James Cameron Explains Why The Original ALIENS Poster is Just Black with a Title

I’ve honestly never wondered why the original Aliens poster was just a simple black poster with the title of the film with a couple of tag lines. I just thought it was a product of its time and was created the way it was to keep the film shrouded in mystery.

Turns out, the poster came out of some miscommunication when Cameron was telling the head of marketing that the initial poster design sucked.

James Cameron has a new book titled Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron, and in it the filmmaker talks about his time creating posters for an old movie company called Saturn. The films were so bad that he never really watched any of them.

In an interview with io9, Cameron shared the story behind the poster for Alien. He shared, “There was a funny one sheet story on Aliens! I did have a strong opinion on that.” This is the story that followed:

“So I went into the office of the the head of marketing for 20th Century Fox, I literally met him on his last day at the office and his office was all boxed up. I was his last meeting before he left the job. He was sitting at the desk and he had this little green plastic frog and he was squeezing a bulb and making it hop around the desk. And I said, ‘What’s with the frog?’ And he said, ‘It’s my stress frog.’ I’m like, ‘OK, this guy is a casualty.’”

“Then he said, ‘But I’ve got a one sheet for you.’ And he showed this one sheet. I think you can get it online, a few of them kind of leaked out. And it was this horrible sort of mash-up photography. It looked worse than a Roger Corman one sheet because, like me, Roger believed in good one sheets. Not good movies, but good one sheets. And I looked at this thing and I kind of held it in my hands and and I said, ‘Oh, let me tell you exactly what I think of this one sheet,’ and I just slowly sort of crumpled it up [into] a ball and threw it in the corner. And he was working the stress frog. And I said, ‘Honestly, if I had a choice between that piece of shit and just an all-black frame, I’d go with the all black frame.’ And apparently what happened was I walked out of the office and he called somebody up and said ‘He wants it all black!’ He wasn’t hearing what I was saying. So if you ever wondered why there was literally nothing on the one sheet for Aliens, that’s why.”

You gotta love some studio executives. Makes you wonder how some of these people get jobs in the entertainment industry.

Source: Gizmodo