A History of Grand Openings

Remember these movies? Their opening credits became classics:

A naked baby bounces up into a pale blue sky, a pink airborne cherub. (“The World According to Garp,” title sequence: R/Greenberg.)

A black cat, young and lean, prowls dangerous alleys, his eyes at times the only spots of light on the screen. (“A Walk on the Wild Side,” title sequence: Saul Bass.)

Farm families from Kansas and Missouri are caught in snapshots that speak eloquently about their closeness in increasingly lean Depression days. (“Bonnie and Clyde,” title sequence: Wayne Fitzgerald.)

With newsreel starkness, a mass becomes a massacre as crowds at an El Salvador cathedral are fired upon by government troops. (“Salvador,” title sequence: Robert Dawson.)

Neon above an L.A. bar pulls us into a nighttime street, full of private dancers in a downtown, arty underworld as seductive as it is improbable. (“Choose Me,” title sequence: Saxon/Ross.)

Viewed from inside a gun barrel, a man in dinner clothes whirls and fires straight at us as blood floods the screen in a red wash. (14 of the 16 James Bond films, title sequences: Maurice Binder.)

The time it has taken to read this is, give or take a minute, all the time the designer of the credits had to hook us into the film.

A movie is never more vulnerable than at its opening. Within those few minutes it will seem crass or sophisticated, flat or intriguing, bombastic or subtle. It is the title sequence of images and their vital other half, the film’s music, that place us at the emotional center of the movie.

It can come through a visual metaphor (“Garp’s” baby); typography or graphics (“Kiss of the Spider Woman’s” gray and black forest of lettering) or an entire scene (dressing what turns out to be a corpse in “The Big Chill”). The sequence may be set in the movie’s present or any time before the action. It can be photography, animation, collage or even outtakes from the movie itself.

What’s astonishing to realize, in the 100th anniversary of the moving image, is how young the art of the modern title sequence really is: roughly 35 years and its greatest innovators are innovating still, with the exception of 007’s greatest ally, Maurice Binder, who died April 9.

On May 15, Opening Shots, a show in Studio City, will celebrate two of the newer artists on the scene, Saxon/Ross. Designed to demonstrate and perhaps demystify the elements of title design, their title and logo designs will play on a video loop, while the nuts and bolts of their graphics, lighting, animating techniques will be shown in a walk-through format.

How did this art of compressed eloquence emerge? Designer Saul Bass must be rumblingly bored with being called the father of it all, yet it was Bass, in 1955, whose graphics for “The Man With the Golden Arm,” in combination with Elmer Bernstein’s jazz score, hit American audiences viscerally. Coming at the same time as the French New Wave with its visual shorthand and jump-cutting, the intensity and expressiveness of Bass’ graphics was revolutionary.

Credits before 1955 were short but stodgy. A satin title card meant class; a heavy velvet book meant historical drama. Letters against a billowing sail promised a swashbuckler; parchment with burned edges took us into ye olden days.

Bass was already a legendary graphics designer: the man with the golden logo, through his designs we recognize companies from AT&T; to the Girl Scouts. Now he and his company’s artists took a fusty form by its shoulders and shook it up. First the look: “West Side Story” was Bass-style graffiti, with names scrawled on everything from peeling fence boards to traffic signs. Next, time: why must credits be set in the film’s present? They could be even more dramatic as forerunners. The famous multiple screen images for “Grand Prix” were set in the tense milliseconds before the international road race.

Although he was the most highly visible, Bass wasn’t, of course, the only title innovator on the scene. The otherwise unremarkable saga “The Vikings” had a splendid set of credits by the UPA studios in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry. It may have fudged historical time slightly, but audiences raised on wood-burned parchment credits felt positively blessed.

Meanwhile, as more and more talents entered the scene, the form became less a show-stopper in itself and more a seamless prelude.

Pablo Ferro made “Dr. Strangelove’s” midair bomber refueling operation, set to “Try a Little Tenderness,” into an eerie sexual encounter. Wayne Fitzgerald discovered that a scene could play with information over it far longer than an audience would stand for the footage alone. Thus, under its titles, “North Dallas Forty” could get a wounded football player out of bed and on his feet the morning after a game, at aching length.

What has almost 40 years of graphic innovation created? Intense visual literacy, at levels down to Sesame Street. Puzzling out what the movie is about, then distilling it, is still the designer’s challenge. And there’s plenty of room for affectionate re-creation, like Colossal Pictures’ opening for “Tucker” a 1930s-style promotional short, boosting the automobile company’s go-getting young president in a lush Art Deco style.

Somehow the titlemaker’s art has avoided becoming cliched. Think of Rosie Perez shadowboxing her way through an artworked city in “Do the Right Thing,” courtesy Balsmeyer & Everett Inc. Nor have its poets vanished: consider Robert Dawson’s title sequence for “Edward Scissorhands,” the perfect echo for the film’s soul.

The optimism of title artists must be limitless, when you consider the movies whose titles were their best part: Wayne Fitzgerald’s 24 irrepressibly characterized pairs of dancing feet for “Footloose.” “Bonfire of the Vanities” could not have had a better metaphor for the power of New York than R/Greenberg’s time-lapse image of the city from atop the Chrysler Building. It didn’t help.

Title design also remains a world with a high degree of continuity. Maurice Binder’s last films were “The Last Emperor,” “The Sheltering Sky,” “Mr. Johnson.” Saul Bass’ recent work includes the stark red titles of “GoodFellas,” whirling on and off so ominously.

A retrospective for Saxon/Ross, in the business just four years, may come under the heading of continuity or perhaps prematurity. Still, those four years have produced “Choose Me’s” neon promise, the elegant irony that opened “Tin Men” and more. It will remain to be seen.

* The Art Store Gallery 11450 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. (818) 505-1383, May 15-June 28.