If Tucker had had his way, all cars would have had seat belts as standard equipment by 1950 and we’d all be driving cars with steerable headlights. This was Francis Ford Coppola’s paean to Preston Tucker, the too-far-ahead-of-his-time automotive genius of the 1940s. Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988, Lucasfilm, distributed by Paramount Pictures). All in all, a very funny film, but spotty in its use of type. On the other hand, the use of signs (especially the hand-lettered one in the medicine cabinet) is right on target. They look more like children’s readers than real newspapers. The newspapers seen in several scenes are also problematic. The movie got a lot of praise for its attention to such details, but of course nobody mentioned the use of Blippo, a pop-art typeface from the early seventies, on the cruise brochure. They even hired veteran Hollywood costume designer Edith Head (for which she won an Oscar) and created sets and lighting to blend with existing footage from classic films. ![]() In the forties, movie titles were usually hand-lettered on cards shown in sequence.Īpart from the titles, careful attention is paid to get details right. The choices here, Newport (1932) and Brush Script (1942), fit the period, but the style of the credits feels wrong. No attempt at historically accurate typography only free fonts from Apple or Microsoft were used.ĭead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982, Universal Pictures) In this case the movie is a parody of the film noir genre so the titles are part of the world the film portrays. Little attention to period typography period-correct type appears only on actual period artifacts Uneven use of period typography major mistakes occasionally Good effort to use period typography minor mistakes here and there Nearly perfect use of period typography errors, if any, are difficult to find Ratings are given from one to five stars indicating how well type is used in the each film: It may be debatable whether it was an appropriate choice, but it would be a matter of taste, not historical accuracy. For instance, the movie Eight Men Out (1988) used the Emigré typeface Modula (1987) in its titles (designed by M&Co.). What follows is a brief survey of films that have caught my attention over the years for their use (or misuse) of period typography.Īt the outset, I should point out that typefaces used in titles don’t necessarily count since they exist outside the world depicted in a movie. Besides, the number of people who notice things like anachronistic type choices is small. There are more important things to attend to in movie making. It’s probably unrealistic to expect this level of attention to detail in movies. To him it was as glaring as if they had had Paul Le Mat driving a Camaro. A friend of mine in high school was a telephone nut and liked to point out that the kind of phone booth that appears in a scene near the end of American Graffitti (1973) didn’t exist in 1962. ![]() Noticing little slips like this in movies can happen to anyone with knowledge in any specialized field. It is likely that Art Nouveau typefaces would still be in use in provincial France of the mid-fifties. ITC Benguiat was designed in a quasi-Art Nouveau style. The headline was set in ITC Benguiat, a typeface which debuted in 1978 and was mainly popular in the ’80s. I almost laughed when they showed a close-up of the notice. About halfway through the film, the town’s mayor puts up notices forbidding anyone to eat anything but bread and weak tea during Lent (which of course coincides with the opening of the new chocolaterie). The movie is set in a small town in provincial France, mid-1950s. But if they gave out Oscars for Best Type Direction, it would not have been among the nominees. It managed to get five Academy Award Nominations.
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