Artwork by the brilliant Robert McGinnis on this US one sheet for the 1980 re-release of Woody Allen‘s 1973 sci-fi comedy Sleeper. Allen stars as Miles Monroe, a musician and health store owner who is cryogenically frozen by accident in 1973 and then revived 200 years later to discover that 22nd-century America is now an oppressive police state ruled by a dictator. Monroe falls in with a group of rebels who are trying to infiltrate the government’s top secret Aires Project, and it’s not long before he is on the run from the authorities with a kidnapped socialite Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton) in tow.

One of the director’s earliest and best, in my opinion, the film is a frequently hilarious slapstick adventure that differs greatly from many of his later, more serious and introspective films. Incredibly, Allen was able to complete editing almost 35 hours of footage down to the release running time of two hours; a feat he managed with two days to spare. The film was released with the title ‘Woody and the Robots’ in French-speaking Canada and this led the director to ensure he had a clause in all future contracts that prevented his film titles being changed by third parties.

Robert McGinnis is an American artist and illustrator who is perhaps best known for his work on several James Bond posters, as well the iconic one sheet for the first release of Breakfast at Tiffanys. These and many others can be seen on this website. The other posters I’ve collected by him can be seen here.

The brilliantly bonkers trailer can be seen on YouTube.

In August 2011 I was lucky enough to visit the island of Cuba for a ten day trip, which was a fantastic experience. It really does feel like a country stuck in a time warp, circa 1965, particularly once you leave the capital and head into the countryside. It’s a stunningly beautiful island with very hospitable people but the relative poverty of the country is clear to see. It’s often said that the government is likely to relax the current freeze on foreign (particularly Western) investment once ‘Comandante’ Fidel Castro passes away, although with his brother Raul currently in charge very little has changed. This article on the BBC gives you an insight into the current situation.

The Cuban people’s love for film and cinema-going is legendary and our guidebook claimed that at the end of the 1950s there were over 300 cinemas in the capital Havana alone. Today, these great old buildings continue to thrive and whilst there I witnessed the queues of people lining up to see the latest releases. I took this picture of the Yara cinema in the Vedado area of Havana before the evening crowds descended.

Whilst in Havana I visited a bookshop that was selling original Cuban propaganda posters printed in the 1950s and 60s by OSPAAAL. They also had a handful of screen-printed film posters, all of which were reprints of the original Cuban cinema posters or re-imagined designs by local artists. They are officially screen printed by the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Artes Industrias Cinematografia) in Havana.

This poster for Francis Ford Coppola‘s classic crime epic The Godfather was designed and illustrated by Antonio Pérez González Ñiko. Born in Havana in 1941, Ñiko (as he is known) studied a Bachelor degree in Art at the city’s university before getting a job at a graphic design agency. He was instrumental in designing multiple posters for the Cuban revolutionary movement in the 1960s and 1970s as well as many film posters in conjunction with the ICAIC.

Now a resident of Mexico, Ñiko works as a professor of Graphic Design at the Gestalt Design School in Xalapa, Veracruz. He continues to design and paint and his work has been featured in countless exhibitions around the world. His personal blog can be viewed here. Galleries of his work can be viewed on his Cargo Collective website here, and the sheer number of film posters he’s worked on is nothing short of incredible.

Whilst in Havana I also picked up a few other posters, one of which (A Clockwork Orange) I have already posted here.