Speaking of movie posters, I just read on PosterWire.com that the artist John Alvin has died. There’s a more detailed article here. He was only 59.

Alvin was the man behind many of the best-remembered one-sheet designs of the ’70s and ’80s, including Young Frankenstein, Empire of the Sun, The Lost Boys, The Color Purple, and Gremlins. His posters for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Blade Runner are iconic.

As I’ve mentioned before, I started collecting one-sheets when I was working as an usher and later a projectionist for the local multiplex. Alvin was in full bloom during that period, and many of the posters he designed for movies we ran found their way into my Archives.

If you click over to this fan site, you’re sure to recognize much more of his work than what I’ve linked to here. Alvin’s style wasn’t as recognizable as Drew Struzan’s, but it also didn’t suffer from the predictable quality of Struzan’s work. (It’s always fairly easy to tell which publicity still Struzan has copied a facial expression or a pose from, even though he does magical things with the image.) Alvin’s images were frequently more graphical than portrait-like, using silhouettes instead of clear faces, for example, and clean patches of color with no detail in them. It was distinctive. And it was beautiful in its own regards.

Movie posters have always excited me, stirred my imagination, whetted my appetite for the cinematic experience to come, and reminded me of the good times I’ve had in the dark. Alvin’s posters were especially good at accomplishing those tasks. I’ll miss the work he may have done in the future.