Iconic film images online by Crookham Common man
Poster and film art dealer Michael Bloomfield, aged 53, has been asked to catalogue and administer the works of Tom Chantrell, the artist who created the iconic film posters which accompanied epics such as Star Wars, and One Million Years BC, as well as the Hammer Horror and the Carry On...series.
The website features original posters from the Chartrell archive and original artworks, some of
which is to go under the hammer at world famous auctioneers Sotheby’s.
The Chantrell family approached Mr Bloomfield, who has run MEM: Music and Cinema Memorabilia in Newbury since 1998, to co-ordinate the website.
“It is an honour and a privilege to be working on the Chantrell website,” Mr Bloomfield said.
“The great thing is they are so accessible.
“Works of art like Picassos and Rembrandts will sell for millions, but in terms of cinema these are so important and that they retail for hundreds, or thousands of pounds, younger people can get into collecting them.”
Many of Chantrell’s works were lost owing to the nature of the cinema industry during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, when the posters weren’t kept, simply due to the rapid turnover of films, and only later on did his work become appreciated when Mr Bloomfield and his ilk began collecting them.
As poster design evolved and cinema advertising over the decades and graphic designers began to be commissioned, the hand-painted styles faded away, but Chantrell, the Manchester-born son of a trapeze artist, was still very much in demand.
American director George Lucas brought him in to create the poster for Star Wars after rejecting a piece by a design company.
Old fashioned and inventive to the last, Chantrell made wife Shirley pose as Carrie Fishers character Princess Leia in their back garden holding a stick in the manner of a lightsaber; the infamous weapon of the sci-fi series.
“When Tom started out the only way films could be advertised was on the poster, there was no TV or internet to advertise, and he never lost sight of that even as films progressed.
“He was an artist but he had a genius touch of how to sell a film.
“He was so good that with some of his efforts you could find that the poster was more exciting and colourful than the film itself.”
For more information, telephone (01635) 269 327, or log on to www.chantrellposter.com and