Dan Perri
Art
Biography
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 several notable films including The Exorcist (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Star Wars (1977), Raging Bull (1980), Airplane! (1980), and Suspiria (2018). Perri made contact with the film graphics designer Saul Bass and began to pester him for work at his studio on Sunset Boulevard. Eventually, Perri found work with Bass through his illustrator, Art Goodman. During his service in the US Navy, Perri served on the USS Repose and designed an on-board newspaper, entitled The Repose Reprise. After serving in the Navy, Perri went to work with Cinefx alongside Phill Norman, Wayne Fitzgerald Don Record, and a former school friend, Steve Smith. After a year, both Perri and Smith quit and went on to form their independent design studio, Perri & Smith. The pair worked together from 1969 to 1973, mostly on small, low-budget television features, but their credits also included films such as Electra Glide in Blue and several of Gene Corman's blaxploitation films. The designers were often exploited and clients sometimes failed to pay, and eventually, the business folded. Perri's big break came in 1973 when he was commissioned by Billy Friedkin to produce the main titles for The Exorcist, his first solo project. With a blockbuster film in his portfolio, Perri was now able to attract more work and soon found himself working on high-profile titles. For Nashville (1975), Robert Altman commissioned a main title sequence and a logo to be used in marketing. Perri produced an unusual, kitschy sequence inspired by low-budget K-Tel Records television commercials, complete with a loud, brash voiceover by Johnny Grant. In 1976, Martin Scorsese brought Perri in to design the titles for Taxi Driver. Perri took second unit footage and color-treated the film through a process of film copying and slit-scan, resulting in a highly stylized graphic sequence that evoked the "underbelly" of New York City through lurid colors, glowing neon signs distorted nocturnal images and deep black levels, accompanied by Bernard Herrmann's jazz soundtrack. 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.
Known For
A late-night live television sketch comedy and variety show created by Lorne Michaels. The show's comedy sketches, which parody contemporary culture and politics, are performed by a large and varying cast of repertory and newer cast members. Each episode is hosted by a celebrity guest, who usually delivers an opening monologue and performs in sketches with the cast, and features performances by a musical guest.
Saturday Night Live
Princess Leia is captured and held hostage by the evil Imperial forces in their effort to take over the galactic Empire. Venturesome Luke Skywalker and dashing captain Han Solo team together with the loveable robot duo R2-D2 and C-3PO to rescue the beautiful princess and restore peace and justice in the Empire.
Star Wars
When a mysterious entity possesses a young girl, her mother seeks the help of two Catholic priests to save her life.
The Exorcist
Suffering from insomnia, disturbed loner Travis Bickle takes a job as a New York City cabbie, haunting the streets nightly, growing increasingly detached from reality as he dreams of cleaning up the filthy city.
Taxi Driver
Teenagers in a small town are dropping like flies, apparently in the grip of mass hysteria causing their suicides. A cop's daughter, Nancy Thompson, traces the cause to child molester Fred Krueger, who was burned alive by angry parents many years before. Krueger has now come back in the dreams of his killers' children, claiming their lives as his revenge. Nancy and her boyfriend, Glen, must devise a plan to lure the monster out of the realm of nightmares and into the real world...
A Nightmare on Elm Street
After an encounter with UFOs, an electricity linesman feels undeniably drawn to an isolated area in the wilderness where something spectacular is about to happen.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
An ex-fighter pilot forced to take over the controls of an airliner when the flight crew succumbs to food poisoning.
Airplane!
As a young and naive recruit in Vietnam, Chris Taylor faces a moral crisis when confronted with the horrors of war and the duality of man.
Platoon
Ruthless silver miner, turned oil prospector, Daniel Plainview, moves to oil-rich California. Using his son to project a trustworthy, family-man image, Plainview cons local landowners into selling him their valuable properties for a pittance. However, local preacher Eli Sunday suspects Plainview's motives and intentions, starting a slow-burning feud that threatens both their lives.
There Will Be Blood
An erotic story about a woman, the assistant of an art gallery, who gets involved in an impersonal affair with a man. She barely knows about his life, only about the sex games they play, so the relationship begins to get complicated.
Nine 1/2 Weeks
A color-blind psychiatrist is stalked by an unknown killer after taking over his murdered friend's therapy group and becomes embroiled in an intense affair with a mysterious woman who may be connected to the crime.
Color of Night
In early 1860s New York, Irish immigrant Amsterdam Vallon is released from prison and returns to the Five Points, seeking revenge against his father's killer, William Cutting, a powerful anti-immigrant gang leader. He knows that revenge can only be attained by infiltrating Cutting's inner circle. Vallon's journey becomes a fight for personal survival and to find a place for the Irish people.
Gangs of New York
A biopic depicting the life of filmmaker and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes from 1927 to 1947, during which time he became a successful film producer and an aviation magnate, while simultaneously growing more unstable due to severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The Aviator
The life of boxer Jake LaMotta, whose violence and temper that led him to the top in the ring destroyed his life outside of it.
Raging Bull
In 1993, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence Project receives a transmission detailing an alien DNA structure, along with instructions on how to splice it with human DNA. The result is Sil, a sensual but deadly creature who can change from a beautiful woman to an armour-plated killing machine in the blink of an eye.
Species
Two Los Angeles homicide detectives are dispatched to a northern town where the sun doesn't set to investigate the methodical murder of a local teen.
Insomnia
Prominent gang leader Cyrus calls a meeting of New York's gangs to set aside their turf wars and take over the city. At the meeting, a rival leader kills Cyrus, but a Coney Island gang called the Warriors is wrongly blamed for Cyrus' death. Before you know it, the cops and every gangbanger in town is hot on the Warriors' trail.
The Warriors
Eight people embark on an expedition into the Congo, a mysterious expanse of unexplored Africa, where human greed and the laws of nature have gone berserk.
Congo
After a successful deployment of the RoboCop Law Enforcement unit, OCP sees its goal of urban pacification come closer and closer, but as this develops, a new narcotic known as "Nuke" invades the streets led by God-delirious leader Cane. As this menace grows, it may prove to be too much for Murphy to handle. OCP tries to replicate the success of the first unit, but ends up with failed prototypes with suicidal issues... until Dr. Faxx, a scientist straying away from OCP's path, uses Cane as the new subject for the RoboCop 2 project, a living God.
RoboCop 2
The amazing true story of a Uruguayan rugby team's plane that crashed in the middle of the Andes mountains, and their immense will to survive and pull through alive, forced to do anything and everything they could to stay alive on meager rations and through the freezing cold.