Joe Alves: Adventures In Film Design - Back This Kickstarter!
It seems ridiculous to think that in the New Year, it will be fifty years since Steven Spielberg terrified a generation with his man-killer shark thriller, Jaws.
A defining moment in film history, it set the blueprint for the Summer Blockbusters that would rule the box office for the next half a century.
It was also the first major movie to be filmed on the sea. Production was fraught with new challenges and unexpected problems. Including, how to portray the shark - they even considered trying to train a real-life Great White!
Realising that sharks are (at best) unreliable pets, they turned to Art Director and Production Designer Joe Alves to design three full-size pneumatically powered prop sharks, nick-named Bruce after Spielberg's lawyer Bruce Ramer.
Joe Alves and Bruce the shark, created for Steven Spielberg's Jaws
Jaws is one of the many cinematic adventures of multi-talented Joe Alves. In a career spanning over forty years, he was Oscar nominated for his work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), helped revive 3-D cinema with Jaws 3-D and re-created the Big Apple in John Carpenter's Escape From New York (1981).
Alongside many of the movie poster artists that we celebrate on the blog, Alves is one of the creative geniuses who crafted the cinematic worlds we fell in love with, but that few outside of the industry can name.
Joe Alves with Close Encounters' Devil's Tower
We have a chance to help change that.
Back in February, we covered Dennis Prince's passion to capture the work of Robert Tanenbaum in The Movie Poster Art of Robert Tanenbaum. This beautiful book not only celebrates Tanenbaum's art legacy, but also shares some amazing stories that, in time, would have been lost to the world.
After a chance encounter with Joe Alves, Dennis has pulled off another tour-de-force, a 538 page, 2 inch thick book, beautifully printed on high-quality silk paper, providing an in-depth exploration of Joe's work on Hollywood blockbusters for Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Rod Serling, Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter and many others.
It is packed full of original production notes, sketches, storyboards, and photos, all from Joe's extensive personal archive, the majority of which have never been published before.
Shooting Jaws 2, from Joe Alves: Adventures in Film Design
The book is designed, formatted and ready to go. It is being offered as a limited-edition run of only 1,000 copies worldwide, through a Kickstarter fund-raising campaign.
Designing New York for Escape From New York, from Joe Alves: Adventures in Film Design
The campaign closes on the 5th January but the book will only be printed if the $20,000 fund raising target is met. You can contribute, and receive a copy of the book from as little as $65 (~£52).
Realising the meeting point for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, from Joe Alves: Adventures in Film Design
If you loved the blockbusters of the 1970's or 1980's or have any interest in the movies, I encourage you to participate and to get hold of a copy of this limited edition book. It would be criminal for these images and stories not to be shared.
You can find the Kickstarter campaign here.
Adam and the Art of the Movies team
