Haruo takino biography of william

Above: 1980 Japanese poster for Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1979).

Design by Eiko Ishioka, artwork by Haruo Takino.

With Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestated Megalopolis having premiered yesterday at Cannes,it's a good time to look back at the posters from his 60-year-long career.

The only problem is that many posters for his films are either too well known (the iconic Godfather logo, which came from Mario Puzo’s book cover) or nothing to write home about (as with his more recent films, from Jack [1996] to Twixt [2011]).

Like Coppola’s career itself, there are peaks and valleys—one of my very first posts for Notebook, almost exactly fifteen years ago, was about the gorgeous design for The Rain People (1969)—but a career retrospective of his posters seems like it might result in less than the sum of its parts.

Yet of all his posters there are three rare Japanese designs that have al