(Wow, two new posts in one day - I think this is a record for me)
This is something that has been bugging me for a long time. Why, on movie posters, do they use such tall, narrow lettering (I’m talking about for the credits, not for the movie description, which is normally done in regular type)? I can’t imagine that it would be to make them easier to read; shorter block letters would (IMO) be more readable and you could still fit the same amount of text.
The only WAG I could come up with is that there’s some sort of weird contractual obligation that says that the stars’ names on the posters must be a certain height, but individual character width was not specified. Anyone know for sure?
I believe it’s tied to contractual matters and ego. The higher up on the marquee (or poster) you are, the more “important” you are. With everybody clamouring (through their agents) to be on top, it’s convenient to use skinny letters, so you can cram lots of names on the first few lines.
Of course, once you’ve set the pitch for the first lines, the rest follow in the same pitch for consistency’s sake.
I worked on the production of many many movie posters in my days working in a service bureau in Los Angeles. The type on movie posters is a real pain in the butt because it has all sorts of finicky requirements.
Yes, there is a certain pecking order in the names listed on the poster. It’s related to the screen credits before the movie, and after the movie. At the start of a movie, you might see “Steven Spielberg Presents” and then the names of some actors, and then “In (movie title)” These are the “above the title” credits. You might see these on the poster up at the top in big type, because these are the big attractions so the movie. Then at the end of the movie, you see all these names again, and every production worker from the producer down to Craft Services.
Now on a movie poster, down at the bottom in the compressed type, you don’t get everyone listed. But due to contractual obligations some people get their names listed in a certain order of importance. There’s a certain cutoff point, the major production credits are there but the gaffers, lighting assistants, and other flunkies, they don’t make the cut. I’m not quite sure where the line is drawn, they used to just give me lists of names. I’m sure this is all worked out when people are hired and contracts are written.
As far as the funny type, well, its just a convention. I don’t know where it originated, but it is merely a way to squeeze lots of names into a small space, without being too visually overpowering and drawing your eye away from the artwork (where the promotion is going on). Most annoying to typographers like me is the “stacked type” of the job titles. Typically you’ll see some long two word title like “Executive Producer” with the words on top of each other, two half-size lines of small type stacked together, just before the full-size name. This is just another technique to save space, otherwise most of the poster credits would be job titles and not the names. It seems to have originated as a style in the early movie posters where the stacked type style was used loosely in various ways, but by now it has become a rigid, standard style. In case you hadn’t noticed, Hollywood isn’t exactly a fountain of original ideas. Safer to repeat past successes than do something original. Better to do what we’ve always done, than have to think up some new way.