Wayne Fitzgerald created a main title that doesn't reveal itself till the very end of the slow-paced but suspenseful opening sequence.

In 1983, the year that The Dead Zone was released, Kyle Cooper must have been around twenty years old. The title sequence of The Dead Zone was the first title sequence that made a really big impression on Cooper. * “It was very simple typography, but the music was great and it played out over time. It was very mysterious, and I guess the reason that that made an impression on me was because I realized at that point that my interest in film and my interest in typography and graphic design could somehow be the source of another vocation. I realized then that somebody actually designed titles, you know. And that is when I started wanting to do this for a living.”

* Kyle Cooper interview, Forget the Film, Watch the Titles, L.A. 2009

Although his work has been seen by millions of movie-goers and inspired many other graphic and motion designers, Wayne Fitzgerald is not a name that immediately rings a bell. Not even with title designers in the know. Fitzgerald, however, designed an endless number of main titles for film and television (IMDB lists over 400), and worked with legendary directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, John Hughes, Martin Scorcese and Orson Wells. Lots of classic movies in that list too: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, The Breakfast Club, The Godfather II and III and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, to name but a few. And what about his work for TV: Battlestar Galactica, Columbo and Dallas.

Fitzgerald doesn't do animation though, or, as animator Bob Kurtz put it: “He doesn't do 'fun',” so, at times, he collaborated with other designers and animators. With Kurtz, he made Four Rooms, Max Dugan Returns, Straight Talk, City Slickers and City Slickers II – all on this site.

more about Wayne Fitzgerald

Full credits

Title Designer
Wayne Fitzgerald

Film director
David Cronenberg

Links

comment on this title

Your comment

All fields are required. Your email address is used for verification only (we won't spam you).

name:
email:
message:
code:	reload (case sensitive)