The Art of the Sell: Stephen Sayadian

The Art of the Sell: Stephen Sayadian (2015)

*** (out of 4)

Art designer Stephen Sayadian is the focus of this ten minute featurette that can be found on The Criterion Collection's release of DRESSED TO KILL. Sayadian talks about his work at Hustler magazine and how his career really took off when he started his own company and began doing one-sheets for Hollywood. He talks about his work for Brian DePalma's DRESSED TO KILL as well as going into detail about several other movies that he worked on including THE FUNHOUSE, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and plenty of others. Posters are pretty much forgotten in today's movies but back in the day they were a very important part to selling a movie so getting to hear from Sayadian about the process back in the day was quite interesting. He talks about how they often got ideas before even seeing the movie and he goes into details about what he tried to express in the poster.