A look at Hollywood and the movies : ‘Posse’ Poster Ropes Crenshaw Grad a Job

Even in the cutthroat environs of Hollywood, fortune occasionally smiles on the less fortunate. And recognition of budding talent does happen from time to time. A case in point is 18-year-old Sherwood Andrews--an art student hired straight out of Crenshaw High School last June to work as a summer employee at Frankfurt Gips Balkind, one of the more successful movie ad agencies (“Indecent Proposal,” “Groundhog Day”).

Andrews is nominated for a Key Art Award--which recognizes excellence in motion picture advertising--for originating the visual concept behind the poster for “Posse,” the Mario Van Peebles Western from Gramercy Pictures. What Andrews came up with was a pure black silhouette of a cowboy, an image that suggests the mostly black racial makeup of the “Posse” cast and which adds a mythical aura.

Andrews is sharing FGB’s nomination for best English-language poster along with designer and art director Randi Braun, photographer Albert Watson and FGB President Peter Bemis, who together refined Andrews’ original concept into a darkly shadowed, near-silhouetted photo of Van Peebles in cowboy gear. Nine other posters are competing in the category.

(The 22nd annual Key Art Awards were to be handed out in 16 categories on Friday at the Directors Guild of America, after Calendar’s deadline.)

Whether or not the “Posse” team wins the Key Art Award, Andrews feels that he’s gotten a huge boost from the campaign, both psychologically and in terms of opportunity.

One year ago, Andrews was looking at a not-so-promising future. A senior with a passion for drawing, Andrews had no plans after graduating other than “to find work somewhere,” he says. Living on a low income with his mother and sister near Vermont and 179th Street, Sherwood “didn’t have a lot of encouragement to do something with himself,” says Susan Curran, his former art teacher at Crenshaw High School.

Opportunity knocked, ironically, as a result of the Los Angeles riots, which occurred in April, 1992. Bemis and FGB’s singularly named co-president, Smitty, decided soon after that “we wanted to do something, even if it was just hiring one kid” to lessen the despair among L.A.’s disenfranchised groups, the former 20th Century Fox executive says. To find some candidates, FGB contacted a student job-search outfit called First Break, which put out the word among art teachers in inner-city high schools. “We were especially interested in finding kids who didn’t have college or a job lined up,” says Smitty.

Andrews, who says he likes “to do drawings more than anything else . . . I’ve been doing them since I was 5,” was hired in late June after several candidates were interviewed. Curran recalls that Andrews “always had this wild hair and he’d always dress off-the-wall, but he went to the interview looking like a Marine.” Curran adds, “I’m glad they picked Sherwood because there wasn’t a lot available for him after high school. . . . I know he wanted to go to Otis School of Art and Design.”

FGB landed the “Posse” account from Gramercy Pictures not long after Andrews was hired. He was asked to work on ideas for the movie’s poster along with “four or five other designers,” says Bemis, but Andrews, he explains, “got right to the heart of the movie in one conceptual stroke--a black cowboy film for black audiences.”

Andrews says he came up with the idea “on my last day there,” in accordance with his summer employment term. The “Posse” brainstorm changed everything, though, and he was invited to remain on a free-lance basis.

As for the future, Bemis says he expects that Andrews “will eventually become a full-time, permanent employee.”