Saul Bass reflecting on The Man With the Golden Arm:
“There was a tendency to think it worked because it was ‘graphic,’ but that was incidental. If it worked, it was because the mood and the feeling it conveyed made it work, not because it was a graphic device.
[…]
Otto Preminger was sitting with his back to me – he didn’t know I was there – talking on the phone, obviously to an exhibitor somewhere in Texas. The exhibitor was complaining about the ads and saying that he wanted to have a picture of Sinatra. …And I heard Otto say to him, ‘Those ads are to be used precisely as they are. If you change them one iota, I will pull the picture from your theater.’ And hung up on him.”
— (via Graphic Design America, 1989)