Born in New York in 1920, after the end of World War I, Saul Bass grew up during a time in history when the world was going through massive changes. Women had just been granted the right to vote and Margaret Sanger was getting ready to launch the National Birth Control League (United States History, 1999). With the economic boom of the 1920s tumbling into the Great Depression of the 1930s, Bass was still fortunate enough to be able to study art under Howard Trafton at the Art Students League from 1936 to 1939. After World War II he continued his studies under Gyorgy Kepes at Brooklyn College, New York from 1944 û 1945 (Contemporary Designers, 1997).
In 1946, Bass moved to Los Angeles and started his company Saul Bass and Associates. Although he did mostly graphic design at the time, by 1954, about the time of the Civil Rights Movement, he had signed on to work on his first film, Carmen Jones (1954) with Otto Preminger. Preminger liked his work so much that he asked Saul to work with him on the film The Man With The Golden Arm (1955) (Maltin, 1994). Bass is quoted as saying:
Motion picture photography was always about ten years behind. . .ThatÆs what distinguished my initial work in films. I was bringing to bear the visual standards that I had developed in the graphic field. That was very startling, and thatÆs what made the work I did then look so wild (quoted in Communication Arts, 2001).
Besides working with Otto Preminger on many films, he also worked Alfred Hitchcock on Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960) (he conceived the frame shots for the shower scene) (Maltin, 1994). Bass also worked with Martin Scorsese, who once said of him, ôBass fashioned title sequences into an art, creating in some cases, like Vertigo, a mini-film within a filmö (quoted in Communication Arts, 2001). This was a technique he would use in many films, his most recent one being The Age of Innocence (1993) (Maltin...