Joe Caroff, the unheralded graphic designer whose iconic creations included James Bond‘s 007 gun logo, posters for West Side Story and A Hard Day’s Night and typography for Last Tango in Paris, Manhattan and Rollerball, died Sunday. He was 103.
Caroff died one day short of birthday No. 104 in hospice care at his home in Manhattan, his sons, Peter and Michael Caroff, told The New York Times.
Caroff also cooked up the opening title sequences for such films as Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977), Volker Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman (1985), Gene Saks’ Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986) and Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which pulled back to reveal a crown of thorns.
His portfolio of posters included those for a dozen or so Woody Allen films plus Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (1963), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), Too Late the Hero (1970), Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970), Cabaret (1972), An Unmarried Woman (1978) and Gandhi (1982).
Plus, Caroff designed the logo and title signature for Orion Pictures, several album covers for Decca Records and the logos for ABC’s Olympic coverage (with the network’s circular letters and five Olympic rings intertwined), ABC News and 20/20 (styled to resemble a pair of eyeglasses).
The one quality he wanted his work to have was “effervescence,” he said in the 2022 TCM documentary By Design: The Joe Caroff Story. “I want it to have a life, it doesn’t want to lie there flat.”
Courtesy Everett Collection
For his first movie job — he would work on more than 300 campaigns during his career — United Artists executive David Chasman hired him to design the poster for West Side Story (1961), then asked him to come up with the letterhead for a publicity release tied to the first Bond film, Dr. No. (Chasman had designed the poster for the 1962 movie.)
“He said, ‘I need a little decorative thing on top,’” Caroff recalled in 2021. “I knew [Bond’s] designation was 007, and when I wrote the stem of the seven, I thought, ‘That looks like the handle of a gun to me.’ It was very spontaneous, no effort, it was an instant piece of creativity.”
Inspired by Ian Fleming’s favorite gun, a Walther PPK, Caroff attached a barrel and trigger to the 007 and for his work received $300, the going rate for such an assignment, he said. Even though the logo, though altered in subtle ways, has been featured on every Bond film and on millions of pieces of merchandise, he received no credit, no residuals, no royalties.
The logo did, however, bring him “a lot of business,” he said. “It was like a little publicity piece for me.”
Joseph Caroff was born on Aug. 18, 1921, in Linden, New Jersey. He had four older sisters and a younger brother. His father, Julius, was a painter who “could make a plaster wall look like a wood wall … it wasn’t as if he just painted it, he rendered it,” he said.
While attending Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, he assisted French graphic designer Jean Carlu on the making of the 1942 propaganda poster “America’s Answer! Production” for the U.S. Office of War Information. It featured a large, gloved hand on a wrench. (Carlu, whose right arm had been severed in a Paris trolley accident, had designed the poster for the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid).
“At Carlu there were no set times,” he told Thilo von Debschitz in a 2021 interview for Eye magazine. “Sometimes he asked me to come at eight in the morning, sometimes not before 10 in the evening. I was able to take part in large design projects and learn a lot of different techniques from him.”
Caroff graduated in 1942 after majoring in advertising design, being elected class president for three straight years and serving as art editor on the school yearbook, Prattonia.
Five days after getting married, Caroff in 1943 headed overseas to serve in the U.S. Army, and he would load propaganda leaflets that he had worked on with Carlu months earlier into planes that would drop them all over Europe.
Courtesy Everett Collection
Back home after 36 months away, Caroff landed a job at Alan Berni & Associates, then opened his own business designing book jackets. The first one he got paid for was for the cover of Norman Mailer’s debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, first published in 1948.
“I loved doing that work,” he said in the TCM documentary, “primarily because it was an opportunity to read a book, to interpret it and then come up with a cover design that I felt best expressed what was in that book.”
Caroff got the idea for the West Side Story poster — it famously features textured letters that resemble bricks and the ballet-like outlines of lovers Maria and Tony on fire escapes — after seeing clips of the film. (He said it helped that he was a West Sider in real life.)
One of his fun touches on the poster for The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night was putting a knot in a guitar handle. “It frankly was just a whim,” he said. “It doesn’t do anything except to create a quirky note, nothing more.”
After 18 years going it alone, he founded the agency J. Caroff Associates in 1965, and he and his 22-person staff, working out of offices on East 57th Street in Manhattan, often handled 10 film projects at a time.
As von Debschitz related in an interview for Print, “His poster for Tattoo — a [1981] erotic thriller produced by [frequent client] Joseph E. Levine — caused a scandal because it depicted a naked woman with bound feet. Feminists (and probably pubescent men) tore the posters down in the subway, which led to even more publicity. Levine told Caroff, ‘You made out with your fucking poster better than I made out with my fucking movie.’”
Courtesy Everett Collection
He invented an undulating typeface for Last Tango in Paris (1972) and came up with treatments that used roller skates and high rises to spell out Rollerball and Manhattan for those 1975 and ’79 movies, respectively. He also fashioned a train out of the title for the poster for The Great Train Robbery (1978).
He retired in 2006 at age 86 to concentrate on painting.
In addition to his sons, survivors include his daughters-in-law, Ruth and Cynthia, and his granddaughter, Jennifer. His wife of 81 years, Phyllis, a longtime professor at the Hunter College School of Social Work whom he met at a New Year’s Eve party, died in February, four days shy of 101.
After decades of being ignored by Bond producers, Caroff received an Omega watch with an 007 engraving from Barbara Broccoli, Michael G. Wilson and EON Productions as a 100th birthday gift.
Caroff was asked if he had saved any of his original renderings over the years. Think how much those would be worth! Alas, he had tossed pretty much everything.
“Probably not a smart thing to do, but I never attached what I was doing to any greatness,” he said. “I was just working, period. I was just being an artist.”
Courtesy Everett Collection
