Saul Bass Notes

 Biography

1920 Saul Bass is born in the Bronx district of New York

1936 Wins a scholarship to study at the Art Students' League in Manhattan

1938 Employed as an assistant in the art department of the New York office of Warner Bros

1944 Joins the Blaine Thompson Company, an advertising agency, and enrolls at Brooklyn College, where he is taught by the émigré Hungarian designer and design theorist Gyorgy Kepes

1946 Moves to Los Angeles to work as an art director at the advertising agency, Buchanan and Company

1952 Opens his own studio, named Saul Bass & Associates in 1955

1954 Designs his first title sequence for Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones

1955 Creates titles for Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. The animated sequence he devises for Preminger’s The Man with a Golden Arm causes a sensation

1956 Elaine Makatura joins the studio as an assistant

1957 Devises titles for Michael Anderson’s Around The World in 80 Days and Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse

1958 Forges a new collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock by designing the titles for Vertigo. Works with the architects Buff, Straub & Hensman on the design of his home, Case Study House #20 in Altadena

1959 Creates the title sequences for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder

1960 First title commission for Stanley Kubrick, Spartacus, and the last for Hitchcock, Psycho

1962 Devises titles for Edward Dmytryk’s Walk on the Wild Side and directs his first short film, Apples and Oranges. Marries Elaine Makatura

1963 Stanley Kramer commissions Bass to create titles for It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

1966 Directs the racing sequences and devises the titles for John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix

1968 Wins an Oscar for the short film Why Man Creates and develops a corporate identity programme for the Bell System telephone company. Creates an installation for the Milan Triennale, which is cancelled after a student occupation

1973 Designs the corporate identity of United Airlines

1974 Directs his first feature film Phase IV

1980 Designs the poster for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and devises the corporate identity of the Minolta camera company

1984 Creates a poster for the Los Angeles Olympic Games

1987 James L. Brooks persuades Bass to return to title design by creating the opening sequence of Broadcast News

1990 Begins a long collaboration with Martin Scorsese by creating the titles for GoodFellas

1991 Devises the titles for Scorsese’s Cape Fear and a poster for the 63rd Academy Awards. Bass designs the Academy Awards poster for the next five years.

1993 Creates the title sequence for Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and a poster for Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List

1995 Designs titles for Scorsese’s Casino

1996 Saul Bass dies in Los Angeles of non-Hodgkins lymphoma

Career

Saul Bass was born on May 8, 1920, in the Bronx, New York, United States, to Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents. He graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx and studied part-time at the Art Students League in Manhattan. He began his time in Hollywood during the 1940s doing print work for film ads, until he collaborated with filmmaker Otto Preminger to design a film poster for his 1954 film Carmen Jones. Otto Preminger was so impressed with Bass's work that he asked him to produce the title sequence as well. Bass was one of the first to realize the creative potential of the opening and closing credits of a movie. Bass became widely known in the film industry after creating the title sequence for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Bass decided to create an innovative title sequence to match the film's controversial subject. For Alfred Hitchcock, Bass provided effective, memorable title sequences, inventing a new type of kinetic typography. Bass once described his main goal for his title sequences as being to ‘’try to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story” He designed title sequences for more than 40 years, and employed diverse film making techniques.