Tony Seiniger, the poster designer who also oversaw marketing campaigns for such classic movies as Jaws, Poltergeist, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Total Recall, died Monday in Atlanta, his family announced. He was 87.
Known as the “Godfather of Movie Advertising,” Seiniger took unknown illustrator Drew Struzan under his wing and gave him his start as a poster designer in Hollywood. Struzan would become a show business legend.
The New Yorker was involved with more than 2,500 major motion picture campaigns during his career, and in 1998, he became only the seventh person to receive the lifetime achievement award from THR’s Key Art Awards.
After launching Seiniger Advertising in Los Angeles in 1970, Seiniger designed the poster for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and that led to the job that brought his company lots of attention — the iconic poster for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). It employed Roger Kastel’s painting of a shark and a swimmer that also was the cover of Peter Benchley’s paperback Jaws novel.
The ‘Jaws’ poster.
