Bill Gold dead at 97
Bill Gold, who created posters for “Casablanca,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Alien,” “Mystic River” and hundreds of other films with an artistry that captured the intrigue, romance and drama of Hollywood for nearly 70 years, died on Sunday in Greenwich, Conn. He was 97.
Mr. Gold’s wife, Susan, said he died at Greenwich Hospital from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
In the niche of poster art for films, Mr. Gold was a behind-the-scenes superstar whose work, mostly for Warner Bros. and Clint Eastwood’s Malpaso Productions, was displayed at theaters and in promotional campaigns across America from 1942 to 2011. While he was largely uncredited until the internet age, his posters offered millions of moviegoers tantalizing glimpses of the raptures awaiting in the cinema darkness.
Long before poster artists turned to photography and computer-generated images in the 1980s and ’90s, illustrators like Mr. Gold billboarded movies with freehand drawings, based on scripts and first screen prints, that hinted at plots and moods and mysteries, without giving away too much — priming audiences for love, betrayal, jealousy, murder.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/20/obituaries/bill-gold-dead-movie-posters.html