Roger Kastel

Roger Kastel (June 12, 1931 – November 8, 2023) was an American artist, best known for creating the posters for the films Jaws and The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

Personal life Roger Karl Kastel was born in White Plains, New York on June 11, 1931, to Karl and Anna Kastel. His father was a jewelry designer. Both of his parents painted as a hobby, and Roger developed an interest in drawing at a young age. One of his earliest influences was Tom Hickey, a cartoonist, comic book artist and illustrator of pulp magazine covers for National Comics Publications/D.C. Comics and Dell Comics who was a neighbor in White Plains. Roger Kastel died of kidney and heart failure in Worcester, Massachusetts, on November 8, 2023, at the age of 92.

Career

Kastel's first professional job came at age 15, when he designed a pamphlet at Hickey's request showing industrial workers how to use equipment properly. He was a student at the Art Students League of New York while in high school, and then again after serving in the Navy during the Korean War. While in school, he studied with Sidney E. Dickinson, Edwin Dickinson, Robert Beverly Hale, and especially Frank Reilly, who had been an apprentice to Dean Cornwell.

In New York he took various jobs including working in an art studio. He eventually landed a job drawing cartoons for Reddy Kilowatt (an electronic advertising company). He sold his first paperback book cover illustration in the 1960s to Pocket Books. A painting of his that was made into a fire safety poster won first prize from the National Board of Fire Underwriters. In the 1960s Kastel did illustrations for western paperbacks and Argosy Magazine and illustrated paperback covers for several publishing companies including Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, and Harlequin Books, before signing an exclusive contract with Bantam Books in 1967. It was here that Kastel had his greatest success, painting the iconic paperback book cover for Jaws, which was later used as the movie poster for the 1975 Spielberg film adaptation.

Jaws Bantam Books cover (1974) and movie poster (1975) Author Peter Benchley envisaged a cover for his novel Jaws that depicted a peaceful coastal town framed by the jaws of a shark. Alex Gotfryd, the design director at his publisher, Doubleday, assigned the concept to book illustrator Wendell Minor. Minor's cover was ultimately rejected because of its resemblance to a toothed vagina (vagina dentata) (see Jaws (novel)). The revised cover for the Doubleday edition had no image, just the author's name at the top and "JAWS" in white lettering against a black background (with "A Novel" in red lettering underneath). 300,000 copies of the book with the typographical jacket were printed in early 1974. However, Oscar Dystel, president of Bantam Books, who owned the paperback rights, was not happy with the hardback cover. "It could have been a book about dentistry," he said. He asked the book's editor, Thomas Congdon, to put a shark on the jacket. Minor was out of town, so Gotfryd commissioned artist Paul Bacon to do a new cover. With prompting from Gotfryd to add a swimmer to Bacon's original idea of an enormous head of a shark, Bacon completed a jacket illustration with an open-jawed shark's head rising towards a swimming woman. Dystel was pleased, although Congdon thought that the new cover "looked like a penis with teeth." Dystel wanted Kastel to read the book and pick out a part of it to illustrate. However, Kastel thought that the best part of the novel was the beginning when the late-night skinny dipper Chrissie Watkins is attacked by the great white shark. "The only direction Oscar and Len gave me was to make the to make the shark bigger, and very realistic." Kastel went to the American Museum of Natural History. They didn't have any photos of sharks that he could use so he asked if they had a shark exhibit. They said that they did but that it was closed for cleaning. "It was lunchtime, so I went upstairs anyway, and there were all these different stuffed sharks, just laying on boards. I had my camera with me so I took a few pictures. The shark in my painting developed from there. I just tried to paint a ferocious-looking shark that was still realistic." The shark is still held in the Ichthyology Collection in the museum.

Bantam Books requested a new cover for the paperback edition, and the now iconic artwork by Roger Kastel was reused for the Jaws film posters. alt=Painting of a shark head rising up on a naked swimmer. Atop the cover is "#1 Superthriller – A Novel of Relentless Horror", followed by the title and author, "Jaws by Peter Benchley". A 24-year-old Wilhelmina model, Allison Maher, who had moved from Ohio to New York that summer, was hired to pose for photographs. She went to the studio of the photographer on Fourth Avenue, and lay across two stools simulating doing a front crawl as photographs were taken of her. Kastel was in the studio, shouting "Swim faster! or "Look out, shark!" This was one of Maher's first jobs and she was paid $35 for one hour. Speaking to the New York Post, Maher, who became Allison Maher Stern, a wildlife advocate and philanthropist, said "I knew it was a book cover and that was it." About the book cover and the movie poster she said, "If you know me, you can tell it's me." She was not recognized, however, despite the poster for the movie being on a giant billboard on Times Square. "I think everyone assumed the girl swimming was the girl from the movie."

Kastel painted the oil painting on Masonite. It did not take him too long. Bantam used Kastel's oil-on-board painting for the paperback cover, but it proved controversial due to the woman's nudity. It was banned in Boston and St. Petersburg.

Speaking to a reporter in 2015, Kastel said "What really bothered me was that they used the image for merchandising. You see that poster on everything."

Kastel's original painting toured bookstores and made other appearances. However, the last time he saw his painting was at the exhibit, "200 Years of American Illustration", at the New York Historical Society in 1976. After that it went back to Hollywood. Kastel got a phone call from the Universal Studios Art Director letting him know that it had won a gold medal at an art show, but the painting was never seen again, despite later efforts by Dystel to get it back from Universal. "I don't know if it was stolen or thrown out or someone has it," Kastel told a reporter in 2015. celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the movie's release.

Other movie posters

Kastel also did movie posters for films such as Doctor Faustus (1967 film), Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975), The Great Train Robbery (1978), as well as the movie poster for George Lucas's The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

Kastel illustrated approximately 1,000 book covers over his career, including several best-selling books by Jackie Collins, such as Hollywood Wives, the best-selling Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), and The Great Santini (1976). He also created the cover art for the first issue of the Doc Savage comic book series from 1975.