This Doc is a Love Letter to Movie Posters
We spoke with the director of ‘24x36: A Movie About Movie Posters,’ streaming exclusively on Tribeca Shortlist
We’re excited to announce the streaming premiere of 24x36: A Movie About Movie Posters exclusively on Tribeca Shortlist now! This brand new documentary follows the world of illustrated posters from their prestigious early history to the current world of fan-created alternative posters. To mark the occasion, we sat down with the film’s director Kevin Burke and talked about his love of posters, where his poster habit first started, and what he’s got hanging on his walls.
“Originally the film was just going to be about screen printed poster art,” Burke explained to Tribeca Shortlist, “because it’s such an enormous growing phenomenon, a collector’s world, that I felt needed to be captured.”
But how did his love of this modern phenomenon first begin? “About seven years ago my fiancee bought me my first screen print, it was a Mondo screen print by Olly Moss and I just fell in love with it. And I immediately started collecting screen print posters.”
Here’s the incredible Olly Moss poster that Burke attributes to starting his entire collection:
His love of posters goes way back before the There Will Be Blood poster. “When I was a kid I used to collect one-sheet posters,” Burke explained. “I used to go to the locally owned cinemas and video stores—they were still locally owned back then, they still existed back then—and they would have a poster of a marquee and all the kids in town would put their names on a waiting list. So you’d have to be the first one there to see it and tell the manager you wanted that poster. And then they’d call your house, and your mom would say ‘hey, the poster came down, you can go get it.’ And we’d hop on our bikes and ride down and get it. And I did that for years.”
But a love of posters and an idea that this subculture deserved a documentary weren’t quite enough to get the ball rolling. The final piece of the puzzle came together gearing up for his fiancee’s lecture on the history of horror movie posters. While prepping for that, the two learned that one of their favorite poster artists, Gary Pullin, was based nearby.
“So we asked if we could interview him. I shot an interview, and animated some of his poster art and some of his work, and we showed it as part of the lecture and the segment was a huge hit. And people were asking about how they could see more, and that’s when we took what had already been an idea of ours and just pulled the trigger and said ‘Okay, we have to to make this movie.’”
“I wanted to explore the popularity of the art and what makes it so popular, outside of the fact that it’s just fantastic illustration, but if there was some sort of connection there. Because, for me, I knew that was my personal connection. I used to love one-sheets, when they were illustrated, and I stopped collecting when they weren’t. And then years later I was introduced to this new form of poster art that kept the illustration alive.”
“This whole community is really rad. I wish I could have made the movie three hours long because there’s so much more to this whole world,” Burke went on to explain the way the poster collecting community works together to make sure everyone gets their favorite prints. From trading to “poster buddies” (people who will buy a poster for someone if they can’t make it to that particular convention), the feeling of community really shines through the entire film. “That was one of my favorite parts of making the film, even outside of meeting some of my hero artists, was just the chance to meet some of my friends face to face for the first time, and actually get to include them for the first time.”
To close out the conversation, we asked Kevin Burke about some of his favorite movie posters, and some of the posters in his own collection.
What are Burke’s all-time favorite posters? “It’s a cross between John Alvin’s E.T. poster, with the two hands touching and Roger Kastel’s original poster for The Empire Strikes Back.”
As for the latest poster Burke’s picked up, that honor goes to Matt Ryan Tobin’s poster for Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey for Scuzzles.
And finally, the rarest poster in his collection is the above screenprint for Enter the Dragon, by poster artist Kako, complete with gold leafing (the photo doesn’t do it justice) and limited to an edition run of only 35 prints!
Watch 24x36: A Movie About Movie Posters now ONLY on Tribeca Shortlist. Click below to start your FREE Tribeca Shortlist trial now!
