“I want to make beautiful things. Even if nobody cares.” – Saul Bass

Q. What do the Girl Scouts of the USA, Quaker Oats and Martin Scorcese have in common?

A. They were all clients of graphic designer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Saul Bass

Born in the Bronx, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents, Bass pursued an interest in the arts by taking night classes at Brooklyn College with the legendary Hungarian-born designer, György Kepes. “To perceive an image,” Kepes wrote, “is to participate in a forming process; it is a creative act.” In a sense, Bass spent the next 50 years proving his teacher right. Some of his most memorable artworks consist of little more than lines and simple geometric shapes against a plain background. The viewer does the real work, assembling these elements into a coherent whole.

After graduating, Bass began work as a freelance commercial artist. He moved to Los Angeles, finding work designing movie posters and then title sequences. He also worked designing corporate logos.

“The ideal trademark is one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable. Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible.” – Saul Bass

It was the opening sequence for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) that made his name. Bass showed that this previously neglected part of a film could win over an audience before the actors uttered a word. At the time, censorship codes forbade directors from depicting drug use onscreen; knowing this, Bass designed what was essentially an abstract short film that paired long, needle-like lines with an arm—and left audiences to imagine the rest. Projectionists were given strict instructions to wait for the audience to settle before starting the film such was the integration of the title sequence with the story.

“When we were growing up and seeing movies, we came to recognize Saul’s designs, and I remember the excitement they generated within us: like Bernard Herrmann’s scores, they added a whole extra dimension to whatever picture they were part of. They made the picture instantly special. And they didn’t stand apart from the movie, they drew you into it, instantly. Because, putting it very simply, Saul was a great filmmaker.” – Martin Scorcese, from Saul Bass: A Life In Film & Design,

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).

“He would look at the film in question, and he would understand the rhythm, the structure, the mood — he would penetrate the heart of the movie and find its secret. That’s what he did with Vertigo and those spirals that just keep endlessly forming — that’s the madness at the heart of the picture, the beautiful nightmare vortex of James Stewart’s affliction.” – Martin Scorcese, from Saul Bass: A Life In Film & Design,

In 1955, Elaine Makatura came to work with Bass. By 1960 she was directing and producing title sequences, and in 1961 the two married. Saul and Elaine designed title sequences for more than 40 years, continuously experimenting with a variety of innovative techniques and effects,

Saul and Elaine Bass concentrated on other projects from the late sixties, citing film directors increased willingness to title their own films as one reason to work elsewhere.

Bass won the 1968 Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject for Why Man Creates, a 25-minute meditation on the artistic process that is a good deal more light-hearted than it sounds.

Saul Bass’ only feature, a science fiction extravaganza called Phase IV (1974), baffled most critics and failed to earn back its budget. As befits a graphic designer the imagery is excellent but the story is less commendable, in part due to studio interference. Phase IV was the first of many science fiction films in which crop circles signal an impending invasion—this one by hyper-intelligent ants. The film has now become a cult classic.

In the 1980s, Saul and Elaine were rediscovered by James L. Brooks and Martin Scorsese, who had grown up admiring their film work. For Scorsese, Saul and Elaine Bass[12] created title sequences for Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993), and Casino (1995), their last title sequence.

“You write a book of 300 to 400 pages and then you boil it down to a script of maybe 100 to 150 pages. Eventually you have the pleasure of seeing that the Basses have knocked you right out of the ballpark. They have boiled it down to four minutes flat.” – Nicholas Pileggi, co-screenwriter of Goodfellas

. .

On May 8, 2013, Bass’s 93rd birthday was celebrated by a Google Doodle, which featured animation in the styles of many of his most famous title sequences.

“There is nothing glamorous in what I do. I’m a working man. Perhaps I’m luckier than most in that I receive considerable satisfaction from doing useful work which I, and sometimes others, think is good.” – Saul Bass

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