Casablanca, Poster for the Film

Brooklyn-born Bill Gold designed some of the best-known movie posters of the twentieth century. Trained at the Pratt Institute, in 1941 Gold was hired by Warner Bros. to work in the poster department of its New York office. After World War II, during which he made training films for the army, Gold returned to Warner Bros., this time in Los Angeles. He eventually started his own advertising firm. Gold designed the iconic poster for Casablanca at age twenty-one, his first assignment. The film interrogates the isolationist stance that prevailed in the United States prior to its involvement in World War II while also constructing a distinctly American figure in Bogart’s character Rick; it remains an American classic.