This British quad for Terry Gilliam‘s time-travelling fantasy features artwork by the director himself. His signature can be seen to the bottom right of the castle and a more scribbly ‘Gilliam’ is subtly hidden in the background hills (see photo 3). Time Bandits is one of the director’s best, in my opinion, and features typically brilliant imagery combined with a great cast, including a few surprising cameos.

The film follows 11-year-old Kevin (Craig Warnock) and his adventures with a troupe of time-travelling dwarves who are on the run from their master, the Supreme Being. As the gang use a special map to hop through holes in the universe and into different time periods they soon realise that their journey is being controlled by a sinister force. It’s not long before they are forced to confront Evil and save themselves from certain death. The ending of the film, which I won’t spoil, is brilliantly bonkers.

According to IMDb, in 1996 Terry Gilliam and [screenwriter and actor] Charles McKeown collaborated on a script for Time Bandits 2, bringing back most of the original cast, with the exceptions of David Rappaport and Tiny Ross who had passed away a few years before, and owing to Jack Purvis being paralysed from a car accident, his character was written to be in a similar state. But following the death of Purvis, the project was shelved indefinitely.

The excellent, unusual trailer is on YouTube.

The directorial debut of Martha Coolidge and the first time Nicolas Coppola was credited as Nicolas Cage, Valley Girl is a cult favourite in the US and was both a critical and box office success at the time of release. Loosely based on the Romeo and Juliet story (minus the tragic death) the film focuses on Julie (Deborah Foreman) a girl from the suburban, mall-filled San Fernando Valley who meets Randy (Cage) a punk from Hollywood and falls in love, much to the dismay of her shallow friends.

Valley Girl is actually a stereotype leveled at a certain class of American women who are described as colloquial speaking and materialistic. The San Fernando Valley is credited as the birthplace of this phenomenon thanks to its large number of commuter towns and middle-class suburban families. Valspeak is their unique derivation of Californian English, which was first brought to public consciousness through Frank Zappa’s collaboration with his daughter Moon Unit on the single Valley Girl. A bizarre video of Moon Unit performing the song on the TV show Solid Gold can be seen on YouTube.

Kevin Smith is a huge fan of the film and first began discussing it in Smodcast #152, in which he hilariously explained how Valley Girl had a profound effect on the way his understanding of love and relationships was formed. In the special Smoviola #1 Smith interviewed Martha Coolidge, Deborah Foreman and cinematographer Frederick Elmes to discover the story of how the film came to be.

The artwork on this poster is by the American illustrator Birney Lettick who worked on magazine covers, adverts and portraits as well as a number of movie posters. Lettick was a master at capturing star likenesses and the portrait of cage is spot-on. The artist sadly passed away in 1986. The other posters I’ve collected by him can be seen here.

Notice that the Italian title for the film translates, rather bizarrely, as The Girl from San Diego.

The trailer for the film can be seen on YouTube.

Update – 25/03/2012
As Jeff points out in the comments the woman featured on the poster isn’t actually Deborah Foreman but is one of the background actresses. It’s not clear why this is the case.

Some mystery surrounds this particular Woodstock poster as it only surfaced a few years ago and was available at auction and on ebay in relatively large quantity.

One prominent auction house owner immediately dismissed it as a reprint/fake, though several other dealers and collectors are convinced that it’s an original poster from the period of the film’s release. There is speculation that a roll of them was found at an old printers or in storage somewhere.

I have a hard time believing that it’s a recent reprint or restrike for a few reasons:

– The paper is thin and consistent for the age of the film
– All the graphics are sharp, including the printers logo at the bottom and the crop marks
– The measurement is consistent with a poster from this period
– Why would someone looking to create bootlegs to fool collectors choose Woodstock as a target and then deliberately make a new style of poster, not seen before?

If anyone has any further information on the poster please get in touch or leave a comment.