`Seven” director David Fincher wanted to give filmgoers the willies right from the start.
“I said we definitely want people who think they’re going to see `Legends of the Fall’ to know that they’re in the wrong movie,” Fincher says. “People should realize they’re in for some evil.”
So he called on the RGA/LA design team of director Kyle Cooper and producer Peter Frankfurt to come up with an opening-credits sequence that would ambush viewers lured by its likable stars, Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.
The result is a creepy, disorienting montage that assumes the point of view of a serial killer through tight shots of his print-crammed notebooks (which he sews together with needle and thread) and split-second glimpses of him slicing his fingertips off with a razor blade.
The stunning sequence does its job and then some. Not only does it establish the movie’s dark, discomforting mood in indelible fashion, but it stands out among several new opening-title sequences that are rejuvenating an art form that seemed to be moribund.
Over the past couple of decades, constraints on budgets and an apparent lack of imagination have conspired to make most opening credits consist of simple typography running over a movie’s first scenes. But the recent, more elaborate sequences strike blows for those creative approaches that enhance a film’s content and the whole moviegoing experience.
Pablo Ferro’s sly opening credits for “To Die For” serve as both prologue and summary of the movie to follow, offering up a jumble of tabloid headlines and TV coverage of the Nicole Kidman character’s upcoming crimes. The sequence was added after initial screenings of the film indicated that viewers were puzzled by the plot.
The “Dead Presidents” credits, directed by Cooper, also use foreshadowing to highly dramatic effect. They begin with a couple of isolated shots of bank robbers in white-face on the verge of a heist that’s actually about 100 minutes away, and then the credits roll over intense closeups of money engulfed in flames.
With “GoldenEye,” British credits director Daniel Kleinman continues the tradition of elaborate James Bond sequences as the titles once again interweave with dancing women, guns and, in this case, fallen icons of the Soviet Union.
The credits for “Casino” form something of a bookend for Saul Bass, who is back in the spotlight 40 years after he established himself as the godfather of modern artistic titles with his work on “The Man With the Golden Arm.” Bass and his wife/collaborator, Elaine, designed the elegant, slow-motion sequence of a body rising and falling through flames that segue into and out of the neon lights of Las Vegas.
In cinema’s early days, titles were less extravagant. Movies generally began with a series of cards flashing on screen to list the title, cast and crew, with the star system dictating the size of the lettering and which actors appeared above or before the main title.
(Those rules became codified when the unions and studios signed their contracts in the 1940s, and most of the ever-growing list of credits moved to the end of the movie so filmgoers wouldn’t get restless waiting for the actual movie to begin.)
There was an art to these early titles as well, though it lay mostly in the typography. A biblical epic’s credits might appear in fancy calligraphy on scrolls, a pirate movie might feature the titles being hoisted on sails, and credits for literary adaptations often wound up in pages being turned within a book–in the case of the 1937 film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” a lavishly decorated book.
The buzz saw technique
Film historian/critic Leonard Maltin recalls that some of the most inventive early credits were done by Roy Seawright for Hal Roach Studios, including those for the Laurel & Hardy lumberyard farce “Busy Bodies,” in which a buzz saw slices through each title card.
“Gone with the Wind” (1939) made a big impression with the oversized title words sweeping across the screen, and that same year also saw the first Hollywood feature to open with action instead of credits: “Of Mice and Men.”
But until the mid-1950s, filmmakers still generally looked at titles as a formality to dispense with before the actual storytelling could commence. “Titles had lapsed into boring typography,” says Bass, who promptly changed the rules.
Bass already was a renowned graphic designer when director Otto Preminger hired him to design the opening-credits sequence of “The Man With the Golden Arm” (1955). It features a black screen with white lines that shoot out of the sides to form various configurations, with the titles popping up among them.
Ultimately, the lines realign in staccato movements to form a disturbingly crooked arm and hand that represent Frank Sinatra’s junkie lead character. That image, like the broken-body figure of Bass’ “Anatomy of a Murder” titles for Preminger four years later, also anchored the movie’s advertising campaign.
With “The Man With the Golden Arm,” credits were suddenly seen not just as lists but as sequences that could last a couple of minutes and contain their own form of narrative.
“Otto Preminger deserves credit for commissioning Saul Bass and believing there was value to having an interesting title sequence–that it wouldn’t detract from his film but only enhance it and set the stage,” Maltin says. “And he was willing to let it eat up some of his running time.”
The Bass-Preminger collaborations set the tone for the working relationships between graphic designers and directors, who, despite what some might assume, tend not to design their own titles.
Bass’ work with Alfred Hitchcock resulted in eye-teasing sequences for, among others, “Vertigo” (1958) and “North by Northwest” (1959).
The Bass sequences sparked a can-you-top-this spirit among filmmakers and designers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Credits director Steve Frankfurt, the father of “Seven” titles producer Peter Frankfurt, recalls, “When I was asked to do the sequence to `To Kill a Mockingbird,’ they asked me to do something that didn’t look like a Saul Bass design.”
He responded with what is considered a classic opening-credits sequence: a closeup examination of a little girl’s cigar box full of prized possessions, including a pocket watch, marbles, old coins and a crayon with which she stencils the movie’s title.
Peter Frankfurt says the titles for “Seven” were partly an homage to those of “To Kill a Mockingbird” in that they both reveal character by detailing cherished items that will come into play later.
Other groundbreakers included Maurice Binder’s James Bond titles–he projected titles onto women’s bodies in “From Russia with Love” (1963)–and “The Pink Panther” (1964), with its elaborate animated sequence that spawned a successful Saturday morning cartoon.
The Woody Allen approach
But after a while, the energy dissipated. Memorable sequences, like the zooming-through-space titles of “Superman” (1978, Steve Frankfurt again), became islands in a credits-over-scenes sea. Woody Allen championed the new simplicity with his white-on-black title screens that appear in the same typeface for each movie.
Some prefer the Allen approach. “You feel comfortable; you’re not distracted; you look forward to the film,” says Edwin Jahiel, director of Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
More recently, many prestige pictures–such as “Schindler’s List” and even “Waterworld”–have skipped the opening credits (except for a main title for “Schindler’s List”) to end the movie with a big “Directed by . . .”
Peter Frankfurt, whose firm produces title sequences as well as commercials and corporate logos, says the art of title sequences “has kind of gotten lost in the last 10 years or so. You see it reflected in the budget and post-production schedule of movies, that they don’t have enough money to do something interesting and they don’t have enough time.”
Fincher notes that he couldn’t get the approval from his studio to shoot the desired credits sequence for his last movie, “Alien 3.” And even “Seven,” he says, was “a total last-minute rush job.”
The director says he was given two weeks to get the sequence together before the movie came out, so he called on Peter Frankfurt and RGA/LA creative director Kyle Cooper, who suggested exploring the killer’s notebooks. To achieve the sequence’s jagged, disorienting effect, Cooper shot the footage on cameras from the 1950s that he jiggled while filming the titles, which he had scratched onto transparencies.
The idea of cutting everything to an eerie Nine Inch Nails musical track was Fincher’s.
Frankfurt says the 2 1/2-minute sequence cost about $200,000, “which was about 10 times what was in the budget. But in the scheme of things, it was a $30 million movie.”
The stately credits for “The American President,” created by the same graphics team, cost more, Frankfurt adds. That sequence features a tour through White House memorabilia and icons of the presidency.
Money to burn
With “Dead Presidents,” Cooper says the Hughes Brothers, who directed the film, had the idea of burning money to preview a plot point as well as to show presidents and American symbols going up in flames. But they had not been able to achieve the desired, dramatic effect themselves, so they hired Cooper, who created oversized photocopies of the money and arranged it so that the face of one president would burn off to reveal the face of another underneath.
At 33, Cooper is one of the young guns. Spike Lee, working with the New York firm of Bals, Meyer & Everett, also has created several memorable credits sequences.
But several veterans are also leading the titles renaissance. After an absence of many years, Bass and his wife, Elaine, hooked up with Martin Scorsese to design the credits for “GoodFellas” (1990), and the duo continued collaborating with the director on “Cape Fear” (1991), “The Age of Innocence” (1993) and, now, “Casino.”
“He and Elaine have an unbelievable, uncanny ability to capture the heart of your movie in such a brief moment,” says Nicholas Pileggi, who co-wrote the screenplays to “Casino” and “GoodFellas.”
For the “Casino” sequence, Saul Bass says, “we were attempting to create a metaphor for the Las Vegas of betrayal, twisted morality, greed, hubris and, in the end, self-destruction and the descent into Dante’s Inferno.”
He achieved this effect by filming a stuntman’s leap from a 40-foot-high crane at a camera speed 15 times faster than normal, so when it is slowed down, it creates an “agonized journey through the flame,” Bass says. He also shot the flames at a fast speed and then double- and triple-framed them “so they undulate rather than burn.”
Riding the wave
Pablo Ferro, whose first credits were for Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964), also is riding the current titles wave.
“What usually happens is somebody comes up with a good title, and everybody loves it, and everyone starts doing it until it wears out and then they go back to something simple,” Ferro says.
The recent creative spurt has had a snowball effect. Cooper says directors Oliver Stone and Ridley Scott approached him to do the credits for their upcoming movies after seeing “Seven.”
But for Stone’s “Nixon,” which opens Dec. 20, Cooper says he has been working on (yes, it’s the last minute again) a relatively clean set of titles to run over a complicated introductory sequence that the director has shot.
“Sometimes it’s as simple as that; we’re trying not to compete with the scene that needs to play,” Cooper says. “I loved shooting the live action for `Seven’ and `Dead Presidents,’ but I’m just as passionate about choosing a good typeface for a title.”
