Joe Caroff, a prolific but overlooked graphic designer who created the 007 James Bond logo, the book jacket for Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead,” and posters for hundreds of movies including “West Side Story,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Last Tango in Paris,” “Manhattan” and “Cabaret,” died on Sunday in Manhattan. He would have been 104 on Monday.
Mr. Caroff died in home hospice care, his sons, Peter and Michael Caroff, said.
His designs were familiar but his name was not. Mr. Caroff did not sign much of his work and largely avoided self-promotion. He was not included among 60-plus celebrated designers like Saul Bass, Leo Lionni and Paul Rand in the 2017 book “The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design,” cowritten by Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio.
“That he was unknown is shocking,” Mr. Heller, co-chairman emeritus of the Master of Fine Arts Design program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, said in a recent interview.
Still, Mr. Caroff’s abundant output became widely recognizable for an interpretive style that could be bold, elegant, theatrical, whimsical, sensual and deceptively simple in promoting a book or movie and conveying its essence with a single image.
For the first Bond movie, “Dr. No” (1962), Mr. Caroff was hired to create a logo for the letterhead of a publicity release. He began working with the idea that as a secret agent, the Bond character had a license to kill, but Mr. Caroff did not find Bond’s compact Walther PPK pistol to be visually appealing.
As he sketched the numerals 007, he drew penciled lines above and below to guide him and noticed that the upper guideline resembled an elongated barrel of a pistol extending from the seven.
He refined his drawing and added a trigger, fashioning a mood of intrigue and espionage and crafting one of the most globally recognized symbols in cinematic history. With some modifications, the logo has been used for 25 official Bond films and endless merchandising.
“I knew that 007 meant license to kill; that, I think, at an unconscious level, was the reason I knew the gun had to be in the logo,” Mr. Caroff said in a 2022 documentary, “By Design: The Joe Caroff Story.”
Mark Cerulli, who directed the documentary, said in a recent interview that the logo was a “marvel of simplicity that telegraphs everything you would want to know about 007.”
The going rate for a letterhead logo was $300 at the time, profit-sharing and film credits not included.
“My only regrets are that they never paid any royalties for any of these things that were done in those days,” Phyllis Caroff, Joe’s wife, said in the documentary. “We would have been rich.”
But Mr. Caroff, who received a 007-engraved watch from the Bond producers on his 100th birthday, did not appear to be a sentimentalist. Thilo von Debschitz, a German designer, wrote in a 2021 profile in EYE magazine that Mr. Caroff viewed himself as a “service provider” in working with associates to create more than 300 movie posters, keeping none of them in his Manhattan apartment.
“Time is a constant motion,” Mr. Caroff said in the article.
New York City resonated in some of his most renowned work. He drew inspiration from his neighborhood to create the movie poster for “West Side Story” (1961), scuffing the lettering to suggest rugged brick and perching balletic dancers on fire escapes.
For a 1979 Woody Allen movie, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Citicorp (now Citigroup) Center formed a clever skyline of letters that spelled “Manhattan” on a black-and-white poster.
Mr. Caroff worked with Mr. Allen on an estimated dozen film campaigns but said in “By Design” that the introverted filmmaker spoke little except to say, “I’ll take this one,” when choosing among prospective posters for a particular movie.
Deciding to have some fun and hoping to elicit at least a smile, Mr. Caroff and an associate created a fake poster for one presentation that said, “Prunes, the most moving picture since Bananas.”
And?
Mr. Allen “never hinted that he even saw that poster,” Mr. Caroff said. “That was working with Woody.”
Joseph Caroff was born on Aug. 18, 1921, in Roselle, N.J. His parents were Jewish immigrants from what is now Belarus. His father, Julius Caroff, was a painter and his mother Fanny (Sack) Caroff ran the household for six children.
Joseph expressed his artistic leanings early. When he was 4, a friend stopped by one day with a watercolor set. Fascinated, Joseph began painting designs on a white summer suit that he was wearing for a family trip.
“That’s when I knew I wanted to be an artist,” he said in “By Design.”
While attending the Pratt Institute, he became an assistant in the Manhattan office of Jean Carlu, a prominent French poster designer who had lost his right arm in an accident. In 1942, Mr. Caroff helped create a famous propaganda poster with the exhortation: “America’s answer! Production,” which featured a gloved hand using a wrench to turn a bolt-like “O.”
After serving overseas in the Army Air Forces during World War II, Mr. Caroff returned to New York, was hired and then fired by a design firm and went into business for himself, designing sample book jackets that his wife showed to various publishers. His first assignment, at age 27, came in 1948 for a first-time novelist, Mr. Mailer, who was 25.
For the cover of “The Naked and the Dead,” a classic about the toll of war, Mr. Caroff, using the name Joseph Karov, drew a haunted figure with a thousand-yard stare and a suggestion of disordered thoughts circling his head like electrons randomly orbiting the nucleus of an atom.
His movie posters could be more playful. In an era of graphic puns, his poster for “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964), featured a guitar neck tied into a knot, perhaps signaling young fans’ convulsive delight in the Beatles. For a 1967 black comedy, “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad,” he portrayed Dad folded like a pair of pants on a hanger.
Mr. Caroff spoke of the “annihilation of the extraneous” in extracting the essential in his work. He deftly wove the lowercase abc network logo with interlocking Olympic rings when it broadcast the Summer and Winter Games in the 1980s. The title sequence and poster for “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988) featured a crown of thorns set against a blood-red background. For another Woody Allen movie, about a chameleon-like character, the poster repeated the title “Zelig” (1983) with different font styles.
To depict the dance-hall grittiness and hedonism of Weimar Berlin, he placed the likeness of Liza Minnelli atop a vertical marquee in “Cabaret” (1972). He created the seductive lettering for the poster for “Last Tango in Paris” (1972) and futuristic lettering that resembled skates for “Rollerball” (1975).
At the insistence of the producer Joseph E. Levine, Mr. Caroff said he reluctantly designed a poster for “Tattoo” (1981), an erotic thriller, that depicted a nude woman with her feet bound. Some women in Los Angeles and New York ripped up the posters in protest, Mr. Caroff recalled in “By Design,” while Mr. Levine told him, “Joe, your poster did a hell of a lot better than my movie.”
In addition to his sons, Mr. Caroff, who devoted himself to fine art in a second career, is survived by a granddaughter. His wife Phyllis (Friedman) Caroff, a longtime professor at the Hunter College School of Social Work, died in February. They were married for 81 years.
When he saw his designs in public, he sometimes thought to himself, “I did that,” but modesty, Mr. Caroff said, mostly prevented him from telling others about his work.
“I never made a big thing of it,” he said in “By Design.” “It was a job, I wanted to get it done. I always met my deadlines.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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