Written in Stone

Not saying that movie poster art has become, well, a lost art, but the care and the detail once infused, as well as the utter spectacle conveyed, in ads from the 1950s and '60s - remember, movie theaters had to compete with the upstart medium of television - became endangered as newspapers shrunk and advertising space vanished.

There was once a singular motif utilized specifically for big-screen epics in lobby posters and newspaper spots, with ginormous letters seemingly carved out of rock that came to be known as stone-type. Front and center were the monument-sized block letters for 1959's "Ben-Hur," with a colossal title dwarfing Charlton Heston in his chariot as he races around the track in an ancient Roman hippodrome.

The idea for the letters, seemingly carved in stones the size of a mountain, came from the artistic brain of Reynold Brown. Born in 1917, Brown was a realist artist who got his start as a comic artist, working as an inker on cartoonist Hal Forrest's strip "Tailspin Tommy" (pictured below).

It was Norman Rockwell who advised Brown to abandon cartooning if he wanted to be an illustrator. Brown subsequently won a scholarship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. During World War II, he worked as a technical artist at North American Aviation, a major aerospace manufacturer. After the war, he drew numerous advertisements and illustrated several magazine pieces. He also created paperback covers.

Brown was teaching at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena when he met an art director for Universal Pictures, which led to Brown creating the artwork for dozens of movie posters. Brown's original painting for John Wayne's 1960 epic "The Alamo" hung on display for many years in the actual Alamo in San Antonio, Texas.

The original painting had been defaced by somebody with a knife
in the 1970s (slicing the painting at John Wayne's knee) but was
restored by the Alamo Lore and Myth Organization.

Aside from creating movie posters, Reynold Brown was an accomplished painter of western themes, as seen here in depictions of cowboys and Native Americans.

Reynold Brown revisited the stone-type look when he was hired to design the poster for 1960's "Spartacus," starring Kirk Douglas and directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Speaking of ancient epics, after Steve Reeves, an American bodybuilder and former Mr. America, went to Italy in 1958 to star in the surprising box office hit "Hercules," Italian producers and directors cranked out a plethora of sword-and-sandal adventures featuring muscle-bound heroes and heaving bosomed femme fatales. In 1959, Steve Reeves returned to his defining role in the sequel "Hercules Unchained," promoted in appropriately humongous letters.

Even The Three Stooges - Moe, Larry, and "Curly Joe" DeRita - borrowed from the spectacles, in the advertising for 1962's "The Three Stooges Meet Hercules," produced by Moe's son-in-law, Norman Maurer.

The 1977 Italian-made documentary "Kolossal" was a celebration of Maciste, a muscleman first introduced in the 1914 Italian silent epic "Cabiria." The character was revived in the 1960s as an answer to Steve Reeves' Hercules. Many Maciste movies were retitled in other countries with the name replaced by more popular names like Hercules, Goliath, or Samson.

In the early 1960s, one producer who repeatedly returned to stone-type in posters for his pictures was Samuel Bronston. Bronston, born in Bessarabia in the Russian Empire, was a nephew of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky who worked for MGM's French branch in Paris before establishing himself as an independent producer and founding Samuel Bronston Productions in 1943. From 1961 to 1964, his epic films "King of Kings," "El Cid," "55 Days at Peking," and "The Fall of the Roman Empire" were based at his studio in Madrid, Spain.

Samuel Bronston went to the master of stone-type, Reynold Brown,
for this poster for the film with Jeffrey Hunter as a blue-eyed Jesus.

Filmed on a budget of $20 million, "The Fall of the Roman Empire" was Paramount Pictures' biggest flop of 1964 and proved to be the downfall of Bronston's Spanish production facility. He filed for bankruptcy, and lead actor Stephen Boyd (who had played Charlton Heston's nemesis, Messala, in "Ben-Hur") blamed the commercial failure of the film for ruining his screen career.

Elements of "The Fall of the Roman Empire" found
their way into the story of the 2000 Best Picture Oscar
winner "Gladiator," including the depiction of Emperor
Commodus as the main antagonist, played in 1964 by
Christopher Plummer and by Joaquin Phoenix in 2000.

Samuel Bronston was lampooned as Samuel L. Bronkowitz in "The Kentucky Fried Movie," the 1977 comedy anthology film written by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, the creators of "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" pictures, and directed by John Landis, prior to his directing "National Lampoon's Animal House." "The Kentucky Fried Movie" featured a number of previews of coming attractions, all ominously introduced as "Samuel L. Bronkowitz presents," including "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble," "Cleopatra Schwartz," and "That's Armageddon," a spoof of disaster movies with George Lazenby (the screen's one-shot 007 from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"), as well as a "feature presentation" of "A Fistful of Yen" (a parody of Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon"). The name Bronkowitz was a merging of Bronston and Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

Although it isn't true stone-point lettering, "The Kentucky Fried
Movie's" trailer for "That's Armageddon" would have pleased
Samuel Bronston, if not Samuel L. Bronkowitz.

Aside from Samuel Bronston productions, there were a number of other pictures from the '60s advertised in stone-point, among them 1962's "Sodom and Gomorrah," which The New York Times labeled an "obvious but feeble imitation" of Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments."

The film was considered a low point in the career of director Robert
Aldrich, who would see better days with pictures like "The Flight of
the Phoenix," "The Dirty Dozen," and "The Longest Yard."

"Marco Polo" (1962) was directed by an Italian who turned Hercules into a 17th century Zorro-like avenger in "Hercules and the Masked Rider" and then as the hero of a spaghetti western in "Hercules and the Treasure of the Incas." An American director added scenes for the English-dubbed version of "Marco Polo."

Rory Calhoun was more comfortable in the
saddle as a cowboy star than an Italian merchant.

An epic-wannabe, not unlike "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago," 1964's "Genghis Khan" featured an all-star cast, including Omar Sharif, Stephen Boyd, James Mason, Eli Wallach, Françoise Dorléac (Catherine Deneuve's sister), Telly Savalas, and Robert Morley, but suffered from so many historical inaccuracies that it was compared unfavorably to the decade earlier Howard Hughes-produced "The Conqueror," which laughably starred John Wayne, playing Genhis Khan as if he were a Mongol in a cowboy movie.

In 1966, a West German producer remade a pair of silent movie classics by Austrian-born director Frtiz Lang, namely "Siegfried" and "Kriemhild's Revenge," otherwise known as "Die Nibelungen," based on the epic 13th century High German poem Nibelungeneid. (The work also inspired Richard Wagner's four-part opera "The Ring of the Nibelung.") For American audiences, the 1966 films were released under the title "Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy," appropriately proclaimed in towering stone-point.

Costar Herbert Lom made a name for himself
as the long-suffering Chief Inspector Dreyfus
in Peter Sellers' Clouseau comedies, while Karin
Dor played SPECTRE assassin Helga Brandt in
the Sean Connery 007 film "You Only Live Twice."

Despite its imposing prominence in movie ads, 1969's "The Sin of Adam and Eve" was nothing more than a filmed-on-the-cheap softcore Mexican nudie written, produced, and directed by Miguel Zacarías.

Tbe "Candy Wilson" of the credits was a one-time
only starlet, otherwise billed as simply "Kandy."
"George" Rivero was actually Mexican actor Jorge
Rivero, who underwent a short-lived attempt in the
1970s to become an Anglicized actor in the westerns
"Rio Lobo," with John Wayne, and "The Last Hard
Men," starring Charlton Heston and James Coburn.

Throughout his career,  Charlton Heston witnessed plenty of stone-point ads for his epic screen escapades, from "Ben-Hur" to "El Cid" and "55 Days at Peking," so when it came time for him to join the disaster picture cycle, 1974's "Earthquake" was no exception, with mammoth letters from the title literally falling into the Pacific Ocean.

In any language, the colossal letters fell into place...

...in French...

...in German...

...in Spanish...

...and in Turkish.

In the mid 1970s, when the British comedy troupe Monty Python's Flying Circus ventured from the small tube to the big screen, they, spearheaded by their American member, Minneapolis-born cartoonist and animator Terry Gilliam, were not about to forgo the allure of stone-point titles...

...from 1975's "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"...

...to "Monty Python's Life of Brian"...

...to "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life."

The 1981 miniseries "Masada" dramatized the historical siege of the near-impregnable Masada citadel in the Judean desert, occupied by Jewish Zealots called the Sicarii, by legions of the Roman Empire in 73 AD. The siege ended when Roman forces finally breached the fortress, only to discover the mass suicide of the defenders, who preferred death over defeat and capture. Peter Strauss (best known for his starring role in the miniseries "Rich Man, Poor Man") portrayed Sicarri leader Eleazar Ben Yair, while Peter O'Toole played the Roman general, Lucius Flavius Silva. The supporting cast featured Barbara Carrera, Anthony Quayle, and David Warner, who won an Outstanding Supporting Actor Emmy Award for his role as Senator Pomponius Falco.

From the sublime to the subnormal, did a 1982 X-rated comedy titled "Expose Me Now," costarring adult cinema's "The Hedgehog" Ron Jeremy, deserve such monumental advertising?

Starlet Danielle once said, "I believe you only live
once so make the most of it...Some people call me
wild, but I'm just very adventurous. I like to go for
the gusto and try everything out. That is what life is
to me." Danielle died at the age of 49.

At least one of the posters for Steven Spielberg's $132 million retooling of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" in 2005 bore those imposing blocky letters.

And could we expect anything less from a 2007 comedy actually called "Epic Movie"?

On the subject of comedies, the late Harold Ramis' last picture as writer, producer, and director was 2009's "Year One," a well-intentioned but misfiring historical-biblical farce starring Jack Black and Michael Cera.

On the plus side, "Year One" did feature memorable comic
turns by David Cross as Cain, Paul Rudd as Abel, Harold
Ramis as Adam, and Hank Azaria as Abraham.

Finally, it wasn't used to advertise the movie, but Mel Brooks' 1981 "History of the World, Part I" finished with a big ending, literally.