Wayne Fitzgerald‘s iconic main title for David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone is built around a slow reveal of its foreboding title.
In 1983, the year that Croneberg’s The Dead Zone was released, title designer Kyle Cooper must have been around twenty years old. It was the first title sequence that made a really big impression on him, says 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 discusses his favorite title sequences in our 2009 interview
Year of production
1983
About Wayne Fitzgerald
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.
Full credits
Title Designer
Wayne Fitzgerald
Film director
David Cronenberg
Score
Michael Kamen