Drew Struzan, an artist whose talent for realistic portraiture and inventive composition captured the magic and adventure of films by directors like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Frank Darabont in some 200 posters, died on Oct. 13 at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 78.
His wife, Dylan, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr. Struzan created posters for some of the most popular films of the past half-century, including seven “Star Wars” films, four of the five Indiana Jones movies, the “Back to the Future” trilogy, “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” (1982), “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001) and several Muppet movies.
Using acrylic paints that he airbrushed over his drawings, brushstrokes for large swaths of space, and colored pencils, he was known for distilling the essence of a film without giving away the story.
“I look for the best pictures I can find of the actors and scenes,” Mr. Struzan told the website SlashFilm in 2021. “I look for the color palette. Then I design a composition that is open-ended. Not closed-ended, saying, ‘This is what you have to think about this.’”
For “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989), Mr. Struzan used warm sepia tones to paint side-by side-portraits of Indy (played by Harrison Ford), with a nonchalant expression, and his father, Henry (Sean Connery), shooting his son a quizzical look. Below them, Mr. Struzan showed Indy on horseback being chased. In each of the poster’s four corners is a small portrait of a different character.
“We’ve had to live up to Drew’s art,” Mr. Spielberg, who directed four of the Indiana Jones films and “E.T.,” said in the 2013 documentary “Drew: The Man Behind the Poster.”
Mr. Spielberg recalled showing an early version of Mr. Struzan’s art for “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008) to Janusz Kaminski, his cinematographer, and saying, “Now you’ve got to make sure that Harrison looks as good as that picture.”
Mr. Struzan was considered one of the greatest poster artists in film history along with Robert Peak, Bill Gold, Renato Casaro (who died in September), and some of the anonymous artists who used the stone lithograph process to create colorful posters from the silent era until the 1940s.
“What Struzan did that was so revolutionary was that he brought back painterliness to posters,” Dwight Cleveland, a poster collector and the author of “Cinema on Paper” (2019), said in an interview. He added that Mr. Peak was also a skilled painter, but “he came from the comic book tradition,” whereas Mr. Struzan “was more realistic.”
For John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), about a shape-shifting alien terrorizing researchers in Antarctica, Mr. Struzan said that he was asked on short notice to create a poster but was given little information. In the 2013 documentary, he recalled being asked, “Remember the movie ‘The Thing’ from the 1950s? That was it.”
He added, “I couldn’t show an actor or a location or anything.”
His solution: a faceless figure in a parka on a frigid landscape with rays of light shining out of its head. The image was based on a photo that Mr. Struzan’s wife took of him, wearing a winter coat, with his arms outstretched.
“He’s obviously standing in the cold and the snow and he has some lights coming out of his face,” Mr. Struzan told SlashFilm. “And that’s the thing you can’t understand. Hopefully the response is, ‘I’ve got to go see this movie and find out what this is about.’”
Howard Drew Struzan was born on March 18, 1947, in Oregon City, Ore., and moved to Northern California with his family when he was about 4. His father, Wayne, was a real estate broker, and his mother, Bette (Miller) Struzan, was the manager of a See’s candy store in Palo Alto.
Drew’s gift for drawing, some of it on toilet paper, was so evident that when he was about 5, researchers at Stanford University heard about him and took some of his work to study.
“To this day, I don’t know what they were studying,” he told SlashFilm. “I guess I was unusual, but those of us who are freaks in this way still have a gift to give.”
But he felt unloved by his parents — “they didn’t like me; they were afraid of me for some screwy reason,” he said in the documentary” — and left home after high school. He tried to return after one term at the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles (from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1970), but “they locked me out of the house so I never went back.”
While in college, he earned money by selling paintings to fellow students and stinted on meals so he could afford to buy paint. In 1968, while still a student, he married Cheryle Dylan Hubeart, whom he had met two years earlier at a dance in San Jose and found true love.
After college, Mr. Struzan found work at a design studio, Pacific Eye & Ear, where he painted album covers for the Bee Gees, Alice Cooper and other artists. For Mr. Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare” (1975), Mr. Struzan painted him as a dapper figure, in a tuxedo and tails, without his usual ghoulish makeup.
When the album’s image was blown up into a billboard, a film marketer, Tony Seiniger, saw it, tracked down Mr. Struzan and brought him his first poster work. He would go on to give him much more.
He created many other album covers, including for Black Sabbath’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” and Carole King’s “Fantasy” in 1973 and Iron Butterfly’s “Scorching Beauty” in 1975.
He made the transition to posters that year with “The Black Bird,” a spoof of “The Maltese Falcon,” for which he painted a Norman Rockwell-like illustration of the star, George Segal, who played Sam Spade Jr., being chased by an assortment of oddballs.
Mr. Struzan was soon busy painting posters for movies, including, in 1976, “Futureworld,” “Car Wash” and “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.” His biggest break came through collaborating with another artist, Charles White III, on a poster for “Star Wars” (now known as “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope”).
That poster depicted the large figures of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia “swinging across the Death Star Chasm,” according to Lucasfilm, which created the “Star Wars” universe, and smaller ones of the movie’s other main characters: Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, R2D2 and C-3PO.
After impressing Mr. Lucas with that first poster, Mr. Struzan became the go-to artist for the “Star Wars” films, as well as the Indiana Jones films, which were Lucasfilm productions.
“His illustrations fully captured the excitement, tone and spirit of each of my films his artwork represented,” Mr. Lucas said in a statement after Mr. Struzan’s death. “His creativity, through a single illustrated image, opened up a world full of life in vivid color … even at a glance.”
Mr. Struzan, who posed for photographs in Indiana Jones regalia — including the familiar fedora and bullwhip — as a model for his paintings, pleased Mr. Ford with his portrayal in the posters. “It looks like me,” he said in the documentary, “but it’s invested with the nature and the character of Indiana Jones.”
Mr. Struzan’s “Back to the Future” posters form a triptych. In the first, Michael J. Fox, as Marty McFly, nervously checks his watch and has one foot inside the time-traveling DeLorean. The “Back to the Future II” (1986) poster shows McFly in the same pose, joined by the scientist Doc Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd, who also looks at his watch.
In the painting for “Back to the Future III” (1990), which is set in 1885, McFly and Doc strike similar poses (but wear Old West outfits and look at old-fashioned time pieces) and are joined by Mary Steenburgen, who played Clara Clayton, a schoolteacher who becomes Doc’s love interest.
“It’s not just an ad, you know,” Mr. Fox said in the documentary. “It’s the first notes of the piece. It’s the beginning of the story.”
In addition to his wife, a writer who ran his business, Mr. Struzan is survived by his son, Christian; two grandchildren; a sister, April Miller; and a brother, Bruce.
Mr. Struzan’s posters also promoted Mr. Darabont’s films “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994) and “The Green Mile” (1999). Mr. Darabont, who modeled the main character in “The Mist” (2007) on Mr. Struzan, told The Los Angeles Times in 2008 that he “crafts a piece of art that honors your film instead of just merely trying to sell it.”
He added, “Seriously, for a filmmaker who really appreciates what poster art means, Drew doing your poster is like getting an award.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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