The Philosopher's Tone: Mistaken Identities

I was reading an internet article (Lord only knows what about; I can’t remember) and I saw an ad for an upcoming movie in the sidebar. It immediately brought to mind one of the inexplicable trends in movie posters* that has always bothered me.

*When I say “posters”, I am including video covers as well since they are frequently the same image.

And no, it’s not how movies and their posters seem to use only the same two predominant colors.

Peach/Teal or Orange/Blue; remember these for future reference.

Cracked.com analyzes that phenomenon, and others. here:

www.cracked.com/article_18664_5-annoying-trends-that-make-every-movie -look-same.html

It’s also not the Superhero Three Point Landing. Although there is enough material on that subject for a whole other blog entry.

Shown: Number 1 Fan

Here is the ad that set me off.

Looking at the poster, and noticing its departure, from the usual peach-and-teal motif, I can’t help but wonder if a pouting Hollywood has a Red State/Blue State subtext in mind. Just a thought.

Do you see it? Do you know who Ben Kingsley is? If you do, chances are you won’t get confused by this poster. If you don’t (surely, someone out there doesn’t, right?), then you will believe that Ben Kingsley is a handsome young actor and Oscar Isaac is a cranky looking Nazi. (Mr. Isaac is the only Oscar to get a Golden Globe; will he become the first Oscar to get an Oscar?)

I understand that the billing order is involved with the marketing of a movie, Hollywood contracts being what they are. But with a little planning and a smidgeon of effort, it seems that something more acceptable could be worked out. There are even templates and tutorials online to help you make your own movie posters, complete with billing order rules to follow:

https://medium.com/@studiobinder/how-to-make-a-movie-poster-free-movie-poster-credits-template-8efd5637d875

But still, it happens all the time. Prepare yourself for some…well, quite a few…okay, a helluva lot of examples to follow.

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This marks the first time I have ever found a use for Will Ferrell.

Well their hair is kinda similar. I’m sure someone has already noted that Tom Hardy recycled his Bane mask from The Dark Knight Rises, so I won’t point that out here.

And it’s not like this is a new phenomenon. To Catch a Thief came out 63 years ago. You would think in all that time someone would have figured it out. But noooooo. Everyone was too busy trying to figure out other ways of enticing the viewing public into theaters: Sound, Technicolor, VistaVision, Percepto, Stereo, 3D, Cinerama*, Sensurround, Panaflex, IMAX, Dolby Surround sound, CGI, 3D again, digital HD, D-BOX, VR, and as of this writing:

Super EMAX
Laser projection
A screen 92 feet wide and over 48 feet tall
Ultra-bright crisp 4K imagery
64-channel Dolby Atmos^® immersive sound system
Cuddle chairs
1,400 powered reclining luxury chairs
Reserved seating
Stadium seating

*See How the West Was Won below.

“You know, your diamonds cost less than the popcorn here.”

Twenty some years later, they still hadn’t made any progress.

Of course the really Bad News was someone thought they needed to do a remake. Needless remakes sounds like it could be another future blog entry…hmmm…)

Dustin Hoffman doing his best Keanu Reeves impression on the far left.

I found the original photos used for the posters. The one on the left is okay, but something is different about the one on the right. I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Impressions of Keanu are not immune either.

Nobody does Keanu like Keanu. He’s Keanu in every movie he makes.

I notice they did not include the names of Carrie-Anne Moss or Joe Pantoliano, but that would have proven extra awkward as far as the billing goes since Hugo Weaving isn’t even in the picture.

Poor Brad Renfro had the same problem as Trinity in this dualistic trinity.

See how all their eyes are looking in a different direction? Brad’s name is nowhere to be seen.

Pretty amazing how John Travolta was able to hand off his gun in exchange for a portable nuke, without Jonathan Rhys Meyers moving a muscle.

I’m guessing that John plays From Paris and Jon plays With Love, but since the pictures don’t match I can’t be sure it isn’t the other way around.

Trust is something you cannot have in movie posters. Especially since they have started using review quotes from people who post on Reddit. Up next: Craigslist reviews. But that’s not what this article is about.

Frodo tries to toughen up his image by becoming Nic Cage. Nic Cage tries to make off with the bag of loot he has made from being in bad movies.

Critical acclaim doesn’t get you a pass from the old switcheroo either.

Johnny Depp stole Al Pacino’s hat after filming and has worn it ever since.

http://screencrush.com/johnny-depps-dumb-hats-ranked/

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/latest/news/g3763/johnny-depp-stylish-hats/?slide=5

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Now, I would expect bad movies to have this problem more often than good movies. But no. I had to dig deep to find some examples. Of course, some bad movies popped right out as if they wanted to show off their faults.

In the non-“Extreme Edition” the Wolverine knockoff character has normal length claws.

Am I the only one who feels bad that this was the last movie Raul Julia ever made?

Hollywood—and its overseas equivalents— have developed a few workarounds when it comes to matching names with faces. Here is one; it’s a two-fer.

Missed opportunity: they should have put his full name on it twice. (Subliminal points for having the first and last words reiterate the title.)

As I said, for some bad movies I had to go the extra mile. If ever there was a good candidate for lousing up the names, this one is it. But they didn’t even mess it up when they reversed the picture. Take a suck of that, big Hollywood.

Their characters came back from the dead, their careers not so much.

Even using a different picture altogether didn’t trip up our poster makers.

I would love to know what other movies were in the Midnight Madness Series. (Maybe I’ll look that up some time.)
You’re in luck, I did: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_nr_n_0?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A2625373011%2Ck%3A%22midnight+madness+series%22&keywords=%22midnight+madness+series%22&ie=UTF8&qid=1535296931&rnid=2941120011

I finally found a culprit, although the one on the left does a much better job of hiding it than the over-the-top, neon version on the right.

Is a crotch-level exploding delivery van somehow significant? Is that the Dead Heat we’re supposed to notice?

As I was trolling for images for Dead Heat, I found Dead Heat, which is what you would expect. What was unexpected was there is another Dead Heat.

The third version doesn’t even look like Kiefer. It’s as if they lost the first photo, the French wouldn’t let go of the second, and they resorted to using some guy they pulled in off the corner of Hollywood and Vine.

While it is remarkable that all three versions got the right names with the right faces (three stars, no less), it represents three different categories (what’s with all of the threes all of a sudden?) that emerged which will each get their own treatment. The first I have already mentioned: what happens in a group shot. The second is what I like to call the Foreign Filter. And the third is the use of Photoshop. Or a really chintzy chop-and-paste version of it. In this example, Anthony LaPaglia is exactly the same in all three pictures, Radha Mitchell is the same in two of the three and Kiefer Sutherland has a different face in each one. The initial image appears a bit rough and stark. When the French got a hold of it, in the middle, it positively reeks of polish. With the return trip to English, most of the elements were retained but the polish got tarnished…and something happened to Kiefer's face. A car accident maybe? A drunken brawl with Charlie Sheen?

The first Dead Heat was a buddy movie as was Double Impact, sort of, although that might be more of a BromCom. Our second bad movie example is also a buddy movie. And it was equally as difficult to find a mixed up poster.

Back when Mickey Rourke still looked like Mickey Rourke and people actually knew who Don Johnson was, they made a movie together called Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. (Only The Lego Movie has had such blatant product placement in the title; not even Mac and Me did it in such an in-your-face fashion.) . Calling it a bad movie is relative: while it did poorly at the box office, it does enjoy a cult following these days. May I present the image that is most associated with the movie.

The first two are spot on; the third is getting a little iffy but it works from left to right if not from top to bottom, so I’m not citing it with a violation.

The next two images still have their ducks in a row, and if you look closely you can see the photos are in fact different. In the third image, however, things break down. The names are with the right character at least and the billing order is preserved. And it’s not that the photo was accidentally reversed: the writing on Harley’s jacket reads left to right as it should.

It’s like they were purposely messing with the cameraman: they are both smoking a cigarette (Marlboros I would assume) and they switched sides; plus where did the bandana suddenly come from? We all know that’s something a Harley rider would wear…

After that things just went from bad to worse.

In the first one, Don Johnson traded in his ever present gloves (check it out: they are in every single shot) for a denim jacket. I have no idea what the fuck happened in the second one.

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Related to the Buddy Movie is the RomCom. In the standard back to back pose we see Kate Hudson and Matthew McConahghey or do we. In another example of the Foreign Filter, although in this case I’m blaming the graininess of the English version on the internet and not the poster. That’s still no excuse for the unrequested gender reassignment.

Spoiler alert: according to the the placement of the names, in the English version Kate and Matthew get together, in the Spanish version Matthew and Kate stay apart.

All of the rest of the text, even though it’s in a different language, managed to stay in its original position. The names which didn’t need to be translated? Different story. It’s the exact same font. Someone had to take the time to actually switch the names on purpose.

Having the RomCom couple switch sides in the picture does nothing to foil the plot of the evil name switchers. The switch in this case is a bit perplexing since Hugh Grant did receive top billing in the movie. It could be that by this time, Sandra Bullock’s box office power was the greater of the two, not to mention Hugh’s dalliance on the wrong side of the law.

The best RomComs always have a number in the title. (If he were standing like this, Hugh Grant might not have been arrested.)

Sandra Bullock also made a buddy movie with Melissa McCarthy. At least I think that’s Melissa McCarthy. No, that’s not Melissa McCarthy, no matter what the name says.

Well, whoever that is on the right borrowed John Travolta’s micro-nuke.

You tell me: who does the one in the middle look like more?

Making his second appearance on our list is John Travolta. (Hint: he’s not even close to being done yet.)

Before he had his own personal nuclear device, all John had was his pocket rocket, Greased Lightning.

Another repeat offender is Johnny Depp. Here we have a case where someone actually caught the mistake and tried to get it fixed.

“No! The names are in the wrong place! You need to move them!”

“Okay.”

When it comes to moving names around, it’s hard to beat The Jackal. It also gives us an insight on how Hollywood decisions are made.

Richard Gere: “I liked the red light in Pretty Woman much better…”

In the first poster, if we interpret it strictly from top to bottom, it is correct: Richard Gere is the top, Bruce Willis is the bottom. But it doesn’t work. Gere’s name covers the shadow of the gun and the movie’s title obscures the red light. The second one is better. They played with the color and texture a little, too, while they were in there (peach and teal, anyone?), and there’s not as much difference between the height of the names. But you can’t have the names covering any part of the actors, and the not-quite-as-red-as-before light is only half visible. The third poster: perfection. They opted against the color and texture changes, but all the objectives have been met. You can see the gun, the actors, and the once-again red light. But most importantly, Bruce Willis’ name is in first place no matter how you look at it. The only thing better would be if Richard Gere’s name were somewhere close to the bottom saying “also starring” or “with”. But Gere would have backed out of the project at that point. The Art of the Deal.

It’s a RomCom…you were expecting them to face each other?

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Speaking of faces, another thing that seems to confuse poster makers is not merely the placement of the stars, but how much of them you can see. This is the Half Face Phenomenon. (Thank God it’s not the Half Moon Manifestation.)

Craigslist was a game changer, for sure.

When the Half Face Phenomenon meets the Foreign Filter, anything can happen. Just like The Ides of March.

The names could be right; I can’t tell one way or the other. [See “workaround”]

Well, look who’s back for another go at it. Because they are both repeat offenders, they decided to cut their losses by only using half their faces.

Can you imagine the amount of sheer crazy that must have been on the set of that movie?

In the foreign language example below, they tried to make up for the half face by duplicating the image. The second one took half the duplicated image and left us with a Picasso-esque mess. In the bottom image someone figured out if you multiply the image enough times, the dimwit making the poster might realize who is who. The ploy may have worked but that is way too much Travolta/Cage to take in all at once.

Some brilliant marketer found that if matching names to faces is that difficult, just don’t use the faces at all. That strategy works even when native speakers are looking at foreign posters. That reasoning gave us this:

“I couldn’t really say, officer. The sun was in my eyes.”

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I alluded to it before with the second Dead Heat movie. If you can’t get it right with only two stars, what happens when you have more? Men in Black 3 (in 3D! Hey it worked for Jaws…) answers that question for us. There is no hope.

If MIB 3 added a third star to the two in MIB II (as well as not using Roman numerals), shouldn’t the first movie been Man in Black? Of course then you would have the whole Johnny Cash thing…)

For The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, it was the title itself that got mangled here. The Foreign Filter kicked in though and prevented getting the billing wrong, by removing the names entirely, along with the “and”.

Well, actually, that’s a fib. The original title of the spaghetti western in Italian was The Good, the Ugly and the Bad. Of the 48 countries in the IMDB’s list of alternate titles for the movie, 32 went with the Good, Bad, Ugly order, either with or without the articles or the conjunction. Cuba, Puerto Rico (not really a country…), and Slovenia were the only three to strictly follow the Good, Ugly, Bad order. The remaining countries split the difference using both orders at different times or in different regions where different languages are spoken (Serbia, Belgium, and Spain), or retitled the movie altogether.

There were some interesting variations included in the list, replacing one or more of the three words. Translations give us the following permutations.

The ambiguous The Good, the Bad, and the Evil (Russia, Croatia, and Serbia); the difference between Good and Bad is nothing compared to the difference between Bad and Evil

The Welcome, the Bad, and the Ugly (Greece); such a gracious country

The Good, the Evil, and the Heartache (Norway’s TV title)

The also slightly ambiguous The Good, the Hard, and the Vagabond (Belgium’s Flemish title); let’s assume the “Hard” is referring to the Bad one’s heart and not some other body part, shall we?

The Good, the Ugly, and the Evil (Slovenia)

The Good, the Ugly, and the Rude (Yugoslavia’s [back when there was one] Serbian title); because there is no greater Evil than rudeness

The Good, the Dirty, and the Evil (Slovenia’s TV title)

In renaming the movie, there were varying degrees of creativity. A number of countries opted for variants of the film’s working title: The Two Magnificent Beggars.

The Magnificent Rogues (the UK)

Two Glorious Rats [or Rascals or Scoundrels] (Austria and Germany)

Some were less derivative, but also less imaginative.

Three Men in Conflict (Brazil); a collective yawn is heard throughout the land in anticipation of a film with such an epic name

The Man with No Name 3: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (a world-wide English language release)

And leave it to the Japanese to come up with the best version of all: Gunman of the Profane Sunset.

What I found interesting about the next two was not the billing order, but that Old Glory is absent from the American version but shows up prominently in the Spanish one.

I found these two images where a reverse Foreign Filter had an interesting effect.

Up top, the Terran version; on the bottom, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Go to Mars.

Next up is the potential Spoiler-in-the-Poster problem that some movies fall victim to.

Really Clint was just using these as a pitch to make Hang ‘Em High two years later.

Taken in sequence, the posters tell a story, In the first we have a noose, in the second the noose frames Eli Wallach’s face (but Lee Van Cleef might shoot him before the hanging can commence), in the third the noose has found its target (with two chalk outlines representing Eastwood and Van Cleef? see how the hair is different for each one?), and in the fourth Wallach looks like he’s done for. Guess I don’t have to watch the movie now: I know how it ends. (But I have seen the movie and I do know how it ends.) The fifth poster is offered merely as a red herring. Interesting that, of the three principles of the movie, Van Cleef is the only one not shown about to die…

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All things considered the Name Game could have been much worse for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. That being the case, let’s up the ante and see what a Four-Star movie can do.

Back for his fourth appearance on our list is John Travolta. The billing order presents quite a dilemma for this one.

“Did they say, ‘switch the title and the tagline’, or ’switch the first two names’? Eh; screw it. I’ll do both. That way I can’t miss.”

In the first poster the billing order is correct. I can only imagine how much fun the contract negotiations were for this. This issue comes in where there’s no way the box office power is going to appear anywhere but front and center. The first one tries hard, but is only able to get two of the names out of place. The second one manages to get three out of the four wrong, plus messing up the billing order. Only the unflappable William H. Macy, arguably the least famous member of the quartet, escapes unscathed. Surely we can do better than that.

Ahhh. Much better. Four stars, not a single one in the right place. I knew someone would come through for me.

Again with everyone looking in a different direction? The direction they were looking for was where their careers would go after this. Wanna guess who the big winner was? Stallone only made 4 movies over the next three years: two cameos (one of them in an unreleased film starring his brother Frank), one of the voices in Antz, and finally a reasonable hit in 2000 with Get Carter. Liotta made a total of 8 movies during the same period, including a TV movie about The Rat Pack playing Old Blue Eyes, and a gate guard in Muppets from Space. De Niro did reasonably well with 10 movies to his credit, but one of those was The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle as Fearless Leader, so really that counts as two minus points. The winner here is Harvey Keitel, which should surprise no one familiar with his career, coming in with a whopping 15 movies, playing everyone from Harry Houdini to Elvis (maybe) to (3?) CPO Klough in U-571, a movie that couldn’t exist without numbers and letters. The secret to his success? He’s a man on a mission who I believe has never turned down any part offered to him (The original Bad Lieutenant is a shit storm of “OMG he did that?”). He currently has five movies in post-production, another one in the works and just two released this year. The man is 79 years old…

It couldn’t take forever before a Bollywood movie showed up here. This Indian film about New York (mental note: I gotta see if I can find this on Netflix…) has posters with delightful issues. Well, delightful to me. I have always admitted to being strange.

“Look how well we fit in with our Preppy clothes, twenty years too late.”

[To be fair, there are still some who cling to this fashion trend 30+ years later. I still see occasional Mullets, and look forward to the demise of the Man Bun.]

Here we have four stars, at least one of whom should be familiar to you if you’ve seen Life of Pi. The tagline of the third poster (the first’s tagline reads: “The world what US has become post 9/11”, so not really helpful) lets us know the movie is about three friends (meaning someone in the picture is not friendly). In the first poster, unless you know the actors, you can only be sure that at least two of the names are with the wrong faces, because “Katrina” has a beard and mustache (hint: this is not a Todd Browning movie).

As it turns out—especially if you do know who Irrfan Khan is—all four names are mismatched. And the whitest sounding name does not go with the whitest looking face. The Foreign Filter solution was again simply to remove the names of the stars, this time replacing them with the Presenter, the Producer, the Director, and the Website. It’s up to you to figure out which name belongs with whom. In the third version the two pairs of actors have miraculously switched places without moving (shades of From Paris with Love). Instead of using the opportunity to correct the billing order, they reiterated the Presenter, the Producer, and the Director; but the Website is gone, so at least we know who wasn’t the friend. But using the billing order from the first poster would still have been wrong. In fact neither of the composites we are presented with, nor the name order of the first poster match the actual billing order which is Neil Nitin Mukesh, John Abraham, Katrina Kaif, Irrfan Khan. Bollywood Bollix.

But there’s something else. As we progress through the posters (and I didn’t not alter these images in any way), we see the strangely elongated faces of the first poster evolve through the second until at last showing up with normal proportions in the third. So, props for seeing a problem and correcting it.

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Because no one understands excess like Hollywood, and nobody understood Hollywood excess like MGM, the studio deemed it necessary in 1962 to create the Western to end all Westerns. (Fortunately, Clint stepped in and kept the genre alive and well for another decade, until social awareness happened due to the damn hippies, and wholesale Indian slaughter fell out of fashion. To his credit, Clint wasn’t real big on Cowboy and Indian stories.) Did you think four stars could create chaos in the credits? Try multiplying that by six!

How the West Was Won told the story of four generations of a family over the course of five decades, by three directors in five “chapters”: The Rivers (1839), The Plains (1851), The Civil War (1861–1865), The Railroad (1868), and The Outlaws (1889). With a cast of 24 stars, the billing order was handled alphabetically…in two parts. Apparently some “Great Stars” are not as “great” as others. So if you were in the “superstar” category (a term not quite in vogue yet, but about to be), you got your face on the poster and were placed in alphabet 1 (alphabet A?) If you were a lesser star, you ended up in small print in alphabet 2 (B?), or left off the video cover entirely. Big enough to make the A-list were: Carroll Baker, Lee J. Cobb, Henry Fonda, Carolyn Jones, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Robert Preston, Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart, Eli Wallach, John Wayne, and Richard Widmark. That’s 13.

The movie was narrated by A-lister Spencer Tracy, but since he didn’t appear in the movie he was credited out of sequence and did not appear in the posters, acting as sort of a transition to the remaining 10, working in the Twilight Zone of character actors: Brigid Bazlen, Walter Brennan, David Brian, Andy Devine, Raymond Massey, Agnes Moorehead, Henry (Harry) Morgan, Thelma Ritter, Mickey Shaughnessy, and Russ Tamblyn. Poor John Larch, Harry Dean Stanton, and Lee Van Cleef weren’t even billed. Stanton and Van Cleef, of course, went on to make names for themselves, but I had never heard of Brigid Bazlen before researching this article. That comes as no surprise since she was only in three films, four television series, and sadly died of cancer at the age of 44.

As a bonus you get to see Henry Fonda’s impression of Sam Elliot (top center) and The Duke busting out his W.C. Fields (lower left).

But we’re here about the posters. In our first example (which I believe is from a video cover, made decades after the movie), we find absolute perfection: the alphabet concept worked! Working from the top down there is a one to one correspondence of names to faces. Unless you want to count the complete absence of Spencer Tracy, it can’t get any better. But as noted above, that might not be a foul. Turning back the clock to the promotional posters of the time, however, reveals a dismal jumble, which will only get worse as we progress.

And not all of the posters were as polished looking as they could be, considering the enormous investment the studio was gambling with.

The poster on the right looks like it was done by someone who failed their course in Police Sketch 101.

Combining the chapters and the alphabetic listing was a formula for disaster. And the math doesn’t work out very well either, trying to divide up 14 names (one without a face) by five chapters. As if it mattered anyway. The poster on the right is for the soundtrack, so now we are to match the songs with the faces? And if you look closely, you can already see the color printing starting to deteriorate.

Lobby cards fell victim to all the same issues as their smaller relatives, and added some of their own. I know what the top of the poster is supposed to say, but I still see, “For the first time in and full stereophonic sound 70mm”. Bad visual design. Now let’s take an even closer look.

Once you take out the names, the poster on the left turns out to be a beautifully rendered illustration for each of the chapters. The one on the right was obviously a crayon drawing done by one of the studio exec’s illegitimate children to keep the little bastard quiet for a couple of hours.

Posters were made of the individual chapters as well.

They all look like they could be the box covers for Milton Bradley board games.

Seriously though, nobody was quicker than Milton Bradley to capitalize on fad TV programming except Disney.

During the 50s and early 60s, Milton Bradley had board games based on the following western themed TV shows: Annie Oakley, Branded, Buckaroo!, Cheyenne, Have Gun Will Travel, Hopalong Cassidy, Shotgun Slade, The Deputy, The Fastest Gun, The Huckleberry Hound Western Game, The Legend of Jessie James, The Lone Ranger, The Quick Draw McGraw Wild West Chase, The Rifleman, and Wells Fargo. I was going to post images, but who has that kind of time? And I bet there were others (if you count other game companies, there were).

Notice how badly MGM is pushing Cinerama? Cinerama was a prohibitively expensive new technology that required the movie to be shot by three cameras simultaneously, and shown using three projectors simultaneously on specially altered screens that only a few theaters could afford to install. The studio was hoping the immersive experience of its day would catch fire. Exactly two feature films were done using this process, so I’d say it didn’t spark. (The other was The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.) Studios went to a cheaper single camera versions, the one you’re most likely to be familiar with being “Ultra” Panavision.

The chapter background art got recycled. A lot.

Uh oh, Metro Goldwyn Mayer and Cinerama are in the same size type (no one knew what the hell a “font” was back then). Could it be they already knew the process was fading before even took off? “Let’s start pushing Metrocolor instead. And maybe, for the first time in and full stereophonic sound 70mm?”

But pushing such wordy features took its toll on the ink budget and the posters became more and more drab and monochromatic.

“Just because we like our kitchen appliances in Olive Drab, doesn’t mean we want our posters that way!” (Wait , does that poster say "Technicolor"? I thought it was in Metrocolor. I can't watch it not knowing which one it is.)

It made especially good sense to use a purely visual process like Cinerama to push the movie’s sound track. But you and I know the sound track was pushing Cinerama. I was trying to be sarcastic there.

I can’t even be sure any of the songs on this album were in the sound track…because they don’t tell us what they are. I’m thinking quick knockoff cash grab using existing music by famous artists with a mildly western theme.

Zeppelin had the definitive version though.

I actually own this album. And saw them live. It’s really good if you are into Christian Rock. No, I mean Rock. Not Pop that pretends to be Rock.

Video covers started simplifying the brand, losing all connections with the stars and the chapters, getting back to the basics of the covered wagon.

Cinerama invades the home: you need three disc players to play the three disc special edition simultaneously on three TV screens.

Ultimately, the minimalist approach yielded mono- and dichromatic scenes of dead prairie grass (but they did get the billing order right), and drawings one step up from stick figures.

You had to buy three copies of the book to get the full Cineramatic literary experience.

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As I was compiling this list and noticing all the folks showing up more than once, I found myself wondering if the repeat offenders ever worked together. Johnny Depp, Sandra Bullock, and Jean-Claude Van Damme never worked with any of the others. Depp came close; Robert De Niro was one of the executive producers for Public Enemy, but the two have never acted together.

Partying together does not count as “work”, no matter what Hollywood thinks.

Not to worry though. Nicolas Cage, Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones, and John Travolta have shared some screen time with at least two of the possible three partners.

Cage and De Niro have both made films with Jones and Travolta, but not with each other, and Jones and Travolta have each made movies with Cage and De Niro, but not with each other.

It’s strange that Nic Cage and Bobby De Niro never made a movie together because Nicolas Cage is a Coppola, so there’s the whole Godfather connection they never capitalized on. I don’t see anything odd about Tommy Lee and Vinnie Barbarino never crossing paths. I just don’t see the perpetually sour and dour looking Mr. Jones having much to do with the alternately bubbly or sociopathic Mr. T. In fact, I can almost picture Agent K giving the Scientologist a disapproving side-eye were they ever to meet. We’ve already covered Face/Off so let’s see what else is out there.

Robert De Niro and Tommy Lee Jones were both in The Family with Michelle Pfeiffer. I can certainly think of worse ways of earning a living.

Yeah, sure, they got Pfeiffer and De Niro reversed, but check out Tommy Lee playing the parts of both children.

The poster immediately brought to mind another. Not only is the color scheme virtually the same, but so is the flow of the design as well as the rough edges. Pfeiffer and De Niro end up playing Jason Patric’s head; if their heads are his glasses, and their clothes make up the rest of his face, color scheme reversed. Then there are the children in the background with the blonde girl picking up a very blonde Kiefer Sutherland’s role and the dark haired boy on the far right playing the dark haired boy on the far right. That leaves the tilted tennis racket portraying the tilted Jamie Gertz, although the tilt is going the wrong way, and the black German Shepherd Dog as the epaulet Patric’s black leather jacket; you can almost see the tongue hanging out of the epaulet.

De Niro teamed up with Travolta in Killing Season.

Is letting everyone know it’s from the same director as Daredevil and Ghost Rider a good marketing strategy? I’m guessing Travolta got the part because of the Nicolas Cage connection.

In the first two posters on the left, De Niro does to Travolta, what Travolta did to Jonathan Rhys Meyers in From Paris with Love: he’s wearing different clothes, holding a different gun differently, and is now behind John, before John can even blink an eye. I haven’t seen the movie, but if De Niro’s Ninja skills are that good, he’s a cinch to win. And yes, the billing order is correct, both in matching the picture and the actual billing order of the movie: De Niro surrendered first place to Travolta. Didn’t see that coming. Ninja Bobby strikes again. The third version of the poster has the names reversed (“Okay I’ll take second, but only if I get one poster with my name first.”), but we cannot be sure who’s who in the picture.

Did I say “From Paris with Love”? Not only is it the same gun, it’s the same hand holding it, which means Travolta has a reach-around super power, possibly giving him the edge in Killing Season after all.

I knew a movie this good had to have at least one instance where we have a name issue, and my hope was rewarded.

Never bring a bow to a gunfight.

Am I the only one who thought of this when I heard the title “Killing Season”?:

Not pictured, Elmer Fudd.

Here’s what I feed my dogs. So, credit where credit is due, Elmer.

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Tommy Lee Jones and Nicolas Cage appeared together in Fire Birds with Sean Young. (And I thought the crazy-on-set was amazing in Face/Off.) The billing order problem popped almost immediately.

The Foreign Filter was especially active on this one.

Someone got happy with the fade-out effect.

“First, let’s put some shades on Tommy Lee, because you know, he’s cool.”

“Next let’s use different pictures of the stars.”

“Okay, let’s put Cage in the middle, only remember that the middle one always get the shades, which is fine because Nic is almost as cool.”

“Then we…well, fuck, where did everyone go?”

The Germans and the Swedes immediately went to work to fix this problem.

The Germans: “Just put new pictures in yellow highlighted boxes that have no thematic connection to the poster.”

The Swedes: “Think outside the box; reverse everything, go with blue instead of orange and put shades on everyone but the middle one.”

Of course, with all the billable hours spent reworking the posters, money was starting to run short and they could only afford to show two of the three stars, and later only name two.

None of which explains what is going on with Sean Young’s hair in any of them. It’s a very short do; how does it manage to look messed up and different in every single shot?

Fire Birds caught a bit of flack for being a rip off of Top Gun, which they must have known was coming, since in at least three of the images above, its similarity to Top Gun is specifically mentioned as a selling point. But the rip offs didn’t end there. The poster designs were intended to remind us of another war themed movie.

The posters for Apocalypse Now basically fell into variations of one of these two.

I don’t care what anyone says, I know the real stars of the movie were the Hueys.

I don’t know why, but the one in the middle frightens me more than most horror movies.

Even though he received third billing, Martin Sheen carried the bulk of the movie. In at least one video release this was finally recognized. Second-billed Robert Duvall never got his own movie poster, but posters from scenes in the movie on the other hand popped up and the actor was always ready to sign them for fans. After all, if you’re going to drop a quote from the movie, chances are good that it was one he uttered.

“I love the smell of bacon in the morning; smells like teen spirit.”

But since Duvall was never on any of the movie posters, I won’t be able to share this one with you. It would have added to De Niro’s repeat offender total…

“I gotta confess, Bobbie, I liked The Deer Hunter better than Apocalypse Now.”

“Really, Bob? I was going to say the same thing.”

Some poor sap out there thought this was from Apocalypse Now and was trying to sell it on eBay or Etsy. Some other poor sap probably bought it thinking it was too.

The mystery remains though: why would anyone have made an art poster—stretched on canvas—of Fire Birds.

This brings us to the dilemma of which poster design did Kong: Skull Island steal from? Did they go to the source material or the derivative one?

You know the real reason Kong is pissed off is because there is no Fay Wray, right?

And I could be wrong about the whole Apocalypse Now theory. Since Fire Birds was a rip off of Top Gun, why not use their poster as inspiration?

Translation of the French tagline: “We’re not Fire Birds!”

The poster also lets us know that the film is from the Producer of Flashdance and Beverly Hills Cop, and when you think about they really are the same movie.

But then, did Tom Cruise steal from himself or was he emulating Brando eclipsing the sun?

Eclipse-a-Sun Now: He will make you smell his Napalm

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I cannot end this article using a Tom Cruise movie. The list could go on and on. There so many movies I could have included, perhaps better than the ones I used. Quite a few are listed at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MisplacedNamesPoster , something I did not become aware of until after I started writing this blog entry. So while a couple of my examples also appear on their list, once I found out about it, I purposely tried to steer away from using the same ones.

Here are a few parting shots I found too late in the game.

I looked for the im-Pure Adrenaline Edition, but surprisingly there is no pornographic parody of it.

Ah, what might have been. If only Keanu hadn’t turned down the “opportunity” to star in the stinker on the right. He could have been on this list a third time. Sandra Bullock could have made her third and possibly fourth appearance. Jason Patric could make number 2 (oh wait, the second Speed installment really was a “number two”). I could have included Dennis Hopper, who was also in Apocalypse Now. There could have been Tom Cruise Control jokes. Penelope Cruz Control jokes (hang on, she’s about to show up here). Alas, not to be.

Daryl Hannah might have played both parts in the Japanese version, a la Van Damme, in which case the one on the right would be only half wrong…

The sad part is, I bet they get this a lot in real life.

Movie history trivia: the names would be correct if we’re talking about the horses; they named their horses after each other while bonding over bourbon one night.

Shouldn’t this read “Italian Hustle”? And is it really okay to use another movie’s title as the tagline? Although L’Apparenza Inganna didn’t come out until four years later, so I guess the question is, is it okay to use another movie’s tagline as your title…

Some movie titles seem like they are begging to be on this list. But sadly their posters wouldn’t comply.