Here’s the latest from The Magnificent 60s
Marketeers employ a cute trick to get round the contractual billing required on movie posters. The position and size of a star’s name in any movie – even now – is stipulated long before a single camera rolls. This is where all the “name above the title” malarkey stems from comes from, that stipulation setting the reals stars apart from the wannabes.
However, whoever was in charge of drawing up the standard boilerplate template was only concerned with names, not images. That left a loophole to be exploited. Should you have a female rising star, whose face or figure might be a darn sight more attractive than the top-billed male, well, by heck, there was nothing to stop you plugging the contractually-less-dominant person all over the poster at the expense of the top-billed star….