Dan Perri

Daniel Richard Perri (born August 11, 1945) is an American film and television title sequence designer. He has worked in film title design since the 1970s, and has been responsible for the main titles of a number of notable films including The Exorcist, Taxi Driver (1976), Star Wars (1977), Raging Bull (1980), Airplane! (1980), and Suspiria (2018).

Early life

Dan Perri was born in New York on August 11, 1945. In 1949 his family moved to Los Angeles to be close to his father's parents, but his mother was unhappy there. Over the next few years Perri's family moved back and forth between LA and New York. Eventually his parents divorced and the young Dan stayed with his mother, who was an artist and encouraged his talent. At the age of twelve Perri set up a small sign painting business on Long Island, selling signage to local stores, markets bars and restaurants.

Close Encounters Early in the production of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Steven Spielberg hired Perri to design a logo for the film. With only a script to work from, Perri produced a logotype in Handel Gothic typeface. Spielberg was delighted with the result, and applied the logo to all production stationery and crew shirts. Unusually in filmmaking, Spielberg carried enough influence to maintain creative control over the film's branding, and asked Perri to design the entire advertising campaign for Close Encounters based on his logo.

Star Wars The opening crawl of Cecil B. DeMille's Union Pacific (1939) Possibly Perri's best-known title sequence project came about in 1976 when his friend James Nelson was working on post-production for a new space fantasy film, Star Wars. Nelson recommended Perri to director George Lucas, who invited Perri to Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm's post-production operation at Van Nuys, California. Lucas briefed Perri to take inspiration from old 1930s cinema serials such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers that had inspired Lucas to write much of his Star Wars story. After struggling to come up with a concept that Lucas liked, Perri eventually developed a concept for presenting a textual introduction based on the opening credits of the 1939 Cecil B. DeMille film, Union Pacific, in which the credits are shown distorted by a sharp perspective and rolling along a railroad track towards a distant vanishing point. Lucas approved of the idea and Perri produced sketches and prototype mechanical artwork, supported by storyboard artwork drawn by the production artist Alex Tavoularis. This gave birth to the now-familiar opening crawl sequence that appears in the Star Wars films.

Perri has stated that Lucas offered him a share of royalties from the film in lieu of his ordinary fee; Perri rejected the offer and has since regretted his choice.

Later work Perri worked for Scorsese again in 1980, designing a title sequence for Raging Bull. This featured a strong red logotype which emphasised the maniacal quality of the lead character, introducing a film that was shot in black and white. This caused technical problems when the film distributor spliced together colour film stock for the title and monochrome stock for the rest of the picture.

Perri's subsequent credits have included The Fan (1981), The Equalizer (1985), The Player (1992). More recently, he designed the titles for Gangs of New York (2002) and The Beaver (2011).

In 2018, Perri produced the logotype and main title sequence for Luca Guadagnino's film Suspiria (2018).

Selected filmography