Saul Bass

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Lore & Background

Saul Bass was born on May 8, 1920, in the Bronx, New York City, to Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents. He graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx and studied part-time at the Art Students League in Manhattan until attending night classes with György Kepes at Brooklyn College. In 1938, Saul married Ruth Cooper and they had two children, Robert in 1942 and Andrea in 1946. He began his time in Hollywood in the 1940s, designing print advertisements for films including Champion (1949), Death of a Salesman (1951) and The Moon Is Blue (1953), directed by Otto Preminger. His next collaboration with Preminger was to design a film poster for his 1954 film Carmen Jones. Preminger was so impressed with Bass's work that he asked him to produce the title sequence as well. This was when Bass first saw the opportunity to create a title sequence which would ultimately enhance the experience of the audience and contribute to the mood and the theme of the movie within the opening moments. Bass was one of the first to realize the creative potential of the opening and closing credits of a movie.

Reader's Guide

Bass became widely known after creating the title sequence for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). The subject was a jazz musician's struggle to overcome his heroin addiction, a taboo subject in the mid-1950s. Bass chose the arm as the central image, and the titles featured an animated, white on black paper cut-out arm of a heroin addict. For Alfred Hitchcock, Bass provided effective, memorable title sequences, inventing a new type of kinetic typography, for North by Northwest (1959), Vertigo (1958), working with John Whitney, and Psycho (1960). Before Bass's title sequences in the 1950s, titles were generally static, separate from the movie, and it was common for them to be projected onto the cinema curtains. In 1960, Bass wrote an article for Graphis magazine called 'Film Titles – a New Field for the Graphic Designer,' which has been revered as a milestone for 'the consecration of the movie credit sequence as a design object.' Bass once described his main goal as to 'try to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story.' Another philosophy was 'making the ordinary extraordinary,' seen in Walk on the Wild Side (1962) where an ordinary cat becomes a mysterious prowling predator. In 1955, Elaine Makatura came to work with Bass; with Spartacus (1960), she was directing and producing title sequences, and in 1961 the couple married. Saul and Elaine designed title sequences for more than 30 years, experimenting with techniques from Bunraku-style maneuvers in Spartacus (1960) to time-lapse photography in The Age of Innocence (1993). In the 1980s, they were rediscovered by James L. Brooks and Martin Scorsese. For Scorsese, they created title sequences for Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993), and Casino (1995), their last title sequence. Bass' firm also designed iconic corporate logos, including the Bell System logo in 1969, the Hanna-Barbera 'swirling star' logo in 1979, the Geffen Records logo in 1980, and AT&T Corporation's first globe logo in 1983.

Did You Know?

• Saul Bass was born on May 8, 1920, in the Bronx, New York City, to Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents.
• He graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx and studied part-time at the Art Students League in Manhattan until attending night classes with György Kepes at Brooklyn College.
• In 1938, Saul married Ruth Cooper and they had two children, Robert in 1942 and Andrea in 1946.
• Bass died from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in Los Angeles on April 25, 1996, at the age of 75.
• His firm designed the Bell System logo in 1969, the Hanna-Barbera 'swirling star' logo in 1979, the Geffen Records logo in 1980, and AT&T Corporation's first globe logo in 1983.