Curiosidades

It has been said that once you see the opening titles to a film that Saul Bass has done, you can walk out of the theatre because you know exactly what the film's about: he has shown you the entire thing in the first minute or so.

He designed the title sequence in Psicosis (1960) and one of the scenes where Arbogast climbs the stairs to his doom. He also drew up storyboards for the shower scene upon the specific instructions of Hitchcock. However, in interviews with Truffaut, Hitchcock states that he didn't use these because they "weren't right".

In 2012, a Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition on Stanley Kubrick displayed some of Bass' correspondence with Kubrick while he was designing poster art for El resplandor (1980). As well as showcasing some rejected designs, this revealed that Bass was fond of signing off letters by doodling a fish (a sea-bass) with his own face.

In the opening credits to El cabo del miedo (1991), Bass superimposed shots from the title sequence he did for John Frankenheimer's Plan diabólico (1966).

While he is best remembered for working on thrillers and suspenseful works, he preferred to work on comedies.

The rumor that Bass, and not Alfred Hitchcock, had actually directed the legendary shower murder scene in "Psycho", which is promoted in Donald Spoto's controversial biography of Hitchcock and elsewhere, is not true. Bass himself emphatically denied it in an interview on British television in 1987.

His biography is in "American National Biography". Supplement 1, pp. 32-33. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

He was a major influence on Bernard Lodge, a famous British graphic designer who worked for the BBC for many years and whose work included designing the logos and title sequences for the iconic science-fiction series Doctor Who (1963) during the William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker eras.

Two of the films containing a title sequence for which he is best known for, Con la muerte en los talones (1959) and Anatomía de un asesinato (1959), received their national release in the United States just a day apart on July 1 and 2, 1959, respectively, and were films of the two directors with whom he is most associated, Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger.

He designed title sequences for thirteen Otto Preminger films. It was Preminger who hired Bass for his very first title-design job, for "Carmen Jones" in 1954. He also designed many posters for Preminger films, including some for which he did not design the titles, and even designed the cover for Preminger's autobiography.