Interview: Jurassic Park Marketing Artist Andrea Alvin

The late John Alvin was one of the most prolific poster creators of all time and he worked on many Spielberg films in his career—including E.T., Empire of the Sun and The Color Purple. Andrea Alvin and her husband, John, worked on Jurassic Park very early on in the pre-production process. John and Andrea worked as a team on the Jurassic Park campaign and Andrea actually came up with the famous tagline for the classic film. We spoke to Andrea about her memories of her work on Jurassic Park.

How did you and John get involved in Jurassic Park?

Because John’s work had been used on most of the Spielberg movies leading up to this one, we were asked as a studio, to begin working on this film very early on. We did logo concepts, trailer concepts, copy concepts and one sheet concepts. Towards the end of our explorations, the comprehensive art became quite specific and detailed. The large cut out three-dimensional standees in the theater were of the footprints coming out of the big gate that says Jurassic Park. This was taken from one of those later comps.

What are your memories of you and John’s work on Jurassic Park?

We were involved very early on before the movie was shot with logos and all kinds of things. John went to Stan Winston’s studio and got to see all the dinosaurs and everything. We worked on it for a long time and at the very end when he was working on the final Jurassic Park piece…we got a call from Universal saying stop working. Spielberg decided he wanted the logo from the book on the poster. That was disappointing, but they did use it for standees in the theaters. They did use my copy line: ‘An Adventure 65 Million Years In The Making.’

Do you recall how you came up with that copy line, and how you found out it was going to be used?

I remember finding out when the final campaign was released. We knew they would use the art from the book jacket for the campaign, but had no idea what copy line they would choose. These things were not credited. Whatever you contributed to the campaign was theirs to use.

You can read our interview with Andrea Alvin where we explore the work of her husband here.