Drew Struzan, a well-known artist known for designing movie posters such as “Star Wars,” “Back to the Future,” and “Blade Runner,” died on Monday. He was 78 years old.
Struzan’s Instagram account released a statement announcing his death. “I have to share with you all that Drew Struzan passed away yesterday, October 13th. I feel it is important that you all know how much you appreciated his art and how much joy it brought him to me,” his brother Greg Struzan said in a statement.
“Drew created event art,” frequent collaborator Steven Spielberg said of Struzan’s accomplishments. “His posters have made many of our films a destination, and one look at his iconic photorealistic images will always bring back memories of those films and our age when we saw them. In a style he himself invented, no one drew quite like Drew.”
Born in Oregon City, Struzan attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he sold his artwork and a small commission to pay for college. While living in Los Angeles, Struzan found work as a local artist with Pacific Eye and Ear, where he worked under the tutelage of artist Ernie Cefalu.
Struzan designed album covers for artists such as the Beach Boys, Bee Gees, and Earth, Wind and Fire, and illustrated Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare” album cover, charging $150 to $250 per painting. In 1975, while at Pacific Eye & Ear, Struzan began creating promotional posters for films, creating artwork for low-budget films such as “Empire of the Ants” and “Squirm.”
Struzan was asked by Charles White III, an artist employed by 20th Century Fox’s vice president of advertising, David Weitzner, to design a new poster for the 1978 re-release of Star Wars. White hired Struzan to help draw the human characters in oil paintings, while White concentrated on drawing the mechanical details and ships on the posters.
After working on “Star Wars,” Struzan painted posters for films such as “Blade Runner,” “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” “Coming to America,” “The Goonies” and “The Muppet Movie.”
Struzan worked on Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in the 2000s, but announced his retirement in 2008. He previously came out of retirement to co-design posters for Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Batkid Begins, and How to Train Your Dragon trilogy.
In 2013, Struzan was the subject of Eric Sharkey’s documentary Drew: The Man Behind the Poster, which examined the artist’s work and life with interviews with collaborators such as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Harrison Ford.
In a 2021 interview with Slashfilm, Struzan detailed the creative process behind each poster and the artwork’s influences. “I felt that art doesn’t just tell a story. I try to give people a sense of something they can expect,” Strausen said. “I ask the directors what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.[And]I try to find the best of what they’re doing, and then I paint it that way. I look for the best pictures I can find of the actors and the scene[and]I look for the color palette. I say, ‘Here’s what you have to think about,’ and design an open-ended composition, rather than a closed-ended one. When that happens, I feel like I’ve done a good job. ”
