Now the name Roger Kastel might not mean much to you but his work will be because it is he who designed Jaws poster, possibly the most iconic poster is cinema history. Though he recently died on 8th November 2023 aged 92 years old his art will live on.
Explaining how the image came into being he said, “I did a very rough sketch, and [the book publisher] said, ‘That’s great, just make the shark realistic and bigger. Make him very much bigger!’”
The image first painted by Paul Bacon appeared on the novel in 1974 and Kastel tweaked the image giving the shark far more teeth having drawn inspiration from a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York to photograph the shark there.
At the museum he asked a museum employee, ‘Do you have a shark exhibit in the building?’ [The employee] said, ‘Yes we do,’ but they were all down. They were refurbishing, cleaning them,”
‘All the sharks were laying on easels. And so I had my camera with me. I knew what position I wanted the shark in, and there was this great white that they had laying on an easel; I guess they were dusting it. And that’s what I worked from.”
For the swimmer in the poster he asked a model he was photographing at a Good Housekeeping shoot to stick around a bit longer, and he got her to approximate a front crawl while on a stool. (He also removed the bathing suit that the swimmer had worn on the hard-cover version, and that got the book banned in several cities.)
Now the image should have made Kastel a fortune but rumour has it that Bantam books chief Oscar Dystel gave the image to Universal Studios for free, losing out on millions of dollars — and it quickly became iconic, riffed on by cartoonists to represent USSR-USA relations, the presidential elections (Gerard Ford vs. Ronald Reagan), rising inflation and the energy crisis.
We love the Jaws poster (and the film too) and is one of many posters we have on our office walls
related feature : The story behind the shot – Jaws
related feature : cocaine fuelled Shark movie, ‘Deep Fear’ – cast & crew Q&A
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