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| It turns out that this familiar poster was created by a prolific and successful artist. |
In Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), the title character (Johnny Depp) is so eager to direct an upcoming biopic of Christine Jorgensen that he visits the headquarters of a hole-in-the-wall studio called Screen Classics and talks to the film's producer, George Weiss (Mike Starr). Weiss tells Eddie that the film will have to be fictionalized, since he doesn't have the rights to Christine Jorgensen's life, but he's going forward with the project anyway.
"Is there a script?" Eddie asks.
"Fuck no," Weiss replies. "But there's a poster."
With that, he holds up a one-sheet featuring a half-man, half-woman and the provocative title I Changed My Sex, cheerfully adding that the film "opens in nine weeks in Tulsa."
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| Is this Ed Wood's most famous poster? |
The scene illustrates the importance that posters have had in selling films, both big and small, for decades. Who can forget the iconic posters for Jaws (1975), Halloween (1978), Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Jurassic Park (1993)? Movie posters are a lot like movie trailers: pretty much every theatrically-released film gets them, regardless of genre, and they promise thrills and excitement that the movies themselves can't always deliver. Because they're so collectable, movie posters have been remarkably long-lived for something that's supposed to be ephemeral. Occasionally in my research, I've found film posters that have survived even when the films themselves haven't!
So far, I've not written a lot about the posters that advertised Ed Wood's movies, even though these were a constant in his career from the 1950s to the 1970s and beyond. Let's change that today, shall we? If I were to pick out the single best-known poster used to advertise one of Eddie's movies, I'd probably choose the one-sheet for Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). If you're a Wood fan, you've seen this one countless times—the grim-faced astronaut with his head encased in a fishbowl, the shadowy gravediggers, the cloaked figure menacing a man in a tunic, the spaceships soaring overhead, and even Vampira herself in a strapless, sleeveless red cocktail dress better suited to Jessica Rabbit. It's a poster that raises many questions, namely: "What the hell kind of movie is this, anyway?"
Ed Wood's most famous film premiered under its original title, Grave Robbers from Outer Space, on March 15, 1957 at the long-since-demolished Carlton Theatre in Los Angeles, but it didn't achieve any kind of meaningful release until 1959, when it was picked up by the Hal Roach-owned Distributors Corporation of America (DCA), retitled Plan 9 from Outer Space, and shipped out to unsuspecting theaters across America. That's also when the film acquired its iconic poster.
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| Legendary poster artist Tom Jung. |
To create advertising art for Plan 9—not just posters but pressbooks and print ads as well—DCA contracted with a New York firm called Ben Adler Advertising Services, which also helped market such independent films as The 400 Blows (1959), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Go, Johnny, Go! (1959), and a 1956 rerelease of the dialogue-free thriller Dementia (1955) called Daughter of Horror. The task of designing a poster for Plan 9 from Outer Space fell to a young artist from Boston named Thomas "Tom" Jung, whose specialty was advertising foreign films in a way that would appeal to American audiences. Tom's birth year is usually given as 1942, but that seems unlikely, since he would have only been 17 years old at the time of Plan 9's nationwide release. Before working for Ben Adler, Tom had already studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and served in the U.S. Army. Did he do all that as an adolescent? My assumption is that he was actually born a few years earlier but gave his birth year as 1942 for personal or professional reasons.
Whenever he was born, Tom Jung had an astonishing career. In the 1960s, he worked for MGM and helped design posters for such prestigious films as Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Grand Prix (1966). Perhaps his most iconic work from this era, however, came in 1967 when MGM reissued Gone with the Wind (1939) in a stereophonic 70mm edition. Tom sketched the concept art for the new poster, which was ultimately illustrated by another artist, Howard Terpning. The 1967 artwork, with Clark Gable cradling Vivien Leigh in his arms against a backdrop of flames, is so closely associated with GWTW that I had no idea it wasn't part of the film's original advertising campaign.
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| In 1967, Gone with the Wind was reissued with this iconic artwork. |
Tom Jung kept designing memorable film posters throughout the 1960s and '70s. One of his specialties was creating one-sheets for Steve McQueen movies like Papillon (1973) and Le Mans (1971). ("Steve represented, at that time, a gut of defiance that any person could identify with," the artist mused.) He also worked on a James Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). Even with all these accomplishments, however, his biggest career milestone was still to come!
In 1977, while working as a freelance artist, Tom Jung was selected by 20th Century Fox to create a poster for Star Wars (1977). This ubiquitous one-sheet—with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) hoisting his lightsaber aloft and forming a giant white cross in the sky, while Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) shows plenty of thigh and the ghostly image of Darth Vader (David Prowse) looms large in the background—is simply one of the most recognizable pieces of advertising artwork ever created for a motion picture. I've seen it on countless pieces of merchandise and even airbrushed on the sides of vans.
While Jung designed and executed the artwork himself, he originally had fellow artist Frank Frazetta in mind with his concept art, and it's not difficult to see the influence of Frazetta here. Compare Tom's Star Wars poster with Frank's strikingly similar poster for National Lampoon's Vacation (1983).
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| A detail from Tom Jung's famous Star Wars artwork. |
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| Side by side: Plan 9 and Star Wars. |
Jung also knew to employ an element of sex appeal into his work, even though neither Plan 9 nor Star Wars is particularly erotic. On these posters, Princess Leia fulfills essentially the same function in 1977 that Vampira had in 1959. Even the positioning of their arms is similar. And, obviously, special emphasis is given to the women's legs and breasts. Supposedly, Tom Jung's own wife served as the model for Leia. Did she also model for Vampira? The two women have remarkably similar bodies in these posters. The Plan 9 poster does not depict Vampira's ridiculously tiny waist.
The single largest element of the Star Wars poster is the helmeted head of Darth Vader. Notice that Vader is not staring directly at us, the audience, nor is he looking at any of the other figures on the poster. Instead, he is gazing off to the side, like someone posing thoughtfully for a yearbook photo. The single largest element of the Plan 9 poster is the helmeted head of our unnamed astronaut. He, too, is gazing off at some point in the distance. I don't know if this figure is supposed to represent heroic human Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) or misguided alien Eros (Dudley Manlove). Neither wears a space helmet in the film.
The Star Wars poster is Tom Jung's most famous creation, but it was hardly the end of his career. He went on to create posters for such films as The Lord of the Rings (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Raging Bull (1980), The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Right Stuff (1984), and Weird Science (1985). Basically, if you attended any movies in the 1980s, you saw Tom's work. In the '90s and 2000s, he switched gears and became a storyboard artist. His credits there are likewise vast: the Eddie Murphy comedies Doctor Doolittle (1998) and Nutty Professor II (2000), the first two Stuart Little movies (1999-2002), Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), Ang Lee's Hulk (2003), Scooby Doo 2 (2004), Disturbia (2007), Blades of Glory (2007), and many more.
Tom Jung seems to be enjoying a well-deserved retirement in 2024, his most recent credit being a 2020 Ren & Stimpy short. Honestly, I had never even heard of the man until I started looking into the history of the Plan 9 from Outer Space poster and stumbled upon his name. That's a shame. Tom's work is influential and far-reaching, and he deserves to be better known. I doubt I'll ever be able to afford a genuine 1959 Plan 9 poster for my own apartment. But reproductions are plentiful online, with prices ranging from $4.99 to $29.99. I'm guessing Tom sees not a penny of that.
Links for further study: