Grand Central Creative Campus in Glendale, California. I’ve known Floyd for almost 20 years through our membership in CAPS, the Comic Art Professional Society, but I was still surprised and pleased to get invited. A lot of comics and animation folks were in attendance, many of whom I know and some I wanted to meet, but the one I was most excited to discover in attendance was Drew Struzan; I found myself chatting with him. It turned out he lived about 3 miles from me, was one of Floyd’s neighbors. It also turned out he was every bit what I had hoped he would be. Anyone who tells you “never meet your heroes” needs better heroes.
A year later, CAPS chose Drew as that year’s recipient of the Sergio Award, named for co-founder Sergio Aragones. I was part of the committee that put that evening together, and I did a fun little slide-show of some of the worst movies Drew Struzan ever did a poster for. He laughed along, interjected memories and jokes about the films, and telling behind-the-scenes stories. This followed Chad Frye’s presentation on the amazing quality of Drew’s work, showing extreme close-ups of details, such as the denim texture on Marty McFly’s Levi’s in the poster for Back to the Future. My point is that it’s not often somebody brings their A game to an objectively shitty project, but Drew did it every time. The post linked above is only about half of the MST3K-level films I included in my slideshow that night, and every one of those posters was a beauty even though the movies mostly stink. He probably could have been accused of false advertising for making Popstar Private Eye (original title: Sexina) look like something worth watching.
Drew officially retired in 2008, but came out of retirement in 2012 to do a promo poster for Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, again in 2015 for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and again in 2019 to create three posters for the How to Train Your Dragon trilogy, and finally, illustrations for A Bloody Business, a novel about organized crime written by his wife, Dylan Struzan. In 2013, the documentary Drew Struzan: The Man Behind the Poster was released. Drew did his final signing in 2019 and announced he was fully retired. Unofficially, what he retired from was art directors, studio executives, deadlines, and client notes. He continued to draw and paint for as long as he was able, but he was creating his own art for his own satisfaction, never intending for any of it to be commercialized. He signed Galactic Gallery as his exclusive representative and shipped all of his art to them. You can buy original art or prints from them. Dylan Struzan also wrote a book about Drew’s Work, Oeuvre, which is gorgeous.
What none of us knew was that Drew had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s some years ago. That fact was not revealed until March of this year, when Dylan posted on Facebook, revealing that “Drew can no longer paint or sign things for you.”
I was thrilled to meet Drew the couple of times that I did, I wish there had been some excuse to get to know him better, and even though I barely knew him, I’m going to miss him. Certainly the movies will miss him.
The best to ever do it. The master of what has sadly become a lost art.
Saw the news of his passing a few days ago.
He was indeed an amazing talent; I have Dylan’s A Bloody Business as an e-book – haven’t actually read it yet (still on the virtual shelf of shame) – but I have gone through it several times just to look at Drew’s illustrations. They are quite stunning, and I wish he had illustrated more books.
And that unused ‘Revenge of the Jedi’ poster is so damn good; don’t know why the image wasn’t re-used even after the movie’s name was changed.
Billy Wilder help me; but, I actually paid money to see The Sting II, in a theater! I was visiting family, in a small Southern Illinois town (bigger than my Central Illinois hometown, though) and my brother, myself and my two male cousins went to a movie at their local theater and that was it, though I seem to recall it was part of a double feature that included some kind of spring break teen sex romp (possibly the film Spring Break). In our defense, those were our only choices available and there wasn’t much else to do. It wasn’t horrible; but, it was pretty bland and boring, which is probably worse, because you can usually laugh at horrible.