poster headline design — Experimental · Oversized Title · Bottom Title

A conceptual design turns the Hollywood sign into looming buildings filled with fragmented, famous faces. Giant letterforms — H, O, L, L, Y, W, O, O, D — stand like towers against a pale sky, and within their shapes appear photographic fragments: an adult man's stern face, another man's haunted eyes, a young woman's bangs and solemn gaze, a blonde woman's worried face resting on her hand, city grids, and window panes. Below, dark treetops form a black band. The effect is ghostly and disorienting. Everyone in this town is haunted, and the letters they live inside are the ghosts. Maps to the Stars: the map leads nowhere, and everyone follows it anyway. The off-white title sits in the black like a headstone inscription for the dream factory. The treetops below are black teeth; the sky above is an empty prescription pad. The faces in the letters do not look out; they look through, at a town that ate them alive. The End would be a mercy; instead the letters just keep standing, and the faces keep fading. The pale sky offers no comfort; the black band below offers no exit. The geometric white characters stand at attention in the dark like the last honest thing in Hollywood. The End: the sign still stands, the stars still fall, and the map still lies. Somewhere below the black treetops, the city keeps dreaming its rotten, glittering dream. Roll credits on the nightmare. The End. At the bottom, the text "TITLE" appears in very large off-white Chinese characters "墮落星圖" in a bold, modern, geometric face, arranged horizontally, with the English words "MAPS TO THE STARS" in smaller off-white spaced capitals beneath. No other text appears on the artwork. The letter-towers' forms are monumental, their photographic fills ghostly. The stern face is sharp, the haunted eyes hollow. The bangs are dark, the solemn gaze direct. The blonde's worried face is pale, the hand delicate. The city grids are tiny, the windows blank. The black treetops are a jagged band. The white title's geometric face is stark, the huge characters severe. The overall mood is one of glittering, rotten glamour. Flat, bleached, overexposed daylight washes the scene in a sickly, dreamlike pallor. The composition builds the haunted, face-filled letter-towers above the stark, severe white title, using a bleached cream, black, and gray palette with a conceptual, Cronenberg-cold arthouse style and a decadent, fame-is-a-ghost-town, Hollywood-horror mood of beautiful rot.