Biography

Saul Bass

Jump to

Saul Bass was born in New York City in 1920 and is a widely acclaimed graphic designer with a career spanning over 40 years. Among his most famous works are the title sequences for such classic films as The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960). Bass used his innovative ideas and unique perspective of the world to influence his art, engaging his audiences and developing the graphic design industry in the process. Hitchcock's famous shower-murder scene in Psycho owes its success to the design work of Bass' storyboards. Bass' short documentary Why Man Creates (1968) was spotlighted on the premiere episode of 60 Minutes (1968) in 1968. He is also responsible for the logos of many prominent corporations like AT&T, United Airlines, and Dixie. Bass died in Los Angeles in 1996.
- IMDb mini biography by: Laura R. Smith

It has been said that once you see the opening titles to a film that Saul Bass has done, you can walk out of the theatre because you know exactly what the film's about: he has shown you the entire thing in the first minute or so.
He designed the title sequence in Psycho (1960) and one of the scenes where Arbogast climbs the stairs to his doom. He also drew up storyboards for the shower scene upon the specific instructions of Hitchcock. However, in interviews with Truffaut, Hitchcock states that he didn't use these because they "weren't right".
In 2012, a Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition on Stanley Kubrick displayed some of Bass' correspondence with Kubrick while he was designing poster art for The Shining (1980). As well as showcasing some rejected designs, this revealed that Bass was fond of signing off letters by doodling a fish (a sea-bass) with his own face.
In the opening credits to Cape Fear (1991), Bass superimposed shots from the title sequence he did for John Frankenheimer's Seconds (1966).
While he is best remembered for working on thrillers and suspenseful works, he preferred to work on comedies.

Design is thinking made visible.
My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.
[on Otto Preminger]: I would have jumped off the roof for Otto. Those qualities that made him difficult also made him a man you could count on.