I've won a lot of awards for the Sideways poster, AI, Society of Illustrators, and the Key Award- poster design's Oscar- for best comedy poster. There's a story behind the making of this. The funniest part is that they used one of my sketches for the final art. I had no idea until I saw it. When the job came in from Stephanie Allen at Fox Searchlight, I was delighted, of course, and determined to land this one for illustrators everywhere. It's been a long time since we've seen illustrated movie posters like this - I am referring to the simple graphic posters of the late 50's and sixties by people like Tommy Ungerer and Saul Bass. So I did dozens of sketches. The director, Alexander Payne, had seen a cover that I'd done for the L.A. Times Magazine about alienation in Southern California and wanted to capture the same feeling of anger and malaise. It did help that I had Paul Giomatti as the star
Christian Struzen, my designer, turned the bottle on
The winning sketch.
This is the L.A. Times Magazine cover that inspired the producers of Sideways to commission the poster.