The Illustrated Man

The Life of Pablo Ferro: Animator, Graphic Designer, Counterculture Hero

By Paul Rogers

It would be easy to assume that Pablo Ferro spends his days looking back with pride and nostalgia over his five-decade career as a designer of iconic film titles, trailer campaigns and commercials. But lately it seems that other people are more interested in examining Ferro’s enviably full life as an animator, graphic designer and counterculture cult hero. The man himself, now 76, seems much more focused on his work in the here and now.

Respect for Ferro is such that, since 2005, director Richard Goldgewicht and producer Jeremy Goldscheider have been working on a documentary, titled PABLO, that tells his story through a combination of animation and outpourings of admiration from celebrity talking heads like Andy Garcia and Anjelica Huston. The film, which is narrated by Oscar-winning actor Jeff Bridges, should finally see the light of day next year.

Pop-Culture Look

All this seemed unlikely when the teenage Ferro arrived barefoot in New York from pre-revolutionary Cuba shortly after World War II. Having taught himself animation from a book by renowned Disney/MGM animator Preston Blair, Ferro began freelancing in the industry in the mid-1950s. Mentored by Disney animator Bill Tytla, and working alongside the likes of future Marvel Comics editor Stan Lee, by the early ’60s he had his own animation company, Pablo Ferro Films.

Though Ferro remains perhaps best-known for the remarkable opening of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove and is widely credited as a significant influence on the pop-culture “look” of the 1960s, his work has in fact continued to grace screens ever since. As well as his astonishing split-screen sequences on the 1968 Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway classic The Thomas Crown Affair, Ferro has also worked on movies including Harold and Maude (1971), Beetlejuice (1988), Good Will Hunting (1997); 2004’s Napoleon Dynamite; and this year’s Larry Crowne.

“It surprised me when I created the lettering for Strangelove . . . I didn’t think everybody would like it, until I saw all the imitators of that lettering—even now,” mulls Ferro, who currently lives in the garage behind his son’s Los Angeles home. “I keep saying I’ve got to do something that will last—and then realizing I did it already!”

Abstract Collages

Ferro’s penchant for creating art from a crowded cacophony of information seemed to sense the onset of the Internet age and was a both a precursor of and an influence on the ADHD aesthetic of the MTV generation. His ability to convey sometimes complex messages in seconds also made his work a natural fit for TV commercials, which were themselves becoming art forms by the late 1950s. His innovative, often abstract collages and distinctive use of quick-cut editing has featured in any number of these, including animating the first color NBC Peacock and the Burlington Mills “stitching” commercials.

“The agencies, they were great in [the 1960s]. They would come up to me and say ‘Hey, here’s a new project; we’re making a new commercial’—and they would leave me alone to come up with an idea,” Ferro recalls. “That’s why I have all these commercials that are very unique . . . Different kinds of animation; different kinds of graphics put together.”

The diversity in Ferro’s work has meant that it has never become overly distinctive and thus prone to dating. Yet the only concession he’s made to the times has been integrating (though not succumbing to) the power of computer animation.

“The only difference I’ve found [is] I’m a bit slower than before,” says Ferro. “I used to be extremely fast—age does catch up with you. But I still create the same way.

“I think [computer animation and analog techniques] work good together. I think computers still have a long way to go . . . You have to know too much technical stuff with a computer before you can do something. It has to be made a little more easier to work with.”

“Peaceful and Very Cooperative”

Predictably, for a man who made his name amidst the colorful bohemia of New York’s East Village in the “flower power” era, marijuana has played its part in Ferro’s tale. But cannabis’ place in his life has changed radically over time.

“I was doing [marijuana] before I even did [animation]. Since I was a kid; when I just came out of high school,” Ferro laughs. “To me it’s different than other people. It didn’t slow me down. If I was tired . . . I could work all night doing [marijuana].”

But since Ferro was injured in a bizarre 1970 shooting (which he describes as a case of mistaken identity on the part of an inept hitman), his marijuana usage has become decidedly medicinal.

“I have a chronic pain in my back—a ricochet bullet went through my neck and it broke a nerve,” Ferro explains. “[Marijuana] takes the headache away and gives you help with the pain. I have other medication that I take also for this, but [cannabis is] my emergency one to get rid of the headache.”

Now a card-carrying medical marijuana patient, Ferro is predictably in favor of full legalization nationwide.

“Definitely. I never heard of people who smoke marijuana doing anything but peaceful and very cooperative. Because that’s what the medicine does . . . it calms them down.”

As for his feelings about having a full-length documentary devoted to him, the ever-modest Ferro is lightheartedly coy.

“I’ll tell you after I see it!”

www.artbypabloferro.com.

Strange Days

Animator and graphic designer Pablo Ferro is very well known for putting his distinctive visual stamp on the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. That film, a 1964 black comedy that spoofed the Cold War and nuclear tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, starred Peter Sellers as the titular character and George C. Scott in the role of an Army general. Dr. Strangelove was nominated for four Academy Awards.