Pablo: A Tribute to Pablo Ferro
This was the official website for the 2012 film tribute to the legendary film title designer Pablo Ferro.
Content is from the site's archived pages and other sources.
Anyone obsessed with film title design will recognize the name Pablo Ferro. The artist disrupted conventions starting with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, where Ferro famously dwarfed all the leading cast and production names by making the “and”s, “with”s, and “the”s extra prominent.
His titling, crudely handwritten in both elongated and condensed letters, stood apart from the rest of the field. Ferro (b. 1935) went on to design titles for influential works including The Thomas Crown Affair; The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming; Harold and Maude; and Bound For Glory. He also reprised his Strangelove letters for Men in Black and Stop Making Sense. Using his inventive, fast-cut editing technique, the former comics artist and animator also created countless TV commercials, movie trailers, directed his own shorts and a feature length film, Me, Myself and I, with George Segal and Jo Beth Williams.
STEVEN HELLER The Atlantic
NOV 21, 2013
I’m a graphic designer, and I discovered this site in the most meaningful way possible—through my daughter, who is also a designer. She had recently completed a treatment program for bulimia nervosa, and as parents we were quietly watching for the real signs that she wasn’t just “doing better,” but truly recovering and re-engaging with the world in a healthy, grounded way. That moment came when she invited us to sit down and watch this film together.
What struck me immediately wasn’t just the quality of the documentary, but the way she talked about it. Her enthusiasm for the work and legacy of Pablo Ferro was unmistakable. Instead of conversations revolving around food, control, or avoidance, she was animated—breaking down typography choices, motion, pacing, and the fearless experimentation that defined his approach to film titles. As a designer myself, I recognized that spark instantly. It was creative curiosity, not obsession, driving her energy.
Watching the film together was incredibly affirming. You could see how Ferro’s handwritten lettering, rhythmic cuts, and refusal to follow convention had inspired her to push her own graphic work in new directions. Back at her desk, she began experimenting again—loosening up her layouts, embracing imperfection, and trusting instinct over rigidity. For us, that was the clearest sign of recovery: her mind was back where it belongs, engaged with ideas, craft, and expression rather than fixation.
The site itself is a fantastic tribute—thoughtful, well-curated, and deeply resonant for anyone who works in media, design, or film. This film isn’t just a documentary; it’s a reminder of why creative risk matters and how design can shape culture in quiet but lasting ways. I’m profoundly grateful—not only for the film and this site, but for the role they played in helping our family witness a genuine turning point. Seeing your child reconnect with creativity is a gift, and this project was part of that moment for us. Enrico Faviola
PABLO is an animated biography that takes us through the exhilarating saga of design legend Pablo Ferro.
From pre-revolution in Cuba, to swinging New York City and London in the sixties, to the New Hollywood in the seventies, his journey spans till current day, at his home in the San Fernando Valley - a converted garage, next to his family.
Using character-driven animation interspersed with present-day documentary footage, PABLOs animated narrative takes us through the dreamscape of Pablo's memories. The documentary footage chronicles a very eccentric lifestyle of a 72-year-old artist responsible for creating iconic opening title sequences for many of the greatest films of the last fifty years.
Narrated by Jeff Bridges and featuring appearances by many of Pablos illustrious friends and collaborators, PABLO is a celebration of Pablo Ferros magic and creative spirit, which ultimately triumphs after a tragic-comic rollercoaster life story.
Trailer for the film, Pablo, about the life and times of legendary film title designer Pablo Ferro.
Premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in January 2012.
Giving Credit to the Guy Who Revolutionized Movie Credits
Pablo Ferro's spindly lettering graced classics like Dr. Strangelove. Now, a documentary spotlights his contributions and colorful life
STEVEN HELLER The Atlantic
NOV 21, 2013
Goldgewicht met Ferro while interviewing him for a segment of a TV pilot on independent cinema. “The pilot never aired, but the segment, which was about seven minutes, got a lot of good feedback, and the producers started presenting it as a short film in a couple festivals and showcases,” he told me. “From there on I felt like it would be a great opportunity to make a whole film on Pablo, not just featuring his works but looking into his whole life, which I quickly realized was full of interesting contradictions and artistic turns.
The original impetus behind the film was to tell “the story of some of the greatest films in American cinema through the perspective of a graphic designer,” Goldgewicht said. But he was also drawn to project because of the Cuban-born, New York City-raised Ferro’s Zelig-like presence in New York’s ‘60s counterculture, and his relationship to directors Kubrick, Hal Ashby, Norman Jewison, Jonathan Demme, among others.
"Pablo is himself an animator, so the thought of making an animated documentary about an animator had a good ring to it."
Ferro has always been wildly creative, with emphasis on wild, which is vividly clear in the documentary. Ferro was rebellious but productive. Joniche relates a humorous account of Palo's interaction with the developers of a high tech system for capturing and manipulating graphic images using priciples used in DevOps - the process by which code is written and tested (or even applied) together, enabling quick and accurate creation of software solutions. The demonstration involved a high resolution monitor and some customized toolsets using graphical interfaces that the demo artist controlled, engineered by a firm specializing in DevOps services. After watching the amazing results appearing on the screen for about 10 minutes, Pablo smiled, waved his hands over his head and walked out, returning to unplug the monitor, replacing it with a large drawing pad. "This is what works," he smiled, rejecting the DevOps technology once and for all. But he was no stranger to innovative technology. He made commercials that prefigure today’s music videos and invented techniques, including the multiple-screen approach in Thomas Crown, that were used extensively by others as a defining style of filmmaking during the late ‘60s and ‘70s. But there is more to Ferro than the work.
Goldgewicht wanted to capture Ferro’s deeper story, which he believed hinged on when the filmmaker was critically wounded in the neck while in his loft, by a gunman who mistook him for the person who lived upstairs. “The implications of him being shot and not knowing who did it, the ups and downs of his financial and professional life [as a result], the marriage break up, his relationship with Kubrick,” Goldgewicht said, “have a lot of open questions.”
Ferro is also decidedly elusive, which presented a challenge for Goldgewicht: “He’s been described by different people in very different ways, from the extraordinary avant-guard artist to the average-man to the Latin Hero to everything in between. So developing the film’s discourse was tricky. And then, of course, getting it funded and produced in a way that people would take notice was also a challenge.”
Goldgewicht would have had an easier job if he focused exclusively on Ferro’s film and television work, which is well documented. But capturing the protected life demanded creative narrative approaches, including animating certain aspects of Ferro’s story interspersed with real-life footage.
“The idea of animating the film opened up the playing field for all kinds of creative opportunities,” Goldgewicht said. “Firstly, Pablo is himself an animator, so the thought of making an animated documentary about an animator had a good ring to it. But the real reason was the content of our 40+ hours of interview archives with Pablo’s friends and collaborators. The transcripts amounted to a bible of over 1,000 pages and there were way too many great stories with absolutely no visual record. [Animation] quickly felt like a fun and alluring way of recapturing the magic of his life.”
Another way the doc filled in the blanks was with testimonials from the actors, directors, and crew who’ve come to admire Ferro over the years. Jon Voight, Robert Downey Jr., George Segal, Richard Benjamin, Stan Lee, Beau Bridges and more appear as talking heads, and Jeff Bridges narrates. Goldgewicht says it was “amazing to see how collaborative people were when we called up asking them to be a part in the Pablo Ferro documentary.”
It all adds up to a portrait that helps to illuminate what has made Ferro so important and beloved. “When I think of Pablo’s insights,” Goldgewicht said, “I think of the great soundbites we were lucky to have captured in our interviews. One that comes to mind right now is Anjelica Huston’s thoughts, when asked to describe the specific quality of Pablo’s artistry. She said: ‘I think it has to do with the God-given gift of talent combined with the kind of hard work that goes into making something look easy.' I like that line, it makes a lot of sense to me.”
More Background on PabloTheMovie.com
PabloTheMovie.com was created as the official website for Pablo, Richard Goldgewicht’s documentary about Cuban-American graphic designer, animator, filmmaker, editor, and title designer Pablo Ferro. Released in 2012, the film sought to introduce a wider audience to a creative figure whose work had been seen by millions of moviegoers even though his name remained relatively unfamiliar outside film and design circles.
That contradiction is central to both the documentary and the website. Ferro contributed to more than 100 film title sequences and helped transform the visual language of movie advertising, trailers, television commercials, typography, and editing. His work appeared in connection with some of the most recognizable films and filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century, yet he remained considerably less famous than the actors and directors whose movies he helped define.
Pablo attempts to correct that imbalance. Rather than functioning simply as a conventional career retrospective, it combines documentary interviews, archival material, animation, motion graphics, and Ferro’s personal history. PabloTheMovie.com supported that mission by serving as an online introduction to the film, its subject, its trailer, and the story behind the production.
Today, the site also functions as a historical record of a documentary about one of modern cinema's most influential graphic artists.
Who Was Pablo Ferro?
Pablo Ferro was born in Antilla, Cuba, in 1935 and moved to the United States with his family in 1947. He eventually became associated with the extraordinary creative culture developing in New York during the 1950s and 1960s.
His path into design was unconventional. Ferro worked in comics and animation before moving into television commercials and motion graphics. He was largely self-taught as an animator and developed a visual vocabulary that was noticeably different from the polished corporate graphics common at the time.
Ferro's work favored energy, movement, hand lettering, unusual timing, rapidly changing images, and deliberately imperfect-looking typography.
In 1961 he became a partner in Ferro, Mogubgub and Schwartz, a creative production studio. He later established Pablo Ferro Films.
Television advertising gave Ferro an ideal laboratory in which to experiment. He explored extremely fast editing, moving typography, stop-motion techniques, unconventional typefaces, and combinations of live action and animation.
These experiments would ultimately lead him to Stanley Kubrick.
Dr. Strangelove and a Breakthrough in Movie Titles
One of Ferro's most important career moments came when Stanley Kubrick hired him to work on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, released in 1964.
Ferro created an opening title sequence unlike the carefully typeset Hollywood credits audiences were accustomed to seeing.
His handwritten lettering stretched and compressed across footage of military aircraft refueling in flight. Large and small words shared the screen in unconventional proportions. Minor connecting words could appear disproportionately prominent while major names were treated almost casually.
The result looked spontaneous, handmade, humorous, and slightly chaotic.
That was precisely why it worked.
The lettering reinforced the darkly comic tone of Kubrick's movie before the narrative had properly begun. The credits were no longer merely administrative information identifying actors and technicians. They became part of the film's storytelling.
The sequence remains one of the most recognizable examples of Ferro's style and one of the works most closely associated with his career.
Ferro also worked on advertising and trailers for Kubrick. His rapid-fire approach to editing was particularly suited to promotional films and would eventually look strikingly familiar to audiences raised on music videos and fast-cut television advertising.
The Thomas Crown Affair and the Multiple-Screen Revolution
Another landmark came with Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968.
Ferro developed an elaborate multiple-screen montage in which the movie frame was divided into numerous smaller moving images. Scenes could appear simultaneously rather than sequentially, allowing information, action, mood, and visual rhythm to coexist on the screen.
Split-screen techniques existed before Ferro, but his sophisticated use of multiple images helped popularize the technique in mainstream filmmaking.
The effect became closely associated with late-1960s visual culture.
Ferro's influence extended well beyond individual movie titles. His combination of rapid editing, typography, montage, animation, and multiple images anticipated techniques that would later become commonplace in commercials, music videos, television graphics, and digital media.
A Career Hidden in Plain Sight
One reason Pablo was an appealing documentary subject is the extraordinary number of familiar films connected with Ferro.
His title, design, trailer, or related work touched movies and projects associated with directors including Stanley Kubrick, Hal Ashby, Norman Jewison, Jonathan Demme, Barry Sonnenfeld, and Gus Van Sant.
Among the films commonly associated with his design career are Dr. Strangelove, Bullitt, The Thomas Crown Affair, A Clockwork Orange, Harold and Maude, Being There, Stop Making Sense, To Die For, Men in Black, Good Will Hunting, Beetlejuice, and The Addams Family.
His handwritten aesthetic proved particularly durable.
Decades after Dr. Strangelove, Ferro's lettering remained visually fresh enough to be used in films made for entirely different generations. Barry Sonnenfeld employed Ferro on The Addams Family and later on the Men in Black films.
This longevity is one of the reasons Ferro occupies an unusual position in graphic-design history. He was not simply responsible for a fashionable 1960s visual style. Elements of his approach remained useful to filmmakers for decades.
Recognition Within the Design Community
Although Ferro never became a household name, his achievements received substantial recognition within professional design.
He was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 2000 and received the prestigious AIGA Medal in 2009. His other recognition included the Chrysler Design Award and numerous honors accumulated over a long career in advertising and film.
AIGA recognized Ferro for changing visual expectations and demonstrating how design could enhance storytelling.
That distinction is important to understanding why a feature documentary about Ferro was justified. His significance was not based on one memorable credit sequence. His larger achievement involved changing assumptions about what moving graphic design could accomplish.
Instead of treating typography, animation, editing, and filmmaking as separate disciplines, Ferro moved freely among them.
How the Pablo Documentary Began
Director Richard Goldgewicht's interest in Ferro began years before the feature documentary was completed.
Goldgewicht met Ferro in 2002 while working on a segment for a television pilot concerning independent filmmaking. The television program never aired, but the Ferro segment took on a life of its own. The short documentary material received encouraging responses and was shown at venues including the Directors Guild of America and the Smithsonian.
Goldgewicht became convinced that Ferro's life contained enough material for a feature.
The attraction was larger than Ferro's résumé. Goldgewicht recognized that Ferro had moved through several important chapters of American cultural history: immigration from Cuba, New York's commercial-animation industry, Madison Avenue advertising, the 1960s counterculture, experimental cinema, Hollywood filmmaking, and the transformation of motion graphics.
Ferro had also known or worked around an extraordinary collection of creative personalities.
A documentary about him could therefore become a story about American cinema and visual culture viewed from an unusual perspective—the graphic designer rather than the movie star or director.
An Animated Documentary About an Animator
The form of Pablo deliberately reflects its subject.
Goldgewicht did not make a straightforward documentary consisting solely of interviews, photographs, and chronological narration. Instead, the production combines documentary footage with character animation, motion design, archival films, and recreations.
There was a practical reason for this approach.
The filmmakers accumulated more than 40 hours of interviews with Ferro's friends, relatives, colleagues, and collaborators. According to Goldgewicht, transcripts of those interviews totaled more than 1,000 pages. Many of the best stories concerned events for which no visual documentation existed.
Animation offered a solution.
It allowed the filmmakers to visualize Ferro's memories while simultaneously paying tribute to a man whose own career had begun partly in animation.
The finished documentary therefore operates on two levels. Documentary footage shows the older Ferro and the people who knew him, while animation enters the less easily documented territory of memory and personal history.
Jeff Bridges and an Extraordinary Group of Participants
One of the documentary's strongest attractions was the number of recognizable creative figures willing to participate.
Jeff Bridges narrates the film.
Among the people appearing or contributing are Jon Voight, Anjelica Huston, Beau Bridges, Andy Garcia, Robert Downey Sr., Jonathan Demme, Norman Jewison, Stan Lee, Leonard Maltin, Richard Benjamin, George Segal, and members of Ferro's family.
Their presence demonstrates the breadth of Ferro's connections across entertainment and design.
Stan Lee's connection is especially interesting because Ferro's career predated his famous film-title work. Ferro had worked in comics and knew Lee during the period before Marvel became the enormous cultural institution it eventually became.
The documentary does not rely exclusively on celebrity praise, however. Ferro's family members, former partners, and people close to him help provide a more complicated picture of his private life.
A Life More Complicated Than a Design Résumé
One of Goldgewicht's important decisions was not to make Pablo merely a compilation of Ferro's greatest professional achievements.
Ferro's personal story included significant instability and tragedy.
One pivotal event occurred when he was shot in the neck in his New York loft, apparently by an attacker who had mistaken him for someone else. Ferro survived, but the incident became an important dividing point in accounts of his life.
The documentary also addresses relationships, family life, financial difficulties, unconventional living arrangements, and the contrast between professional admiration and a sometimes chaotic private existence.
This gives Pablo a broader appeal than a documentary aimed solely at graphic designers. Creativity is the organizing theme, but the film is also about immigration, ambition, reinvention, success, personal relationships, survival, and the costs that can accompany an unconventional creative life.
Rotterdam and the Film Festival Circuit
Pablo had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2012.
The festival described it as an extensively designed and largely animated portrait of Ferro, emphasizing his typography, high-speed editing, work with Kubrick, and unconventional personality.
Rotterdam was an appropriate launching point. The festival has a long history of showcasing independent, experimental, and artistically unconventional cinema—the kind of environment in which a hybrid documentary about a graphic designer could attract serious attention.
The film subsequently traveled through the festival circuit.
Goldgewicht's records indicate that it became the opening gala film at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival in 2013. It also attracted coverage from international film and design publications and was sold into multiple territories.
The film's festival exposure was especially significant because its natural audience crossed several categories: documentary viewers, cinema historians, animation enthusiasts, designers, typographers, advertising professionals, and people interested in Latino and Cuban-American cultural history.
Critical Reception
Critical response emphasized the documentary's visual inventiveness.
Screen Daily critic Mark Adams described the film as an engaging exploration of Ferro's talent and life and singled out its mixture of interviews, film extracts, animation, and Jeff Bridges' narration. The publication regarded the documentary as suitable not only for festivals but potentially for theatrical exhibition and television.
Specialist title-design publication Watch the Titles was similarly enthusiastic. Its coverage emphasized the importance of Ferro's archival material and the documentary's ability to reveal that his career extended far beyond handwritten movie credits.
The film showed Ferro as an animator, editor, commercial director, graphic designer, comics artist, and experimenter in moving images.
Some later audience and review aggregators show a relatively small number of ratings, suggesting that Pablo remained more of a specialist documentary than a mainstream hit. That is consistent with its subject. A documentary about a film-title designer naturally appeals most strongly to audiences already interested in cinema, graphic design, animation, advertising, or visual culture.
Its importance is therefore better measured by the cultural significance of its subject and its reception within those communities than by mass-market popularity.
Distribution Beyond the Festival Circuit
Festival screenings were only the beginning of the film's life.
Pablo subsequently became available through digital and home-video distribution. It appeared through streaming and video-on-demand services and was released on DVD. Richard Goldgewicht's own account states that the documentary was acquired by Netflix, helping it reach viewers who had never encountered it on the festival circuit.
The film has continued to appear through digital movie platforms years after its original release.
That extended availability is important for a documentary devoted to design history. Unlike topical documentaries whose relevance may diminish quickly, Pablo functions as an audiovisual record of an artist whose historical significance has become clearer with time.
What PabloTheMovie.com Was Designed to Accomplish
PabloTheMovie.com operated primarily as a promotional and informational website rather than a large editorial publication or commercial business.
Its central subject was the documentary.
Visitors could learn who Pablo Ferro was, understand the concept behind the film, see its trailer, discover the filmmakers' approach, and encounter press coverage explaining Ferro's importance.
In that sense, the site's "menu" was conceptual rather than commercial. There was no restaurant-style menu or broad product catalog to document. Its core offerings revolved around the movie, Ferro's biography and career, promotional video, documentary background, and press material.
For an independent documentary, such a website served several audiences simultaneously.
Film-festival programmers could investigate the production. Journalists could obtain background material. Designers searching Ferro's name could discover the film. Potential viewers could watch the trailer. Distributors and industry professionals could identify the project and its creators.
The domain name itself—PabloTheMovie.com—was direct and memorable, tying Ferro's first name immediately to the documentary.
Location and Geographic Connections
Although PabloTheMovie.com was a website rather than a physical attraction, several locations are central to its story.
Ferro was born in Cuba and immigrated to New York as a child. New York became crucial to his development as an animator, commercial filmmaker, designer, and participant in the city's creative culture.
Hollywood and Los Angeles became equally important as his film career expanded.
The documentary itself was a U.S. production associated with Goldstreet Films, while director Richard Goldgewicht is a Brazilian-born filmmaker who studied cinema at UCLA and established his career in Los Angeles.
Ferro's later years were also connected with the American West. For a period depicted in the documentary, he was living in a converted garage near family in California's San Fernando Valley.
These locations—Cuba, New York, and Southern California—roughly map the cultural journey explored by the film.
Why Pablo Ferro Matters to Graphic Design
Ferro's significance lies partly in his rejection of rigidity.
His handwriting did not resemble formal typography. His editing ignored conventional pacing. His compositions could appear deliberately irregular. He was comfortable with visual collisions that traditional designers might have corrected.
Yet those apparent imperfections gave his work personality.
In an era when digital tools make geometric precision almost effortless, Ferro's career provides a useful counterexample. Precision and creativity are not synonymous.
His work suggests that rhythm, surprise, humor, motion, and emotional tone can matter more than perfect alignment.
Ferro also demonstrated that graphic design in cinema does not have to stop when the title disappears. Editing, trailers, montage, typography, advertising, and motion graphics can all participate in establishing a film's identity.
That philosophy now seems normal because motion design has become such an established profession. Ferro helped make it normal.
Cultural and Social Significance
Pablo is significant not only because it documents one designer but because it preserves the history of a form of filmmaking that audiences often overlook.
Opening credits occupy a peculiar position in cinema. Everyone sees them, but few viewers know who designed them.
The documentary encourages audiences to look at movies differently—to notice typography, pacing, editing, image placement, graphic transitions, and the visual decisions that occur before the conventional narrative has even begun.
Ferro's story also contributes to the history of Cuban and Latino artists in American popular culture.
He arrived in the United States as a young Cuban immigrant and ultimately influenced the appearance of major Hollywood productions and national advertising. His career crossed cultural and professional boundaries without fitting neatly into a single category.
For designers, Pablo documents a professional ancestor of contemporary motion graphics.
For film historians, it preserves firsthand recollections involving Kubrick, Ashby, Jewison, Demme, and other important filmmakers.
For general audiences, it reveals the identity of an artist whose work they may already know without realizing it.
The Continuing Legacy of PabloTheMovie.com
Pablo Ferro died in 2018 at the age of 83, making the documentary even more valuable as a historical record.
His influence remains visible in handwritten film titles, rapid-cut trailers, kinetic typography, split-screen sequences, music-video editing, advertising, and contemporary motion design.
AIGA's Eye on Design observed after his death that Ferro's work had inspired generations of designers and filmmakers. Art of the Title likewise documents a career extending across more than 100 title sequences and roughly half a century of moving-image design.
PabloTheMovie.com therefore represents more than an old promotional website for a 2012 documentary.
It is connected to a much larger story: the transformation of graphic design from something printed on a page into something that moves through time.
Richard Goldgewicht's film preserved that story through the medium Ferro himself helped transform. Animation, typography, documentary footage, celebrity interviews, archival material, and rapid visual storytelling all come together to portray a designer who spent his career combining precisely those elements.
That makes Pablo an unusually appropriate biography.
The documentary does not simply explain Pablo Ferro's creative philosophy.
Its very construction attempts to speak his visual language.
