Drew Struzan, Master Of The Movie Poster, Dies At 78
by Austin Gorton
Drew Struzan, the artist behind some of the most iconic movie posters for some of the biggest movies of the last fifty years, has passed away at the age of 78. News came from the moderators of his Instagram account, who said, “it is with a heavy heart that I must tell you that Drew Struzan has moved on from this world as of yesterday, October 13th. I feel it is important that you all know how many times he expressed to me the joy he felt knowing how much you appreciated his art.”
Struzan had been battling Alzheimer’s Disease, as announced by his wife via Facebook in March of this year. No official cause of death has been announced at this time.
If you’re a frequent visitor of this site, Struzan likely needs little introduction. Certainly, you’ve seen his work even if you didn’t know it. From Star Wars to Blade Runner to Back to the Future to the Indiana Jones films, Struzan left his mark all over the modern film landscape. He began his career working on album covers for musicians like The Beach Boys and Earth, Wind and Fire. After starting to work on posters and promotional material for movies in the 1970s, he was commissioned to create a poster for the 1978 re-release of Star Wars, and from there, his career as a movie poster artist exploded.
Though often working in fantastical, otherworldly settings, Struzan’s style has an old-fashioned, down-to-earth feel to it, thanks to his use of airbrush and colored pencils as his primary tools. At the same time, his compositions and eye for color — as well as the imprimatur of painted artwork — lend gravitas and a sense of the fantastic to the posters of more mundane stories, such as the relatively down-to-earth prison drama The Shawshank Redemption.
Even after the rise of digital art, a trend Struzan lamented, he continued to produce traditional, physical art and found plenty of work in movie posters, comic books, board game and stamp art. Though he officially retired in 2008 after completing his work for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Struzan came out of retirement numerous times in the ensuing years for various projects, including 2016’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Struzan is an artist whose work surrounded me long before I knew his name, or even thought about the act of creation that goes into movie posters. As a movie-loving kid whose parents helpfully made frequent trips to the video store and movie theater, I saw his work on posters and VHS boxes alike. An American Tail, or perhaps Return to Oz, were likely the first posters of his that I saw. As a He-Man loving kid, his Masters of the Universe poster lived rent-free in my head. By the time I watched the Back to the Future and Indiana Jones trilogies on constant repeat, I recognized the shared look of all those posters, even if I hadn’t clocked the name of the artist in those pre-internet times.
But it is in the Star Wars universe where I first connected the name “Drew Struzan” with the artist behind so many of the seminal movie posters of my youth, and the Star Wars universe remains my principle association for Struzan. While I’m too young to have seen the ’78 re-release poster in the wild, I was the perfect age, in the full bloom of my Star Wars fandom, for the 1997 Special Editions re-release of the Original Trilogy, each of which received their own original Struzan-illustrated poster. His status as the Star Wars poster artist was then cemented by his work on the Prequel Trilogy posters, where his work gave the movies an air of gravitas and sweep the films themselves didn’t always earn.
To this day, I still have several Struzan pieces framed and hanging on my walls; I walk past his Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones poster every time I go in or out of my office. Struzan may be gone, but the impact of his work, the feeling of high adventure, the promise of excitement ahead, and the alluring touch of sophistication he could generate with a single, still image, will be felt, by me, if not the movie industry as a whole, for years to come.
