As a Star Wars poster collector, I'm often asked which poster would be the last to go if I ever decided to sell the lot of them, which easily consists of hundreds. For me, there's no question -- the 1978 Style "D". Commonly called the "Circus poster" by fans because of its retro big-top-genre look, I've always admired its ability to capture essentially what Star Wars is -- a perfect mix of old-world adventure, new-world technology, and classic craftsmanship. The inventiveness of the design is also a stand-out -- the "pasted-on" look was actually devised ad-hoc to accommodate the credit block at the bottom, producing an aesthetically perfect composition. For me, artists Charles White III and Drew Struzan struck the gold standard for all that a movie poster should be.
But it was an anomaly -- no other Star Wars poster attempted to approach the spirit of the Style "D" (well, the IMAX Clones poster came close), since marketing of the films took a different tack in subsequent campaigns. But with the saga complete and the final chapter -- Revenge of the Sith -- donning a bit of the the original trilogy's luster, I thought the time was right to resurrect the Circus poster.
I wondered how the original "D" composition might look if Luke and Leia were replaced by Anakin and Padmé, with a younger Obi-Wan looking on from the fringe? And what if we kept the Star Wars logo at the top, and used the small blurb section in front of the characters for the title? Finally, what if we mirrored the composition so the two posters could be displayed together, book-ending the saga?
The concept nagged me for two years until Jon Freel of StarWarsShop asked me if I'd be interested in working with artist Matt Busch to come up with a poster design for them. The planets had aligned -- I knew Matt to be a top-tier artist who had the style and skill to pull off a re-imagined Circus poster, and was a hardcore Star Wars fan to boot.
I've long admired Matt's work, and was so impressed with his illustrations three years ago that Steve Sansweet and I included one of his earlier pieces in The Star Wars Poster Book. After describing my concept to Matt, he was instantly on board -- I think his first rough sketch must have arrived a day after our first conversation. In it, he'd added Grievous, Yoda, Chewbacca, the droids and the speeder bike at the bottom, and brilliantly angled Anakin's saber to mimic the rope from the original. On the first attempt we'd pretty much locked all the characters and components for the poster, although we'd tweak their poses here and there as the composition evolved.
Matt was looking forward to the range of techniques he'd get to try out on the poster. "One of the wonderful things about the original Style "D" poster from 1978," he explains, "was Charles White III and Drew Struzan's choice to use multiple painting styles throughout the piece. White used a slick airbrush look for many of the mechanical looking characters and vehicles, making the landspeeder almost look like a hot rod! Struzan went with a classic J. C. Leyedecker style for main characters Luke, Leia, and Han, while using a sketchy color pencil rendition of Obi-Wan for his faux ripped add-on. I did my best to emulate these styles for the appropriate characters to make this new poster match as closely as possible."
The image did present a few challenges, specifically with Padmé's pose and Grievous' lightsaber.
"While I loved the image of Padmé wielding a blaster," says Busch, referring to an early concept, "the truth was becoming more and more obvious: Padmé never actually holds a blaster in Revenge of the Sith. In the concept sketch stage, I ended up drawing Padmé five times over until we found the perfect look that we wanted. Of course I could draw Natalie Portman all day, so who was I to complain!"
Placing Padmé in a neutral pose with her back to Anakin quietly suggested their growing separation, which is also underscored by Anakin's open-palm Force-push (Luke's hand embraced Leia in the original). The Force-push also preserved that strong horizontal offered by Leia's outstretched arm in the 1978 poster.
Grievous' saber was also extremely tricky, since we were trying to emulate Vader's from the White/Struzan version, which fades out around half its actual length. Paul Michael Kane, who'd masterfully devised the logo and credits to exactly match the style and font of the original, came to the rescue by digitally painting in the saber to just the right opacity, chroma, and length.
With just a few more tweaks to the composition (Matt subtley aimed Yoda's glare at Obi-Wan, who appears distraught) we had our Sith Circus poster. I was glad to discover that it displays rather nicely by itself or to either side of the original Style "D", giving one the choice of placing the prequels first or last -- an order still up for debate in terms of viewing preference.
The edition size for this exclusive one-sheet has been set at just 1,000. Keep an eye out for the November-December issue of Art Scene International magazine (#77) -- Matt Busch discusses the full evolution of the poster in a 12-page article!
