This is the scarce Posters and Toys variant of the 2011 screen print by Tyler Stout for the much-loved Coen Brothers classic, The Big Lebowski. Jeff Bridges stars as The Dude, a lifelong slacker who also happens to share his name with a millionaire philanthropist with a trophy wife who owes money to a shady pornographer. A pair of hired goons break into his place, rough him up and urinate on his rug. When the goons realise they have the wrong man they leave The Dude alone but, after consulting with his friends Walter (a memorable turn by John Goodman) and Donny (Steve Buscemi), he decides to seek out the real Lebowski to seek compensation for the rug, but things start to spiral out of control when the wife is kidnapped and he agrees to help secure her return.

To say the film has become something of a cultural phenomenon since its release in 1998 would be an understatement. As well as a worldwide legion of fans, there’s the annual Lebowski-Fest, which started in 2002 in Louisville, Kentucky and has since been held in several other cities. Jeff Bridges iconic ‘The Dude’ character is even the focus behind a form of religion called Dudeism.

I’d have a hard time choosing between this and Fargo as my favourite Coen Brothers film, although Raising Arizona and Barton Fink are also strong contenders.

I recently spotted this rather excellent GIF.

Unique artwork on this poster for the Japanese release of the much-loved Coen Brothers classic, The Big Lebowski. To say the film has become something of a cultural phenomenon since its release 13 years ago would be an understatement. There’s the annual Lebowski-Fest, which started in 2002 in Louisville, Kentucky and has since been held in several other cities. Jeff Bridges iconic ‘The Dude’ character is even the focus behind a form of religion called Dudeism.

I have a hard time choosing between this and Fargo as my favourite Coen Brothers film, although Raising Arizona and Barton Fink are also strong contenders.

The image on this poster is a shot from the brilliant dream sequence, after The Dude has his drink spiked by Jackie Treehorn. It’s clear that the designer was experimenting with 3D text effects in Photoshop (v4.0, as it would have been at the time).

I recently spotted this rather excellent GIF.

As well as the film posters I also have a handful of other film-related, paper-based memorabilia that I’ve picked up over the years. I thought I may as well share some of this material in the same way that I’ve been sharing the posters. Some of these items can be scanned rather than photographed.

First up is this original program and cinema ticket for one of my favourite films, John Carpenter’s The Thing. The program would have been available in the cinemas whilst the film was showing. I scanned each page separately and then used Photoshop to recombine the pages since most of them worked as double spreads.

My belief is that the stub is a standard cinema ticket, not a special printing for the premiere. I’ve included a scan of the back where you’ll notice an ink stamp that would have covered the removed portion too.

A Japanese friend translated the text below the title for me and it says:

Directed by John Carpenter/ Starring Kurt Russell
<Colour film>
Universal Pictures / Distributed by CIC ￥1000

The Japanese title is 遊星からの物体X – which translates as ‘X The Thing’.

Note that some of the pages feature strange anomalies due to the dots of the printing being picked up by the scanner. This most obviously shows up as a kind of moire effect on some of the images.

Whilst researching I also found this brilliant cover on the Japanese Laserdisc release of The Thing.

The Japanese B2 poster for The Thing can be seen here.

This year the Alamo Drafthouse cinema in Austin, Texas celebrated the 30th anniversary of the summer of 1982, a period they dubbed ‘the greatest summer of movies…ever’. It’s not hard to see why when, in the space of three months, films like E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Mad Max 2,  Tron, Poltergeist and John Carpenter’s The Thing were released in cinemas. A series of screenings have taken place over the past few months and for several of these shows a limited edition screen printed poster was created by the folks at Mondo, the celebrated offshoot of  the Drafthouse.

Perhaps the most exciting of these was the one created for my favourite film of all time, John Carpenter’s The Thing. Mondo surpassed everyone’s expectations for the poster by harking back 30 years and working directly with the legendary artist Drew Struzan who was responsible for the fantastic one sheet for the film. Using the original painted artwork, Drew and the Mondo team were able to create a screen print of the classic image; a perfect choice to celebrate the anniversary of the film’s release.

Announcing the poster, Movies.com carried out an exclusive interview with Struzan and it’s an absolute must-read for fans of the artist and his work. One of the most interesting parts of the interview sees Struzan recalling the creation of the original poster:

“I got a phone call, the simplest phone call I ever got, saying, “We have a job, we want to know if you can do it, the catch is we need it by tomorrow.””

After agreeing to the ridiculously tight deadline, Struzan remembers getting to work:

“It was a very odd experience. I got an immediate concept, which is not unusual for me; I usually have something roving around in my mind. I dressed up in a winter snow outfit and my wife took a Polaroid of me. This was 30 years ago, back in the stone age when the only way to communicating a hundred miles away was the telephone or the fax machine. So I did the drawing and I faxed it back to the studio and they said, “Fine. We need it by tomorrow morning.” I went to work.”

And the result is this iconic image that perfectly captures the mood of the film and stands out as one of Struzan’s best poster designs, which is no mean feat when you consider the artist’s incredible output over several decades.

Around the time of the release, the website Machinima released a brilliant three-part documentary called ‘Limited Run: Mondo’s Modern Classic’ that features the process of creating this poster and includes interviews with Struzan and John Carpenter. Unfortunately, as of 2021, I can no longer find it online, which is a great shame.

This is the scarce international one sheet for the original release of the much-loved Coen Brothers classic, The Big Lebowski. Jeff Bridges stars as The Dude, a lifelong slacker who also happens to share his name with a millionaire philanthropist with a trophy wife who owes money to a shady pornographer. A pair of hired goons break into his place, rough him up and urinate on his rug (as reflected in the sunglasses on this poster). When the goons realise they have the wrong man they leave The Dude alone but, after consulting with his friends Walter (a memorable turn by John Goodman) and Donny (Steve Buscemi), he decides to seek out the real Lebowski to seek compensation for the rug, but things start to spiral out of control when the wife is kidnapped and he agrees to help secure her return.

To say the film has become something of a cultural phenomenon since its release in 1998 would be an understatement. As well as a worldwide legion of fans, there’s the annual Lebowski-Fest, which started in 2002 in Louisville, Kentucky and has since been held in several other cities. Jeff Bridges iconic ‘The Dude’ character is even the focus behind a form of religion called Dudeism.

I’d have a hard time choosing between this and Fargo as my favourite Coen Brothers film, although Raising Arizona and Barton Fink are also strong contenders.

I recently spotted this rather excellent GIF.

This is one of two Japanese B2 posters for the release of the 1974 drama The Klansman that marks a low point in the careers of the main participants involved and, in my opinion, deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of film history. British director Terence Young (best known for his work on the first two James Bond films and Thunderball) helms this tale of racial tension in a small Southern town that has a large Ku Klux Klan contingent. Lee Marvin plays the lone Sheriff of the town who has to deal with the fallout when a white woman is raped, apparently by a black man. Tensions are escalated when a lone gunman (played by O.J. Simpson) decides to stir things up with the Klan by shooting white townsfolk with a sniper rifle. Richard Burton plays a local landowner who has long opposed the views of the Klan and harboured black people on his land but he gets drawn into the conflict with deadly consequences.

There are many issues with the film, including a confusing script that was clearly trying to imbue the film with something of a social justice message but bungles it badly, and all scenes involving the Klan are cringeworthy and obviously massively politically incorrect. The performances from the two leads are also pretty terrible with Lee Marvin mumbling and drawling through all of his scenes looking like a man who wishes he was elsewhere. Richard Burton also phones his performance in, with an accent that attempts Southern American but ends up sounding altogether wrong, and he also affects a limp in some scenes that disappears in others. Legend has it that the two men were both drunk during the entire shoot and that might explain things. It also doesn’t help that the only version of the film available on home video has been badly cut to remove a lot of the violence and a pivotal rape scene.

This Japanese poster features artwork unique to the Japanese campaign. Seito is one of my favourite Japanese artists who was responsible for several fantastic illustrated posters during the 1970s and 1980s. Little is known about the man himself, even in his native country.

To see the other posters I’ve collected by Seito click here.

This is one of two Japanese B2 posters for the release of the 1974 drama The Klansman that marks a low point in the careers of the main participants involved and, in my opinion, deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of film history. British director Terence Young (best known for his work on the first two James Bond films and Thunderball) helms this tale of racial tension in a small Southern town that has a large Ku Klux Klan contingent. Lee Marvin plays the lone Sheriff of the town who has to deal with the fallout when a white woman is raped, apparently by a black man. Tensions are escalated when a lone gunman (played by O.J. Simpson) decides to stir things up with the Klan by shooting white townsfolk with a sniper rifle. Richard Burton plays a local landowner who has long opposed the views of the Klan and harboured black people on his land but he gets drawn into the conflict with deadly consequences.

There are many issues with the film, including a confusing script that was clearly trying to imbue the film with something of a social justice message but bungles it badly. All scenes involving the Klan are cringeworthy and obviously massively politically incorrect. The performances from the two leads are also pretty terrible with Lee Marvin mumbling and drawling through all of his scenes looking like a man who wishes he was elsewhere. Richard Burton also phones his performance in, with an accent that attempts Southern American but ends up sounding altogether wrong, and he also affects a limp in some scenes that disappears in others. Legend has it that the two men were both drunk during the entire shoot and that might explain things. It also doesn’t help that the only version of the film available on home video has been badly cut to remove a lot of the violence and a pivotal rape scene.

This is the style A Japanese B2 poster but I also have the style B that features artwork unique to the Japanese campaign by Seito.

This is a British quad poster for a 1993 re-release of Martin Scorsese‘s 1973 film Mean Streets. Whilst not the director’s earliest full-length feature, it’s certainly the one that put him firmly on the map ahead of 1976’s global hit Taxi Driver. Co-written by Scorsese, Mean Streets is also a film that is very personal to the director because the film is set in and around the Manhattan neighbourhood he grew up in. The story was shaped by his experience of living in Little Italy and the encounters he had with the various types of characters that live there, including members of the New York Mafia, with whom his father had dealings.

Scorsese also peppered the film with the kind of music he’d been listening to as a youth, which included the likes of the Rolling Stones and The Ronettes. It’s reckoned that half of the film’s budget was spent on clearing these songs for use in the soundtrack, but their inclusion makes for some memorable moments. One such example is the entrance of Joey (Robert De Niro) into the club soundtracked to the Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’.

Harvey Keitel plays Charlie, a small-time member of the mafia who spends his days collecting protection money on behalf of his uncle, the local boss Giovanni (Cesare Danova). He’s also torn between his feelings of Catholic responsibility, and devotion to the church, with his desire to move up the chain in the outfit. Charlie is also hampered by his friendship with the unhinged Johnny Boy (De Niro), an inveterate gambler who owes money to various unsavoury loan sharks around the neighbourhood. Johnny’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and threatens Charlie’s position as a wiseguy and his secret relationship with Johnny’s cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson). As tension rises, the group try to escape to Brooklyn but the neighbourhood has other plans for them.

I’m not totally sure why this film was given a 1993 re-release but it could have had something to do with the success of his 1990 gangster film Goodfellas. It’s also possible that the distributor (Electric Pictures) decided to show the film as part of a particular season of films. Note that all the films mentioned along the bottom of the poster are all based in London so it’s possible it wasn’t a nationwide re-release. The film’s original quad, for the film’s release in the 1970s, is hugely uninspiring (see here) and nothing beats the classic artwork created for the US campaign (see here).

John Carpenter’s The Thing, one of my favourite films, has inspired many artists over the years and this screen print by the American artist Mark Englert was created in 2012. Englert, whose official website is here, has worked on a number of landscape format prints (typically 12″ x 36″) featuring scenes from cult films and TV shows. This print for the The Thing was the artist’s first and was created in response to two other prints in a similar style that were done by artist’s Englert admired. As detailed in this ExpressoBeans thread, he owned Dan McCarthy’s Hoth and JC Richard’s Fortress of Solitude prints, which both feature icy landscapes, and was inspired to create a third image to go with them. He chose The Thing and started to mock up ideas that he began posting in the thread. Over time it evolved into something he was happy with and he decided to have it printed.

Englert made it available for sale on his own site as a timed-edition and the final number sold was 232. There was also a variant version nicknamed ‘yeah, fuck you, too’ which featured a glow-in-the-dark ink layer of the giant creature seen at the end of the film. For more details and images of the elements check out this page on Posterocalpyse. On there he talks about his process:

“It’s my first print, but I’ve been making a living doing illustration for over 12 years now, so I was fairly confident I could pull it off. I work in Photoshop, took pictures of some local mountains after a recent snow storm and drew the rest myself, piece by piece. I drew the dog, base and helicopter at a much larger size then they would be printed in the end, so that when I shrunk them down, they would have a comparable level of detail as the picture of mountains they were placed in front of. The movie is a long-time favorite… lots of note-perfect, iconic moments that are carved into my brain and just re-watchable as hell.”

One of his most popular early prints was for The Walking Dead that was released around the same time as an Alien print. Each print is given a name that relates to the property in some way. In this case ‘Det er en Slags Ting’ is spoken by one of the survivors from the ill-fated Norwegian outpost.

Check out this interview with Englert on Collider.com which was carried out at the 2012 Comic Con and they also featured him in their first ever ‘Limited Paper’ column. Englert’s own site features the posters and other items he’s worked on so far, which includes vinyl sleeves and more. There’s a short biography on his website which mentions he was born in 1979. There’s an excellent interview with Mark on 411posters.com here.

He has a store here and you can follow him on Twitter here.