A MAD Photo Finish!

We’re going to take a break from the seemingly endless monotony of the weekly look back at my work from MAD and share something I wrote for my newsletter “The Ink Stained Wretch” (which you should be subscribed to!). Last week we took a peek behind the curtain of how MAD movie parodies were done “back in the day” as far as obtaining references from the films before we all had instant access to thousands of images with a few keystrokes.

I’ll be the first to admit that my job doing movie and TV parodies is a lot easier today than when Mort Drucker, Jack Davis, Angelo Torres, Sam Viviano and the other members of the Usual Gang of Idiots did them back in the day. Thanks to the internet, finding images from films and/or the actors in them is a matter of a few keystrokes and scrolling among hundreds of results. I can download trailers and capture individual images directly from them. If I want to I can even torrent bootleg copies of the movie (although I never did that, those are lousy anyway as well as illegal). Finding actual images from the movie being spoofed is important because getting the art to capture the visual look of the film is a crucial element to a parody, and the caricatures being drawn are not really caricatures of the actors but of the actor’s CHARACTER from the movie… an important distinction. 

So, now you know how I do it… how did the old school guys do it? They saw the movies of course, just like I do. Some of them did sketches in the theater ala Al Hirschfeld. MAD staffers like Jerry DeFuccio would search out references from anywhere they could, like film magazines, newspaper articles, etc, and collate them for the artists. There just wasn’t a lot of references available while the films were new and in theaters. However there was one secret weapon the MAD parody artists often used that was a major help… the movie press kit.

Back in the day movies did not play in multiplex theaters with 20 screens and boring decor. They played in single screen theaters with lush lobbies, velvet curtains, and room for display. These theaters would get not just the movie reels from the distributor, but entire packages that included one sheet movie posters and promotional items for the film including the “press kit” that would be displayed in shadow box windows and cases at the theater. That press kit consisted of a number of 8×10 promo stills, usually individual pictures of the main characters, key scenes from the film, and sometime behind the scenes photos.

When I first decided to try and get into MAD, I wrote and drew a movie parody as a sample to show newly minted art director Sam Viviano. The film I did was 1998’s “Godzilla” starring Mathew Broderick. In trying to find reference pics of Broderick I happened across an eBay auction for the press kit from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. As I looked at the pictures of the kit on the auction page many of the images seemed really familiar. I pulled out my copy of MAD #268, with the parody “Fearless Buller’s Day Off” by Dennis Snee and Mort (and shame on Dennis and the editors for not using the title “Fearless Buller’s Off Day”). Here’s what I saw:

There are several other examples from this parody. Obviously Mort had this press kit and used it as reference. I later found out MAD staffers and freelancers had sources to procure these press kits when they did the art for film parodies, and the artists often had these kits as well as other references to help with their work. This is also a good example of how Mort and others would use reference as a help in their work, and not as a crutch to just copy what they see.

Just a little peek behind the curtain. That artists like Mort could do entire parodies with so little specific references, and do them at such a high level, is amazing to me.