Mondo's Creative Director Justin Ishmael walks us through his favorite Tyler Stout movie posters and reveals the conclusion of the triumphant Star Wars run with Stout's new original trilogy prints.
Iron Man 2
Alamo Drafthouse hosted an advance screening of Iron Man 2. Attendees were greeted by surprise visitors, Jon Favreau & Robert Downey Jr. Following the screening Jon Favreau DJ'd an after party at the Alamo Drafthouse's bar/karaoke/bowling alley/restaurant, the Highball (Read Jordan Hoffman's coverage of the event!)
Justin Ishmael: Iron Man 2 was a really weird one because we originally didn’t have Tyler on it. We woke up on a Monday morning and we had a fully finished Iron Man 2 poster in our inbox. I guess he just watched one of the trailers and got really excited. It was like Christmas morning where you wake up and there’s this amazing thing you weren’t expecting. Our response: "holy crap!"
We sent it to Paramount and they said "of course you can do that.” There were only a couple of changes to be made. You remember in the trailer, Whiplash had all the magazines pasted up on the wall? It had Rolling Stone with Tony Stark on it. We had something like that in the poster which involved a lot of logos. We had to take those out and we had to remove Randy's Donut, but other than that it was completely finished when he sent it to us. Then we did a metal variant.
Justin Ishmael: It wasn’t like we didn’t want Tyler on Iron Man 2, but he was busy. He surprised us and went, “Here you go. Here’s a finished one.” So that was a big surprise and we were very, very thankful of that. And that showing [at the Alamo Drafthouse] was cool, too, because Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. were there. I guess it was the official/unofficial premiere. It was the second group of people to see it. An incredible night.
Inglourious Basterds
Alamo Drafthouse held a "Cinemapocalypse" event for Inglorious Basterds -- a dusk 'til dawn marathon of movies was kicked off with a premiere screening of Inglorious Basterds and repertory films programmed by Quentin Tarantino.
Justin Ishmael: Inglorious Basterds was crazy because Quentin Tarantino is a big Tyler Stout fan and he was there at the screening, as well as Eli Roth. There were a lot of celebrities at that thing. Quentin bought twenty copies of this poster. We had so many people call us up about it. We had [Gregory] Nicotero call us up and we sold him some. Samm Levine took a photo in front of his poster and sent it to Tyler. This poster was a really big deal for us, and seeing the cast get excited about it was great.
A crazy thing was that something had happened with his computer and Tyler lost some of his work, so he had to start over. He wanted to have it for Tarantino's marathon, so we had it overnighted so it could arrive the Saturday morning before the show. It was really close. It almost didn’t happen.
Chris Radtke: He does these all digitally?
Justin Ishmael: Yeah, Tyler creates them all in Illustrator.
Big Trouble in Little China
This poster was created for Aint It Cool News' 24 hour film festival at the Alamo Drafthouse, Butt-Numb-A-Thon.
Justin Ishmael: Big Trouble in Little China was really weird because I remember seeing one of the posters for sale at Waterloo, a huge music and video store here in Austin. They were selling it for just twenty bucks, which is crazy because that was half the price of the original. Now it goes for close to a thousand dollars. It was just insane that people back then didn’t know how much these things were worth. They were like “Eh twenty bucks, whatever.” And now people would kill for that poster.javascript:void(0) It’s really popular. Tyler loves doing the John Carpenter stuff.
Justin Ishmael: I never thought I’d work in an official capacity with John Carpenter's films or properties like Star Wars, Aliens. . . It’s all these movies that we really loved that we are now able to contribute to, and the cool thing is a lot of these have actually become canon. We did the Rocky poster for the Rolling Roadshow tour and the producers called us saying, “Hey we want some of these for our office because we have every Rocky poster hanging up in our hallways and we want to add yours to it. We think this is one of the best one’s we have ever seen.” It is quite flattering to get a call like that.
Robocop
Alamo Drafthouse screened a 35mm print of RoboCop as part of their Big Screen Sci-Fi Classics series.
Justin Ishmael: RoboCop, I believe, was the first time we ever printed on metal. It was an experiment and took four months to get it printed. I think we printed on wood before that, but that was the first to print on metal. People went crazy for it. Sold out instantly online. This one is a super variant. We don’t like to do too many of those. That one I think we did 50. There aren’t a lot of those floating around out there.
Chris Radtke: Whose idea was it to do it on metal?
Justin Ishmael: Rob Jones. He’s now a Grammy nominated designer. He just got nominated for a Grammy because of his White Stripes stuff.
The Monster Squad
The Monster Squad poster debuted at the second of two reunion screenings at the Alamo Drafthouse with director Fred Dekker, writer Shane Black and star Andre Gower. The first reunion screening with Fred Dekker and the entire cast was credited as leading to the DVD release of Monster Squad by starting a wave of screenings and a resurgence in popularity for this underrated classic.
Chris Radtke: The Monster Squad is such a great little movie. Tell me about the special screenings at the Drafthouse.
Justin Ishmael: Yeah, we had all the actors. Well, not all the actors. Tom Noonan wasn’t there. We had a lot of them in attendance, though. That poster was cool because it was almost like a joke. I said, “Oh wouldn’t it be cool if Tyler did Monster Squad?” and then it wound up happening.
I really like that movie a lot. It’s amazing. You know that question you get asked, if you could live in any movie what would it be? And some people are say "I would live in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure." My answer is Monster Squad. It’s the real world, but it has monsters, too, so it’s not super crazy like Beetlejuice or anything. Monsters exist and there are kids running around.
Justin Ishmael: Like I say, were just joking, wouldn’t it be cool if Tyler did it, and then it came up and he chimed in, “do you have anyone on that? I’d totally do it.”
It’s always a surprise of what he wants to do. He’s really into '80s stuff and smaller movies. I think he enjoys smaller movies than he does larger, newer ones. Especially because most of the time he hasn’t seen the movie, like he hadn’t seen Iron Man 2. He hadn't seen Inglorious Basterds. He has to basically watch trailers, read stuff about it, look at stuff and then try to go off that. It is really somewhat crazy to try and make a poster from not seeing the movie. So, he can really get wild with a movie he's seen several times.
Fred Dekker said, “do the poster. I’d love to see one.” So at the screening we were all losing our minds. We had that poster and the “Stephen King Rules” shirts, and the whole cast, and Jon Gries, who we’re friends with, he was just freaking out. Everyone got one. Shane Black said it was the best poster for the movie ever. So that was really cool.
The Thing
Alamo Drafthouse screened a pristine 35mm print of The Thing as part of their Big Screen Sci-Fi Classics series.
Justin Ishmael: The Thing poster was to advertise the Big Screen Classics series we did a while back. We showed The Thing. I think we did 2001: A Space Odyssey, maybe The Road Warrior. I think they even showed King Kong and Planet of the Apes. I remember going to a Planet of the Apes double-feature - that was a heck of a time.
Tyler did The Thing and it was a perfect combination because one of his favorite directors is [John] Carpenter. His number one poster that he’s wanted to do is Escape from New York. If we ever got Carpenter similar to how we are doing the "Director’s Studio" with Guillermo Del Toro, that would be really cool. The Thing poster, that’s actually our most sought after one. It sells for a lot of money, like thousands of dollars right now. It’s pretty crazy.
Justin Ishmael: With his Thing poster, if you look at the eyes of the characters, the one’s that were infected glow in the dark. Tyler’s really cool because he’s a fan of all this stuff and he gets it. It’s always great when you have a mixture of a super great artist who likes to play with the medium. Plus he’s also a big fan of the subject. He always gets the really tiny details. I think that’s what’s so much fun about his stuff. It’s so nuanced and detailed. With a lot of people’s stuff it’s just one punch-line, you know? With his work you can look at it, and look closer and then see many hidden things.
He did an Alamo one for us, John Wayne's The Alamo. He did it with all different movie characters and we were looking at it again the other day and we noticed, hidden in there, was a straight razor near an ear for Reservoir Dogs. It’s almost like a Where’s Waldo kind of thing where you are always looking and seeing different things.
Star Wars: A New Hope
Mondo rounds out its epic Star Wars poster collection with 3 new posters (and variants) for the original trilogy designed by Tyler Stout.
They will be onsale on Mondo's site on 12/31 - available at "a random time."
They are 24"x36". 850 standard editions and 275 variant edition are being printed, the largest for a Mondo release to date.
Chris Radtke: So, now we get to the Star Wars posters. The final Star Wars posters. You've been rolling out Star Wars posters for quite some time now.
Justin Ishmael: We received the Star Wars posters in order. We planned the whole series and their releases in advance, yet none of it quite worked as originally intended. We had two prints with Yoda, and a few of Luke, and we originally hoped it would be several weeks or months between Yoda, and several weeks or months between A New Hope and an Empire, then skipping between movies. We had this whole document with everything laid out and then complications came up. The artists didn’t get it in on time, or LucasFilm didn’t approve this one, or approved this one. So, we shelved our initial schedule and simply released them when we got them in.
Tyler’s, however, were always going to be the last ones. It was always going to be the main event. A New Hope, Empire, and Jedi. It was really exciting to get his first one in, because with Tyler he’s actually doing movie posters whereas most of the other Star Wars stuff, with the exception of Olly Moss, have been art prints of moments or concepts. Having him do actual movie posters was a big deal because he was nervous, and rightfully so, of all the great posters that come before.
Justin Ishmael: He's going up against the Brothers Hildebrandt stuff or Drew Struzan, there’s so many people. Even though we had the Star Wars license we had to figure out ways to do new things and a lot of people were pushy like, “Oh your stuff is not exciting because your Hoth print was just a probe droid.”
We were taken aback. “You could have done a thing at that battle scene,” we'd hear. But we were very, very versed in what existed before and we didn’t want to do things that were already out. There are several posters of Hoth battle scenes. We wanted to do something of the calm before the storm. There was definitely a reason why we did things, so Tyler’s stuff was a deliberate choice.
There are forums on the Internet where people have lists of stuff that they want to see from us. Top 10 lists. At the top of a lot of those were Star Wars, mainly The Empire Strikes Back by Tyler. These are kind of like dream projects. That isn’t why we went out to Star Wars, not to fill these lists, or check it off, but its cool to do something that nobody expects.
Star Wars: A New Hope Variant
Justin Ishmael: This morning I was reading forums, so I’ll actually read you a quote. It's funny to read this as we discuss releasing the actual posters.
A lot of people are saying, "the thought of Tyler doing three posters never even crossed my mind! How could that happen?" Like it would be impossible for him to do three. He did this fundraiser thing where he put up three regular posters and three variants, but it was all mystery and they sold for five-hundred-fifty bucks, and he didn’t even say what they were. He just said they were three posters and three variants for the Alamo Drafthouse. Now we can announce that it was for these posters.
Five-hundred and fifty dollars for a charity and he sold out in under five minutes. People were blindly buying Tyler Stout Mondo Posters for five-hundred and fifty bucks, and they didn’t know they were the Star Wars ones! People were saying, "do you think he could be doing all three Star Wars posters?" and that's what they are. If they knew what they were buying it would have melted the Internet.
I have some choice message board quotes.
“I always thought Stout would do one Star Wars poster but if he does in fact do one for each movie I would piss myself.”
"Star Wars, Empire & Jedi Stout set? Name your price? Damn. I’d consider selling a kidney for that.” There’s a lot of this stuff.
I love surprises and giving people something they say can’t happen. The example from Star Wars is this: when we handed the poster in, they said you can’t have multiple characters in the design. So, you could see on A New Hope, for instance, there are five Luke Skywalkers. We were so adamant about keeping it that way. We didn’t want Tyler to change it. He worked months on the thing and this is how he likes it. We pulled out every poster that we had and played lawyer with LucasFilms and presented our case. We fought for it hard. This was very foolish on our part looking back on it because we had no time left. We had to get everything out by October 31st and we had a month and a half to get these approved and printed, and their approval process is pretty rigorous.
Justin Ishmael: We wrote this gigantic e-mail and put all these examples of posters that had multiple characters. We found blaxploitation movies and found Woody Allen movies and we found classic movies, super old movies. We whipped out Dolemite or The Black Godfather something like that where it has several character renderings. I think we did a Bruce Lee one too. I think it was Enter the Dragon. There are several Bruce Lees on it. We were saying that this harkens back to the 70’s where there’s lots of different scenes in the poster that get you excited about the film.
If you look at the Star Wars one, if you kind of start at the bottom and go counterclockwise, Luke is on Tatoonie, up the next one you see is him training on the Millenium Falcon with the visor on, and then you go up to him in the X-Wing fighter, and then finally he becomes the Jedi - essentially that’s him posed on the Star Wars logo. So that’s how we explained it and then they said “Okay. Approved.”
So, I suppose you could say we won. They said they never allowed multiple characters on any posters from licensees. We were like the first ones to be able to do it because we could explain it. We just wanted to say that he didn’t run out of things to do, he put these on here for a reason. It's cool because we got to break the rules to have these on there. Every bit of this series has been a fight because there are so many rules, but we're not trying to be different just to be different.
We like to stick up for our artists and this was the big one. It is a highlight for the series, at least to me. Getting the series was big, and getting Tyler to do it was big, but to actually get his artwork approved by LucasFilm, that was a really big accomplishment.
The Empire Strikes Back
Justin Ishmael: Oh, Empire. I think he was most nervous about this one. For all of us, it's one of the biggest movies ever. I’d be comfortable to say there are probably six different versions of this thing.
Justin Ishmael: The icons were originally at the top, and he worked on this the longest out of all of them. There are so many different versions of this poster it was really nuts. He actually draws each thing out so if you look at, for instance, Yoda and Luke, that is a full drawing. You could take everything else away and that would be a fully fleshed out drawing.
The Empire Strikes Back Variant
Justin Ishmael: I still can’t believe how much time he spent on Empire. It’s good that he spent so much time, but it was also very nerve-wracking, as it had to be in approval for so long. You know, it’s Empire! This is the big one and I think he really knew it.
I love the depiction of the Hoth battle, it’s got everything you want. Everything you think about this movie, you’ve got the Hoth battle, the space slug and even the Millineum Falcon flying out of it.
Justin Ishmael: We set such a precedent with the first one that they let us have multiple characters on this one, too. People want Boba Fett of course, he played a big part in it, so he’s on it. This was really exciting. This is the one everyone knew was going to be really exciting.
Return of the Jedi
Justin Ishmael: Return of the Jedi was the very last one that we got in. There were moments where we would politely ask, “are you working on it?” and he'd reply “yeah, I’ll have it done soon.” It ended up almost like an Iron Man 2-type of situation where we got a fully fleshed out work. It wound up a combination of it being very good and it being the last one we had to do, so there was great relief and excitement that we actually had done it.
It was the first time we had anything with the Emperor on it. The Emperor is such a huge part of the poster. I love that it has the Emperor looming over everything.
Justin Ishmael: I think my favorite part is Luke in the Jedi. I think it is so cool. To me, it is a nod to the dark side of Luke, and what could have been. I also like that Tyler has Ewoks in it. I know everybody shits on Ewoks, but, actually, we submitted a few posters and one piece of feedback was “add Ewoks.” I thought that was funny.
I really like that he has Darth Vader without his mask. It’s the REAL Darth Vader, it’s not the CGI Hayden Christensen. I’m glad it’s the real David Prowse guy.
Chris Radtke: You know what’s also awesome is that the background in the icons evoke Jabba’s Sail Barge, the venetian blinds of Jabba’s Sail Barge.
Justin Ishmael: Definitely. That’s how he started the series - we did the Droids and we did the little rolling guys.
Also great in this: Ackbar. People love Ackbar. I think he tried to do important characters throughout the series in little icon boxes, when you put them all together, how they are supposed to be displayed on a wall it sums up the movies and the main characters. That was a cool little extra thing that he did.
Return of the Jedi Variant
Chris Radtke: Last but not least let’s talk about this awesome Jedi variant.
Justin Ishmael: The REVENGE of the Jedi. That was the first thing that I wanted from the series at all.
I felt Tyler should do all three and then he should do a Revenge of the Jedi variant. They were like “Okay!” That was one of those pipe dream things where it’s not real. There’s no way somebody would let us do a Revenge. We would ask people and they were like “No way. No fu*king way man.”
Chris Radtke: I 100% remember seeing shirts and patches and stuff. There were definitely posters. My friend has one and it says, “Coming Soon Revenge of the Jedi” in the Jedi font.
Justin Ishmael: That’s really cool. We were just watching this movie. . .it was like a boner comedy from the 80’s, I can’t remember what it was. There's a scene with these kids are hanging out and they are like “So what do you want to do this weekend?” “Let’s go see Revenge of the Jedi.” They made this reference so early, and the movie was finished before the title had changed. So there’s this dopey movie out there that mentions Revenge of the Jedi. I always thought that was cool.
Justin Ishmael: This was the first thing we talked about for the whole Star Wars project. It was Tyler doing the original three and then Revenge of the Jedi.
All of the variants are a color change. All of Tyler’s variants are gold. It’s his standard thing. We’ll spend extra money if we think it’s really cool and this is an example. A New Hope and Empire are color changes to gold and they are all metallic. But this one we are printing new screens for everything because it’s like a totally different poster.
He had to resize the logo, too. The logo is different enough that it needed to be resized, but we'll go the extra mile to do stuff that’s cool. If we have to spend money to do it it’s not a problem. We are fans first. That’s always what is on our mind.
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