For all of you 80s film buffs, movie poster enthusiasts and/or Madonna fanatics out there, My Life as a Blog has a terrific behind the scenes retrospective of the making of the Desperately Seeking Susan poster. From someone who was directly involved at that.
Movie fanatics often like to bitch about the lack of illustration and graphic design in today's movie posters but even the photography-based movie posters, rarely are pulled from photo-shoots these days. They just do quick slapdash photoshopping of different images of the actors or blow up their faces from stills and work around that.
It's so depressing. Especially when a movie poster that's illustrated or photographed separately merely using the movie as inspiration can be so iconic and worth loving apart from the movie they're attached to.
I Could Go On Bitching.
Reid writes...
Nowadays photo shoots like these are a big deal, with limos for talent, and a gaggle of publicists and studio executives, but the only people from the movie were me and the wardrobe supervisor Melissa Stanton (who brought the jackets, costumes and accessories), Herb’s crew, and Madonna and Rosanna, who cabbed over themselves. [Why am I so sure they didn’t get cars? Because afterwards Madonna complained that she couldn’t take the subway anymore. She had only recently reached the level of fame where people hassled her on the trains...]
I've always really loved this poster and it's hilarious to read that studio executives were worried that people would think it was a lesbian movie. GASP.
Rosanna and Madonna had a peculiar relationship. On one hand they were friends and even hung out together outside of work, but on another… Madonna had a way of sucking all the air out of the room. It’s my understanding that the movie was greenlit because Rosanna, red-hot after “The Executioner’s Song” and “Baby, It’s You,” had agreed to be in it. Rosanna was unquestionably the lead and worked practically every day, while Madonna’s role was much smaller in terms of actual scenes. But there was no denying that Madonna was Madonna and she was “Susan,” in a movie called “Desperately Seeking Susan.” Once, when somebody on the street asked who was in the film, I heard Rosanna say, “Madonna.”
Madonna sounds incredibly bitchy in this article (as she often does in such anecdotal evidence) but I love her all the same. She's like an inextracticble part of my soul.