Talk:Karoly Grosz (illustrator)

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Yoninah (talk) 22:50, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

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The Mummy (1932)

• ... that a poster for the 1932 film The Mummy (pictured) illustrated by Karoly Grosz held the record for most expensive film poster at auction for 17 years?

Source: "Could Rare 'Mummy' Poster Fetch $1 Million at Auction? (October 2018) from the Hollywood Reporter: "The rare 1932 lithographic film poster at one time held the record for the most expensive poster in the world after it sold at Sotheby's New York in 1997 for $453,500. It lost the title in 2014... Universal's advertising director Karoly Grosz designed the poster."

• Reviewed: Catch it, Bin it, Kill it
• Comment: The Mummy poster is a Featured Picture and was previously on the Main Page on October 31, 2013, as a Halloween-appropriate Picture of the Day. I think it's a good opportunity to highlight a Featured Picture in the DYK space, and almost seven years since its first appearance it wouldn't be too soon/repetitious.

Created by Brandt Luke Zorn (talk). Self-nominated at 23:56, 7 March 2020 (UTC).

•  Reviewing... DTM (talk) 10:31, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
• Article was created on 7 March 2020 and nominated on the same day. It is long enough and within policy. Apart from the quote Earwigs doesn't pick up much. There are 27 images in the article and all are licensed adequately. The image in the hook is present in the article; it is a featured image. The hook is sourced and the content is present in the article and cited inline. The hook is interesting and the length is alright. QPQ well under way.

Good to go. DTM (talk) 10:52, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Karoly Grosz (illustrator)/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Usernameunique (talk · contribs) 05:05, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Lead

• Beyond the horror genre, his other notable designs include posters for the epic war film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and the screwball comedy My Man Godfrey (1936). — If these are notable, they should be discussed—not just listed—in the body of the article.

• Fixed. In the of Reel Art (Rebello & Allen 1988) subchapter about Universal Pictures, these two films are the first two examples given of the company's finest poster work during the period. In the same sentence that those two films are named, the authors explicitly credit them as a product of Grosz's tenure as art director.

Early life and career

• Note 2 is unsourced

• Fixed.

• How is it known that he was born in Hungary?

• Rebello & Allen 1988, p. 325. One of the appendices in Reel Art is an alphabetical series of paragraph-long blurbs about the life and work of each of the illustrators and other artists named in the book. Compared to the other bios, Grosz's entry is highly unusual because it provides no date of birth, date of death, or even a precise location of birth (like a city); his entry begins "Grosz, Karoly (dates unknown)", while for comparison the entry just below starts "Grot, Anton (Kelbasice, Poland, 1884–Stanton, California 1974)". The first sentence of the Grosz blurb begins "This Hungarian-born painter's dramatic style ..."

Career at Universal Pictures

• Philip Cochrane ... Robert Cochrane — Worth red links?

• Maybe, although I'm not sure how to name them. I sometimes saw the former name given variously as Philip Cochrane, Philip D. Cochrane, and P. D. Cochrane, depending on the source.

• How is it known that Grosz suggested the neck bolts for Frankenstein's monster, and that Jack Pierce's claim is thus false?

• I took out the word "falsely", which is true but too blunt, and have elaborated a little more on the nature of the claim and how/why it's known to be false.

• Are any other examples of his suggestions for films known?

• None that I've come across in any of the sources I've read.

List of attributed film posters

• reliably attributed to Grosz — Generally speaking, how are posters reliably attributed to Grosz?

• I reworded this to "specifically attributed to Grosz in a secondary source". The word "reliably" didn't add anything that wasn't already required by Wikipedia's reliable sources policies; I kept the word "specifically" since it just means it was attributed to him by name (or in some other non-vague, unmistakable way).

If a film is listed in the table, that means the cited source credited Grosz by name for (1) illustrating one or more of that film's posters himself, and/or (2) overseeing the art direction of that film's poster campaign as a whole. If an image appears in the gallery, that means that either a source has credited Grosz as the illustrator of that image, or a source has specifically discussed his responsibility as an art director for that image.

The gallery excludes images of posters for which Grosz's responsibility can only be inferred, even if it's a reasonable inference. Here's a hypothetical to unpack what I mean: let's say I found a source ("Smith 2011") that says "Karoly Grosz oversaw the poster campaign for the film Monster X as advertising art director". There are five different posters for Monster X, but Smith 2011 did not include images of any of those posters, nor did it describe any individual posters Grosz worked on with enough detail to identify them (such as "the Style A one-sheet" or "the image of Monster X standing on top of Castle X", assuming that image appears on only one of the film's posters). If that's the case, I would use Smith 2011 to add Monster X to the table, but not the gallery. If I find a second source ("Jones 2012") that says something like "Grosz's aesthetic sense as an art director shines through in the Style A one-sheet for Monster X", I would add that poster to the gallery, citing Jones 2012, with note 5 to clarify that Grosz was the art director but not necessarily the illustrator (I say "not necessarily" since he could be credited with both roles). In a sense, I could have used Smith 2011 to add all five Monster X posters to the gallery with note 5, since he's generally responsible for all of them. However, that would have the effect of flooding the gallery and diluting the posters that Grosz is said to be most personally responsible for creating.

Note that The Black Cat is in the table, but not the gallery, because the source does not specify which of the film's specific poster(s) Grosz can or should be specifically credited for. Hammett suggested that Grosz personally illustrated at least one of the film's posters, but there's not enough information to identify which one(s).

Gallery

• Note 5 is uncited.

• It's uncited because it's generally applicable. It clarifies something about the images in the gallery that it's attached to; each image with note 5 is individually cited. It would be redundant and confusing to duplicate the cited sources into one mega-ref attached only to the footnote, as it would end up being totally unclear which source corresponds to which image anyway. I could also use a key (like the one seen in List of songs recorded by the Beatles § Main songs) for the same effect, something like "† indicates Grosz has been specifically credited for the poster's art direction, but not necessarily for its illustration."

Retrospective appraisal

• "as legendary as the films themselves." — Quotations need inline citations.

• Fixed.

Valuation

• He is also the best-represented artist on a much longer list maintained by the website LearnAboutMoviePosters.com.[4] — Is the website what one might consider a reliable source? Also, are you sure the citation is correct? Its parenthetical quotation is about something else.

• Very much so. LearnAboutMoviePosters.com (LAMP for short) has clunky/outdated web design but it is a highly reliable, highly useful source for people in the niche field of vintage poster collecting. The parenthetical quote is clumsily worded—it's certainly not how I would chosen to write the same sentence, and it took me a while to parse it myself. However, I'm certain as to its meaning, and the quoted portion applies to both places I've cited it.

The quotation should be understood to mean "it is even difficult to find information on the artist [who] has more movie posters [on the list of most-expensive posters] than any other—the big dollar leader—Karoly Grosz". (I've now incorporated those edits in the article.) The reason the quotation is so confusing is that they referred to their own site's list in a very offhand manner: "the top selling", dropping the word "list". Plus the phrase "top selling" is ambiguous because it is usually used in the sense of "most copies sold" rather than what they mean, "most expensive"—very different meanings! If I were them, I would have never given that name to my list of most expensive posters in the first place—but that's the name they chose to use.

LAMP's freely available "top selling" list includes the current top 250 most expensive film posters. I don't cite that list directly, however, because they only provide their info on poster authorship information through their pay subscription service. I don't have a membership, but I imagine it is a very worthwhile service for people who want to do some research before dropping thousands of dollars on a poster. If I had a membership to their database, the list of Grosz's attributed posters would be much more complete, indeed, as close to definitive as currently possible.

In short, LAMP is obscure because of the niche nature of their work, but they are highly reliable. By analogy, the situation is like this: Imagine a distant future where, for some reason, it's extremely difficult to find out who directed any given film. In this world, there's a site called LAM (Learn About Movies) that maintains a reliable, very comprehensive, and freely available list of the highest-grossing films. LAM also has a large (albeit incomplete) database of director credits, but they keep those hidden behind a paywall. Then one day, in LAM's freely available newsletter, they write "currently, Steven Spielberg has directed more films on our list of highest-grossing films than any other director." By itself, this would be a very useful and noteworthy piece of information. It's not as useful as it would be to have a subscription yourself; you still don't necessarily know whether Spielberg directed Jaws or Avatar, and maybe not even LAM itself knows who directed Jurassic Park because that info has been lost to time. Nonetheless, that newsletter would confirm that if you had access to the most-complete database on the topic in existence, you would see Spielberg's name pop up more times than anyone else's.

Sounds good. You might think about emailing them to ask if they would provide you with a) access for use on Wikipedia, or if not, b) a list of libraries with a subscription. Just a thought. --Usernameunique (talk) 18:26, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

• The auction record held by The Mummy was broken in 2014 by a poster for the 1927 film London After Midnight. — Any word on who illustrated this poster?

• No idea. I assume the poster's high value was almost entirely driven by its extreme rarity and the fact that London After Midnight is a "holy grail" of lost films, making the poster desirable regardless of any of its actual qualities in and of itself.

Citations

• 32 is broken.

• Fixed.

• The first link is 56 is broken.

• Gah! Fixed. Thanks for the catch; the missing source is just Guitar World aggregating/reposting the video that I also cited, but it includes a key missing detail. I couldn't believe I had to piece together the basic information about that guitar from three different sources, I just about went crazy trying to find all of it in one place (or at least the smallest number of places).

Bibliography

• Jones 2002: What's the long line in "In ——— (ed.)." for?

• Jones was the author of the cited chapter as well as the editor of the book, which is a multi-author anthology. I agree that this was confusing so I just took the editor credit out entirely.

• I would recommend including the editor info for both, just not using the "———" in the second one. --Usernameunique (talk) 18:08, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

• Same comment I made about all the "via"s in your William Rose nomination—I would probably remove them if I were you, but your call.

• I double-checked but these all seem kosher to me.

• Da Ponte, T. S.: Nobody else has initials.

• This editor was credited as T. S. Da Ponte in the scanned magazine. Don't know their full name, have no way to find out, and "T. S. Da Ponte" is the byline they chose to use as a professional editor, so it's the proper credit.

Overall

• Very nice article, Brandt Luke Zorn. Here as with Rose, I especially enjoyed the gallery. Just nits above. --Usernameunique (talk) 05:05, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

• Hi Usernameunique! Just here to say I am about to start working on this review. Thanks for keeping it open. —BLZ · talk 18:16, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

• Sounds good, Brandt Luke Zorn, and no rush. --Usernameunique (talk) 18:38, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

• I've responded to all of the above, lmk what you think of the changes. —BLZ · talk 23:30, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

• Looks good, BLZ. This article was already in good shape to begin with, so it's an easy pass now. I've also left two comments above. --Usernameunique (talk) 18:27, 17 April 2020 (UTC)