The directorial debut of Martha Coolidge and the first time Nicolas Coppola was credited as Nicolas Cage, Valley Girl is a cult favourite in the US and was both a critical and box office success at the time of release. Loosely based on the Romeo and Juliet story (minus the tragic death) the film focuses on Julie (Deborah Foreman) a girl from the suburban, mall-filled San Fernando Valley who meets Randy (Cage) a punk from Hollywood and falls in love, much to the dismay of her shallow friends.
Valley Girl is actually a stereotype leveled at a certain class of American women who are described as colloquial speaking and materialistic. The San Fernando Valley is credited as the birthplace of this phenomenon thanks to its large number of commuter towns and middle-class suburban families. Valspeak is their unique derivation of Californian English, which was first brought to public consciousness through Frank Zappa’s collaboration with his daughter Moon Unit on the single Valley Girl. A bizarre video of Moon Unit performing the song on the TV show Solid Gold can be seen on YouTube.
Kevin Smith is a huge fan of the film and first began discussing it in Smodcast #152, in which he hilariously explained how Valley Girl had a profound effect on the way his understanding of love and relationships was formed. In the special Smoviola #1 Smith interviewed Martha Coolidge, Deborah Foreman and cinematographer Frederick Elmes to discover the story of how the film came to be.
The artwork on this poster is by the American illustrator Birney Lettick who worked on magazine covers, adverts and portraits as well as a number of movie posters. Lettick was a master at capturing star likenesses and the portrait of cage is spot-on. The artist sadly passed away in 1986. The other posters I’ve collected by him can be seen here.
Notice that the Italian title for the film translates, rather bizarrely, as The Girl from San Diego.
The trailer for the film can be seen on YouTube.
Update – 25/03/2012
As Jeff points out in the comments the woman featured on the poster isn’t actually Deborah Foreman but is one of the background actresses. It’s not clear why this is the case.
An excellent, stylised portrait of legendary actor Charles Bronson and the gorgeous English actress Jacqueline Bisset on this 30×40 for the US release of St Ives. Bronson stars as Raymond St. Ives, a former crime reporter and struggling author who is hired by a wealthy eccentric named Abner Procane (John Houseman) to help him secure the return of some important ledgers that were stolen from his mansion. After several unsuccessful attempts to recover them, he eventually gets his hands on the documents but then discovers that a few important pages are missing. He must then team up with Procane and his femme-fatale protege, Janet Whistler (Bisset), to track down the missing pages and St. Ives winds up caught up in a criminal plot that he didn’t see coming.
The film was the first of eight subsequent collaborations between British director J. Lee Thompson and Bronson, which included the likes of The White Buffalo (1977) and 10 to Midnight (1983).
The Models (AKA by the racier title ‘In Love with Sex’) was a French-Canadian-Italian co-production and a sexploitation drama directed by the Parisian Claude Pierson who seems to have made a living from helming these kind of films. I can find little information about the film itself but the various tag lines on this poster give you an idea of what you’re in for. The only synopsis I could find was on a now removed page on the BFI website for the film and simply said ‘About the problems of frigidity encountered by a young married woman and how they are overcome with help of her husband.’ The artwork on this poster is by the legendary artist Robert McGinnis and it’s a wonder that the production company were able to secure his talents (his services can’t have been cheap at this point in his career).
Robert McGinnis was responsible for some of the most iconic James Bond posters, including Thunderball, The Man With the Golden Gun and Diamonds are Forever as well as multiple other classic posters from the 60s, 70s and 80s. He was born in Cincinatti, Ohio in 1926 and was given an apprenticeship at Walt Disney studios before studying fine art at Ohio State University. After serving in the Merchant Marines during World War II, he started work in the advertising industry and later moved into painting book jackets for several notable authors, as well as editorial artwork for the likes of Good Housekeeping, TIME and The Saturday Evening Post. McGinnis’ first film poster was the now iconic one sheet for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, painted in 1962, and he went on to paint over 40 others during his career, including one for The Incredibles in 2004.
To see the other posters I’ve collected that were painted by McGinnis click here.