Friday, June 08, 2007

The Man Who Wanted Everything: Michael Ovitz and the Dark Dreams of Hollywood


by Nikki Finke

• A Type Directors Club Award Winner

Art Director: Anne Twomey // Warner Books Twelve

Art Director Anne Twomey hired me to design this cover for her new imprint TWELVE, for Time Warner, which has since then been renamed Grand Central Publishers. Her only direction to me for this biography of super talent agent to the stars Michael Ovitz was, "Make this say Hollywood and make it look like a Type Directors' Club award winner."
So I came up with the idea that his bigger than life persona is like a movie up on the screen and we are just spectators, but sitting in the worst seat in the theater. Front row and far left. I chose to depict it as end credits since this book was a retrospective and printed on silverish pearlized stock. I had more extreme angles and the back of a person's head blocking some of the type, but legibilty suffered.
Unfortunately the book was cancelled and so far, no plans to be published anytime soon. But that didn't stop Anne from entering the sales proof to the Type Directors' Club competition.
I received an email; "Your entry in TDC53 has been selected by the judges to receive the "Certificate of Typographic Excellence". To be included in the Annual of the Type Directors Club, Typography 28, and to be shown at the 53rd Awards Exhibition in New York."
Nice. It’s been a long while since I designed something type specific that I thought was good enough for TDC.
It's too bad the book won’t have a shelf life out in the public, but at least it's here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Beautiful cover. I saw Anne working on this one and I love how you ended up shooting it on screen just enough to blur the type and get that halo effect. Unfortunate to see it get dropped though.

Anonymous said...

Congrats!

You've been wanting to get into the TDC show.

Nice work. It's great that it's a photo and not just skewed type. Really makes it.

Anonymous said...

It's just Criminal that it was not published.
Still it's mu favorite cover since i've been at Warner.
Anne t

nate s. said...

Everything about this is taken further than expected...most designers (dare I say myself?) would have stopped at the idea of projecting words in a theater. Sitting in the front left really brings it home (this happens to me more often than I would like).