Drew Struzan, the poster artist behind “Star Wars,” “Blade Runner,” “The Thing,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Back to the Future” and countless others, died on Tuesday due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease, his family said on a statement. He was 78.
“Drew made event art. His posters made many of our movies into destinations…and the memory of those movies and the age we were when we saw them always comes flashing back just by glancing at his iconic photorealistic imagery. In his own invented style, nobody drew like Drew,” said Steven Spielberg in a statement.
Struzan attended the ArtCenter College of Design and, after graduating, worked at the Los Angeles-based design studio Pacific Eye & Ear, under the direction of Ernie Cefalu, who had worked on the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers” album cover in the early 1970’s. Struzan would work on album covers for The Beach Boys, Bee Gees and Black Sabbath while there, also illustrating the T-shirt that George Carlin wears on the cover of his 1974 album “Toledo Window Box” and the cover artwork for Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare.”
After leaving Pacific Eye & Ear, Struzan started a company called Pencil Pushers, working on the eye-popping posters for decidedly lower grade fare like 1976’s “Squirm” (about killer worms) and 1977’s “Empire of the Ants” (about killer ants). His big break would come when David Weitzner, at the time vice president of advertising at 20th Century Fox, asked Struzan to create a poster for a theatrical re-release of George Lucas’ “Star Wars.”
This isn’t the main poster for the movie, but rather what has become known as the “circus” poster, with a great typeface and Luke and Leia centered (she’s firing a blaster), with Obi-Wan on the side. The idiosynracies of the poster were a necessity, when Struzan and Weitzner found out that there wasn’t enough room for the movie’s title or the credit block.
For the next few decades, Struzan would deliver some of the greatest posters of all time, including “The Muppet Movie,” “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Coming to America,” “First Blood,” “An American Tail,” “The Goonies” and so many more. He also designed the original logo for Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects company founded by George Lucas for the original “Star Wars,” featuring a magician with a top hat. And while he would continue to work on projects in the 1990s and beyond, he officially retired in 2008, after completing the poster for Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
Struzan would occasionally return for one-offs or re-releases, creating, for instance, an alternative poster for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” in 2015, but stayed largely retired.
Earlier this year his wife revealed that he had been living with Alzheimer’s disease for an unspecified amount of time. This meant that he could no longer paint or sign his posters for fans.
Struzan’s work not only captured the spirit of the movies that he was helping advertise, but created a spirit and mystique all their own. You knew when you were seeing a Drew Struzan poster, every brush stroke felt purposeful and alive. As illustrations started falling out of favor, replaced by clumsy digital mock-ups or collages featuring stars’ giant heads, there was a warmth and texture to Struzan’s pieces that felt exceedingly timeless. They were magical, through and through, no matter what movie he was working on. And they remain so to this day, still as evocative and majestic as ever. He was a singular talent who will be very missed.
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