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The Wall Street Journal (08/Aug/2012) - Leaving His Logo On Hollywood

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Leaving His Logo On Hollywood

Bronx-born graphic designer Saul Bass (1920-96) literally left his mark on everything from airplanes to tissue boxes. His iconic logos for United Airlines, Quaker Oats, AT&T and Minolta, to name a few, set the standard in the postwar era of design. But today they remain cloaked in the long shadow cast by the pioneering title sequences, storyboards and other visual services he provided to filmmakers like Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and, most famously, Alfred Hitchcock. Bass helped plan the shower scene in "Psycho," designed the poster for "Anatomy of a Murder," and created classic title sequences for "Vertigo," "West Side Story," Goodfellas" and many more.

"He became the most famous graphic designer in the world because of those title sequences," said Pat Kirkham, a professor at the Bard Graduate Center and the co-author of "Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design." "He was making graphics move. It was sort of modern art on the screen."

When Bass tried his hand at filmmaking, his debut, "Why Man Creates," won the 1969 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. But his sole feature-length directing credit, "Phase IV," is largely forgotten. Released in 1974, the visually unique, allegorical tale of two scientists (Michael Murphy and Nigel Davenport) and a local girl (Lynne Frederick) under siege by an army of sentient ants, was plagued by production crises and critically panned.

"I think that was a new experience for him," said the director's son, anthropologist Jeffrey Bass. "Everything else he'd done until then was widely recognized as being great."

"Phase IV," which will screen Thursday at 92YTribeca as part of the venue's "Bastards of Hitch" series, was intended to be "an extension of all the types of film art Saul was interested in," Ms. Kirkham said. To that end, Bass assembled a dream team of collaborators including future Oscar-winning "Star Wars" production designer John Barry, screenwriter Mayo Simon, and actor Michael Murphy, known for his roles in Robert Altman's films.

But the production saddled Bass with an arduous education in the realities of studio long-form filmmaking. "I think he was flummoxed by the group-think," Mr. Murphy said. "Saul was used to coming in and saying, 'OK, we're going to make a big red 'U' on the back of your plane. If you don't get it, go somewhere else.' He had that kind of clout in the [design] world but he didn't really have it in the movie business because it was his first picture."

"Phase IV" was made under a co-production agreement dictating that the cast, crew and production locales be part of the British Commonwealth. "It was quite a deal," said Mr. Murphy, the film's sole American actor. "The picture was set in Arizona but we shot in the Rift Valley in Kenya. Then we went to London to do the interiors."

The financial advantages were offset by the handicap of spreading a modest budget over 1,000 miles. "It was a logistical nightmare," Jeffrey Bass said. "They had pieces of that production going on in three continents at the same time."

Spectacular and eerie ant photography, undertaken by insect footage specialist Ken Middleham within his suburban California workshop, was largely supervised via airmail. Despite being bitten by a local ant on set in London, Mr. Murphy had nothing but praise for his six-legged co-stars.

"My feeling was that the ants were great and we weren't so great," he said. "I'll take half the credit for not being wonderful in it." He said that post-recording the film's dialogue--a choice that, like the fictional ant intelligence, was apparently of an unknown origin--proved fatal to his performance. "Saul went home as I recall and I went in and looped every line in the picture," he said. "I was from the Robert Altman school where you didn't loop a line unless you fell down on the set or something. Ultimately we sound sort of disembodied."

A disastrous preview and subsequent altered ending further frustrated Bass. Perhaps most perplexing, though, was that the world's foremost designer wasn't allowed to sell his own film. "Saul wanted to do the ad campaign," Ms. Kirkham said. Instead, "Phase IV" was marketed with a poster illustration featuring a disembodied hand with an ant crawling from it and the words "The Day the Earth Was Turned Into a Cemetery!" hovering above.

"It's just so ironic," Mr. Murphy said. "What an offensive thing for a guy like that. That was not what that movie was about. "

Nevertheless, the curious, hypnotic appeal of "Phase IV" remains difficult to shake. "There is a real strangeness about it," Mr. Murphy said. "People look back on it now and say, 'Well, this is sort of weirdly part of another era."

Jeffrey Bass offered that the film's central theme of "how do we view the other," and "the assumption of superiority" arguably harkens back to his father's Bronx childhood. "Maybe it had something to with growing up Jewish in New York in the '30s," he said. "Your perspective on authority is different."

For Mr. Murphy, mixed feelings about the film itself are unrelated to his perspective on Bass's power as a visual artist: "He'd never really dealt with actors before," he said. "If I had been blue paint, maybe it would've been great, you know?"

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