Pablo Ferro

Not all of our most important filmmakers are the most well-known. Hailed as a genius by Stanley Kubrick and described by Jonathan Demme as "the best designer of film titles in the country today," Pablo Ferro has distinguished himself in film for more than three decades as a director, editor and producer specializing in graphic design, special effects, sequences and main titles, trailers and print campaigns. A significant influence on the "look" of the 1960s, he may have had an even more decisive impact on the world of advertising. In addition to creating and designing some of the more striking TV and print ads of the decade (one highlight was creating the corporate logo for Burlington Mills with fast-moving multicolored stitching animation for a classic commercial campaign), Ferro helped bring the "hard-sell" visual razzmatazz of cutting-edge advertising techniques to Hollywood films that strove to reflect the changing social scene. Often pointed and satirical, much of his best film work has been in association with directors once allied, to varying degrees, with so-called countercultural values such as Kubrick ("Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" 1964; "A Clockwork Orange" 1972), Demme ("Citizen's Band" 1977; "Last Embrace" 1979; "Swing Shift" 1983; "Stop Making Sense" 1984; "Married to the Mob" 1988; "Philadelphia" 1993), Hal Ashby ("Harold and Maude" 1971; "Bound for Glory" 1976; "Being There" 1979; "Second Hand Hearts" 1981; "Looking to Get Out" 1982; "Let's Spend the Night Together" 1983) and William Friedkin ("The Night They Raided Minsky's" 1969; "To Live and Die in L.A." 1985; "C.A.T. Squad" NBC 1986; "The Guardian" 1989).