What Your Framed Movie Poster Says About You

How adults decorate today

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We’re all voyeurs. We all like to see how other people live. Publications like Architectural Digest or Dwell wouldn’t exist if that weren’t true. It’s why, even with shrinking page space, New York magazine goes into homes and shows us how people like the filmmakers Kate Novack and Andrew Rossi decorate their Park Slope brownstone, and people like me eat it up. Even though I complain and I complain about how perfect homes always look for these shoots, how arranged and flat they often feel, I still can’t get enough. I end up hating on these features most of the time, but the Novack and Rossi home looked lived in and inviting. The way it was decorated had me thinking I’d really like to either hang out at their home or steal some of their ideas for my own. But something (I should say things) especially stood out to me as I started looking over the pictures of the house, and it’s become a focal point for me whenever I walk into a home I’ve never been in before.

Framed movie posters.

In the case of the Novack and Rossi home, it was the old Manchurian Candidate and Zabriskie Point posters at the foot of the staircase that caught my attention. I walk into a home and see posters for those two films and right away I find the people who live there immediately fascinating. I don’t think anybody carelessly picks those two films to hang on their wall simply because the posters look cool. And beside some pop of American red, white, and blue in both, the two posters don’t have much in common. The two films came out eight years apart, and both have a Cold War things ain’t right here in America feel to them. But they don’t totally sync up right next to each other. That’s what I love about it. There’s a little intrigue in the way the home is decorated and it’s all because of those movie posters.

Courtesy of Samantha Culp

“Because I grew up in a film industry household, there were definitely movie posters on the walls, which I didn't realize until later was unusual,” Samantha Culp, a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles, tells me. Today, there are three framed posters in the house Culp shares with her husband, the writer Matthew Specktor. There’s a 1972 Play It As It Lays poster she says she bought on Ebay 15 years ago “before the full ‘Didion Industrial Complex’ took hold,” a huge French-edition poster of 1966’s A Man for All Seasons, which Culp notes “it's sort of an easter egg in Matthew’s book, American Dream Machine. There’s also one that has a personal connection, a 1962 Dr. No poster that was a gift from the producer, Albert R. Broccoli. He was trying to convince Specktor’s father, the agent Fred Specktor, to get one of his clients to play James Bond.

The part about movie posters on the walls in a home seeming “unusual” might not make much sense in 2023, but then you think about a film like Robert Altman’s The Player from 1992. Tim Robbins sitting in a Hollywood office with framed movies posters makes sense, but 30 or even 20 years ago, it wasn’t commonplace to walk into a home and see them hanging up. Oil paintings, family photos, or tapestries are more commonplace when you look through old photos of homes from decades past, movie posters, or any posters at all, for that matter, are almost never to be seen. Culp says the way her which movie posters went up in her home when she was younger, “were still chosen and displayed based on the actual poster design, and combined with other art, family photos, etc. on the walls to create a very different effect from the typical ‘production company hallway style’ where it's just a horizontal row of posters from films a company has made, however garish, like a visual representation of an IMDB page.”

Today, if I walk into a home of somebody around my age, if I don’t see an old movie advertisement, it’s almost certain there will be a silkscreened poster from a concert, or maybe one from an art exhibit from the MoMA or the Art Institute of Chicago. I’m always fascinated with seeing exactly what somebody has up in their apartment or house, and trying to read into what it says about them. The movie poster, I find, either gives everything away, or offers the most mystery. Besides paintings or art that might catch my eye, there isn’t much in the way of decorations that I can think of that will have me asking somebody the story of how or why they ended up putting that specific movie poster on the wall.

“Ever since my early teens I had movie posters,” Todd Feldman tells me. Feldman owns the great Brooklyn pizza spot Speedy Romeo, but also runs a casting company called Roman Candle. He and I started talking one night when we bumped into each other at a restaurant and—if memory serves me—we started talking about shirts from Human Boy Worldwide. I could be wrong, but I think he said he was eyeing the Ishtar shirts they had for sale. That surprised me because I don’t find many fans of Elaine May’s incredible and misunderstood 1987 film out in the wild, but also because I happened to be wearing the same shirt he was talking about underneath my sweater. That was the entire reason I decided to ask him if he had any movie posters up around the house.

He goes through a list of posters he’s owned over his life, mentioning a poster from The Blues Brothers in middle school was probably where it started. He mentions a “sick” Steve Martin King Tut poster that wasn’t a film, but he wishes he still owned it, then he gets to his college years. “I had Reservoir Dogs and Godard's Breathless like everyone else. Also Caddyshack.” Of course, this was college so he never had anything framed. Then he gets into a story of the one poster that’s framed and hanging in his home today.

“When I was in my early 20s I moved out to L.A. to work in the CAA mailroom.  One day I caught a screening of Hud and it blew my mind. Newman had always been my favorite actor but somehow I never saw Hud before. I think at the time I was heavy into westerns and I was so taken by the nihilist Hud character living in this modern western universe.  The Elmer Bernstein score with that simple guitar paired with the gorgeous black and white cinematography sent me into a frenzy.  And I was pretty taken aback with Patricia Neal. Can't remember if I saw Last Picture Show before or after this but both those films give me the same feeling.”

At the time, Feldman was living the sort of life that probably sounds familiar to anybody who moved to a big city to try and make a go in entertainment or media. “I lived with two other guys in a three bedroom apartment which smelled of bong water and Jack Daniels. It was a pretty disgusting place.” Eventually, Feldman got fed up. It’s one of those scenes you can see playing out whether you’ve met him or not. All you need to do is imagine three 20-something guys in an apartment in L.A. and one of the guys saying it’s time to grow up a little, clean up the beer cans and old pizza boxes, and maybe get some decent looking stuff on the walls. “So I went on Ebay and searched for an original Hud poster and spent like 200 bucks on it which was a huge deal for me at the time. I couldn't afford to get it framed so it sat in a tube for a while.  I moved back to NYC and found an apartment and the first thing I did was frame it and proudly hang that sucker.”

Feldman says he’s had other movies posters, but since he moved in with his girlfriend who he’d eventually marry, “I had to make some sacrifices, but Hud the man with the barbed wire soul still survives.”

I also have movie posters. A lot, actually. I’ve got a larger German Barton Fink one that I had to put in a frame that’s too big for it until I can get a better one because I don’t want the poster getting damaged. There’s a limited edition silkscreened poster for a special showing of The Virgin Suicides that took place at The Roxy in San Francisco. I didn’t go to the showing, but I love Sofia Coppola’s 1999 film, and the way the faces of the dead Lisbon sisters creep people out when they enter the room the poster is in. I’ve also got about a dozen that are in tubes including a reprint of the original poster from Kurosawa’s Stray Dogs, a bunch of old theater posters from Insonnia D’Amore, otherwise known as Sleepless in Seattle, and a poster from the 1975 Globus and Golan sleeper, Lepke. Whether or not I’ll ever frame them I can’t tell you. Will I keep buying them? Oh yeah. Totally.

Modern home decoration is interesting to me. I could say that putting up movie posters on the wall makes sense in our Instagram and TikTok, everything is content world. But I see it as something different. I see it as a part of the Gen. X influence on culture we sometimes tend to overlook or minimize. Growing up, the first times I could recall seeing posters of any kind as actual decoration in apartments, it was always people a little older than me, but firmly in the “born between 1965 and 1980” zone. I try not to put too much weight into generation discussions, espeically since I was born in what is considered the last year of Generation X, but what your taste in things says about you and also the digging for overlooked and under-appreciated artifacts from the past always feels like something Gen. X really kicked off. All the records, books, and movies the previous generations either discarded or dismissed found new value in the ‘80s and ‘90s, “retro” became something to embrace, and being able to say “Oh, you’ve never seen that movie?” as snobbish as it sounds, really was something that made people like me go “Man, maybe I need to see that film since that cool person seems to think I’m uncool for not seeing it.”

But most of all, I think it goes back to the time before the Internet, before you could see people who liked the same things you do. How did you signify you were into cool stuff? You displayed it. It was communication as decoration. A way of saying “This is what I’m interested in.” And over time, with the Internet making it easier to research and buy new ones, movie fans who like to decorate started to realize that a movie poster can look as good as any piece of art out there. Sometimes better.

“The current posters we have up have some personal connection or meaning, but we also genuinely love the art,” Culp says.