Pablo Ferro, Who Energized Films’ Opening Credits, Dies at 83

Pablo Ferro, who with quick cuts, hand lettering and a bundle of innovative ideas put a jolt into the often drab world of movies’ opening credits, died on Friday in Sedona, Arizona. He was 83.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, his son, Allen, said.

Ferro burst into the film business in 1964 with his attention-getting title sequence for “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear-age black comedy. His hand-lettered titles, full of incongruous sizes (the gigantic “A” in “A STANLEY KUBRICK PRODUCTION” dwarfed the other words), appeared over footage of aircraft refueling in midflight.

In a 2009 article about groundbreakers in Ferro’s profession, The New York Times called it “the title sequence that inspired a thousand hand-drawn title sequences.”

Dozens of films followed, many of them Oscar contenders, including “Philadelphia” (1993) and “Good Will Hunting” (1997).

In 2009, presenting him its highest award, AIGA, the professional design association, recognized Ferro for “changing our visual expectations and demonstrating the power of design to enhance storytelling.”

Pablo Francisco Ferro was born Jan. 15, 1935, in Antilla, Cuba. His father, José, was a dentist, and his mother, Isabel (Rivas) Ferro, was a homemaker.

“Everywhere I went I drew pictures,” he said of his childhood in “Pablo,” a 2012 documentary about him directed by Richard Goldgewicht.

The family moved to New York City when Pablo Ferro was 12. His father left two years later, according to the documentary, and Pablo Ferro went to work at whatever jobs he could find to help his mother support the family. One job was as an usher at a movie house that showed foreign films, and a love of cinema took hold.

He was also teaching himself animation from a book, and after graduating from the School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design) in the early 1950s, he began working alongside Stan Lee drawing science fiction comics. Soon, though, he transitioned to television commercials.

“Most of the artists in comics stayed with the comics most of their lives,” Lee, who died four days before Ferro did, said in the documentary. “The fact that Pablo was able to go from comic book art to directing commercials — that was a tribute to Pablo’s talent.”

Allen Ferro, himself a graphic designer and director, said one of his father’s strengths was becoming adept at all the jobs required for any given project, whether creating graphics, animating or directing, a lesson he passed along.

“He was a warrior when it came to being diversified in skill sets,” the son said. “He imbued in most of us the necessity and responsibility of understanding each of the departments that were in your industry.”

In 1961, Ferro, Fred Magubgub and Louis Schwartz formed a commercial production partnership that within a year was drawing attention with visually jazzy commercials that shook up what had been a bland business.

“Among the few hopeful producers working diligently and with signs of success to inject novelty and a species of art into the message from our sponsor are Ferro, Magubgub and Schwartz,” The New York Times wrote in 1962.

Ferro’s fast-moving commercials, mixing stills, film clips and animation, caught the eye of Kubrick, who was making “Dr. Strangelove.”

“He saw my reel, and he wanted me to do his trailer, even though I have never done a trailer before,” Ferro said in the documentary.

The trailer he produced, a blizzard of written words and images, led to the invitation to do the title sequence as well.

The film installed Ferro among a group of artists who had begun to experiment with ways to make title sequences convey more than just who worked on the movie. Saul Bass became a pioneer with his sequence for the 1955 film “The Man With the Golden Arm,” and others, like Stephen Frankfurt (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” 1962), were also using opening credits to set a tone and heighten expectations.

Ferro worked with top directors like Norman Jewison, Jonathan Demme, Barry Sonnenfeld and Hal Ashby, who became a close friend. In 1971 he received another assignment from Kubrick: to make the trailer for “A Clockwork Orange.” The phrase “quick cut” seems inadequate to describe the result, which remains visually startling almost a half-century later, its words and images coming at the viewer so fast as to be almost unabsorbable.

“One time I was accused of subliminal advertising,” Ferro said of his fondness for that technique. “They would say, ‘Pablo, I’m sure somewhere in there there’s a frame that says ‘Hire Pablo.'” Ferro was not limited to titles and trailers; directors tapped his expertise in other aspects of the filmmaking process. For “The Thomas Crown Affair,” the slick 1968 Steve McQueen thriller, Jewison, the director, wanted to shorten the movie and sought Ferro’s editing help. Ferro used a multiple-screen effect that has since become commonplace but was new at the time. He did not receive an editing credit, but his contribution was later widely cited.

“Ferro cut a key scene known as the ‘polo sequence’ into 20 or 30 simultaneous frames, reducing the time from six minutes to around 40 seconds,” Steven Heller, an expert in graphic design, wrote in the magazine Eye in 1999. “But in addition to compression, certain important character traits were brought out by the way in which he designed and paced the multiples. By focusing on clothes, for instance, Ferro underscored the wealth and sophistication of the people in the specific scene.”

Ferro’s marriage to Susan Fridolfs ended in divorce. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Joy Moore; a brother, José; three sisters, Flora, Bertha and Maria; and two grandchildren. He lived in Sedona.

In a 2002 interview with The Chicago Tribune, Ferro explained why he invested so much effort in opening credits.

“The title sequence is the story,” he said. “It’s the introduction to the movie. It’s telling you what kind of feeling you’re going to get into. If you fail doing that, the whole movie falls apart.”