As founder and creative director of one of the most exciting movie poster agencies in the country, Kenny Gravillis is a forward-thinking CEO whose eye is always on pushing the envelope of design. Although in my writing I tend to concentrate on individual designers rather than studios, the name Gravillis Inc. has popped up regularly in my annual Top 20 lists over the past fifteen years. Outside the industry, studios or agencies tend to seem rather faceless, partly because they have to preserve a fairly homogeneous company front (star designers can be easily poached, after all). But Gravillis Inc.—whose no-nonsense mission statement on their website is “we try to make cool looking shit that people want to talk about”—has more of an identity than most, not least because of the larger-than-life personality of its founder and namesake. Also, as one of the only Black-owned movie poster agencies in America, Gravillis is a trailblazer and groundbreaker.
In December, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures hosted a talk called “Making a Movie Poster with Kenny Gravillis”—his L.A.-based company has actually designed the branding for the Oscars for the previous two years—and a couple of weeks ago, he gave a presentation there on the ’70s and ’80s posters for Best Picture–winning films. As Gravillis told me, “People kind of geeked out.” For the past ten years, Gravillis Inc. has had a very close association with Spike Lee, designing all his posters from Chi-Raq (2015) on. And Gravillis is one of the founders—along with Dawn Baillie of BLT, who I interviewed last year—of Access, a scholarship program sponsored by Netflix and run by Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles that gives young students of color an invaluable pipeline to an entertainment design career, offering full-tuition scholarships, professional mentorship, and paid apprenticeships.
Born and raised in East London, Gravillis studied graphic design at East Ham College of Technology before coming to New York in 1987 to visit his father, who was living there at the time. Not intending to stay longer than one summer, Gravillis nonetheless took his portfolio around to Manhattan design firms and ended up getting hired by a company doing package design. Over the next two years (“two years of running around New York, sort of getting New Yorked,” as he put it), he was fired four times from four companies until he found his niche as a record-cover designer at Def Jam at the age of 21.
Over his illustrious music design career in the ’90s, first at Def Jam and then as the creative director of MCA in Los Angeles, Kenny designed numerous album covers, not least two of the most iconic designs in hip-hop: The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die (under the art direction of Cey Adams) and The Roots’ Things Fall Apart, both of which, in their immediacy and their minimalism, point to the work Gravillis would go on to do in movie-poster design in the following decades.
Above: Kenny Gravillis’s designs for The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die and The Roots’ Things Fall Apart.
I spoke to Kenny Gravillis over Zoom earlier this month about his career, his early struggles for recognition, and his favorite Gravillis posters. In 2000, he and his wife DeAnna launched Gravillis Inc. as a boutique graphic design studio for music packaging. But in the early 2000s, with the rise of streaming and the decline in album sales, budgets for record cover design dwindled. Gravillis, seeing the writing on the wall, pivoted from music to movies. But it wasn’t easy. In the early years, Gravillis Inc. was pigeonholed as an “urban” design firm and given mostly music-related or Black-themed movie projects.
KENNY GRAVILLIS: Because I came from music, that transition into the film thing was really tricky. When we were first going around to the studios, a lot of feedback we were getting was like, “So you guys are really urban, huh?” And I was thinking, God, we are doomed here right now.
NOTEBOOK: Was being a Black-owned agency less of an issue in the music business than it was in the film world?
GRAVILLIS: In the music business it wasn't an issue at all. I remember when I was at MCA, even though we were doing a lot of the Black artists at one point, that shifted, and we were working on indie-white-girl records. But when we got into the movie game, we realized we had to be way more strategic, or people would buck at us. I’ve said this a million times, but thank God for—and I know it's like saying Voldemort—but thank God for the Weinsteins, because they were the first people that looked at our stuff and were like, Oh, okay, yeah, these guys could do something. And so instead of being the Black-owned agency, we became the indie guys. That was really crucial for us. So by 2009, when we did Inglorious Basterds, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and Avatar in the same year, that was when I felt like, Okay, it’s going to be really hard to pigeonhole us now.
NOTEBOOK: What was the first poster that you did for Miramax?
Above: Some of the earliest Gravillis Inc. posters, from 2004 to 2006.
GRAVILLIS: The first one we did was this movie called Daltry Calhoun with Johnny Knoxville in 2005. It was executive produced by Quentin Tarantino. It was a big deal for us. We had done a Jay-Z documentary for Paramount Classics called Fade to Black and that was technically our first finish [a “finish” is a design that makes it to the end of the process as the official poster], which made a lot of sense because we were from music. So it was cool, but it was like, okay, we’re not really stretching much here. So we were really happy to get a Johnny Knoxville comedy. I don’t know if I’ve told this story before actually, but we got a meeting with Miramax, and they gave us an opportunity to work on this project. So apparently, they were showing Harvey Weinstein comps [short for “comprehensive layout” or sometimes “composition layout,” “comps” are fairly finished-looking designs created for the client to choose from] for Daltry Calhoun, and he was apparently losing it, and he’s throwing the comps across the room. And then they give him ours. Now, at the back of the boards, back in the day, there’d always be a sticker of your little company, and then the number of the comp. When he looked at the comp, he didn’t say anything. He turned the board around, and then he looked at it and says, “Who’s Gravel Locks?” And that was it. And from then on we started getting a ton of Miramax work. So that put us on the map, in terms of at least legitimately being in the industry. Because obviously they, at the time, were the titans of independent film. So we were getting stuff like Factory Girl [2006], getting options on these super indie films. It was a good start for us.
NOTEBOOK: But now, twenty years later, I feel you’re embracing your role as the leading Black-owned agency much more, right?
GRAVILLIS: Yeah, yeah. Now we’re embracing the culture way more because we feel way more confident that we can do that without being pigeonholed. Yeah, we can be more of a representation of that, and not just like, only be that, you know? I think, thankfully, we now have the body of work that shows that we’re more than that, obviously, but now we can at least embrace it in terms of trying to sort of push that agenda in a way that maybe isn’t as obvious.
Above: Three of my favorite Gravillis Inc. posters: for The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2011), John Lewis: Good Trouble (Dawn Porter, 2020) with art by Akiko Stehrenberger, and BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018).
NOTEBOOK: I love what you’ve been doing with the Otis scholarship program. How did that come about?
GRAVILLIS: What happened was that after the all the social unrest in 2020, Dawn Baillie and I were both on this huge 300-person Zoom. We were just talking. And then afterwards she reached out to me because she knew I was into arts education. And she’s like, “Kenny, what can we do?” And I told her that one of the big issues, especially for kids of color, number one, is that art school is really expensive. And number two, a lot of those parents have no idea that this job even exists. So if there’s no job at the end of a $60,000 education, then what's the point? You know what I mean? So a lot of kids are saying I want to go to art school. And their parents are like, “Yeah, but what are you going to do at the end?”
Dawn was on the board of Otis, so we ended up talking to them, saying we want to start something really specifically for entertainment advertising. So we built this program, and then it was about who’s going to pay for it, you know? And to be honest, Netflix was our first stop. And so we went to them, and it took about a year and a half, two years. But finally they end up saying, “Yeah, let's do it.” And the first cohort graduated just this December. So basically, the way it works is that there are three tracks: a design track, an illustration track and an AV track [for trailer editing]. It’s a fourteen-month course, but the key for us was, after the fourteen months, then what? So we made sure that from there Netflix would place the graduates in agencies [including Gravillis and BLT] and there’ll be a six-month sort of apprenticeship, and then it’ll be up to the agency if they hire them or not, but they would be paid apprentices for six months at least. So that’s what we put into place. And now we’re hoping for, you know, season two, or cohort two, we’re just waiting to see if the budget gets approved. Hopefully it will. In the last cohort we had six Black kids, three Latino kids, and two trans kids. It was the kind of diversity of people that would not normally be seen in this industry so we’re just hoping to keep that going.
It’s all paid for but it is a tough program. But it really does prepare them for the world that they're about to be getting into. It felt like an actionable step; it actually felt like we were doing something. It was great to be at that graduation last Christmas. And it was amazing meeting the families, because a lot of them didn’t think it was real until they came to Netflix and saw their capstone project and all their artwork. So it’s definitely been a highlight for me in terms of trying to do something.
NOTEBOOK: So how much do you do these days as the creative director? How much are you actually designing?
GRAVILLIS: Designing? Barely. The last thing I remember doing is we were working on Zack Snyder’s Justice League in 2017 and I did a sketch for one of my designers of a film reel in rubble. I’m a terrible sketch artist, but I did this sketch, and I sent it to one of my head designers at 11 o’clock at night, and the next day he’d made the comp and they ended up using it. And, I mean, that was the last time I remember being super involved in the design. Obviously with Spike’s stuff, and certain projects, I'm overseeing the design and I’m picky, so I'll look at something, and maybe it’s a type thing, and I still sometimes needle them. And my guys are used to that, you know what I mean?
NOTEBOOK: But do you miss doing the actual design work?
GRAVILLIS: I get enough of it with the noodling. I don’t need to be starting from scratch. And I like seeing the young designers grow. At Gravillis we have two design teams, about seven designers on each. We also have project managers and specialty people like illustrators and sketch artists, but the design team is about fourteen people and nine of that team started off as interns. So, yeah, we’re really strong when it comes to growing designers. That’s something I take pride in. And everyone wants to steal our designers all the time. But I’m super proud because one of our designers, Brian, just celebrated his ninth year with us. And Jed, our creative director, has been there ten, and Vince, our ECD, has been there fourteen. So I’m proud of that because it just says a lot about us as an agency.
NOTEBOOK: Also, your office looks fabulous.
GRAVILLIS: Yeah I’m surprised that a lot of times people come by the office and say, “This office is so cool.” And I’m like, yeah, it’s a creative office. Like, it should be cool. But a lot of people say they’ve worked in places where it’s just gray and there’s nothing on the wall. I don't understand that. I’m mad when there’s not music playing when I walk in the office, and that might be from my Def Jam days, but dude, I’m expecting to hear music, you know? We get a lot of studio people bringing filmmakers to our office because they know that it’s going to feel like a really creative environment, a creative atmosphere. So I do like that about our studio, and that’s why we didn't give it up during COVID. I still believe in collaboration, face to face. The guys come in like, twice a week. I love that human connection between the creatives, and the younger designers appreciate it, they get it. They’re like, it’s different when you're in here, you know? So, yeah, I still love the studio environment, I don't want that to go away.
Above: Some more of my favorite Gravillis posters, most of which made my Top 20 poster lists over the past 15 years: Iris (Albert Maysles, 2015), Thelma (Josh Margolin, 2024), We Are the Best! (Lukas Moodysson, 2013), V/H/S (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, David Bruckner, Tyler Gillett, 2012) and V/H/S 2 (Simon Barrett, Jason Eisener, Gareth Evans, 2013), The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2016), Human Flow (Ai Weiwei, 2017), Only God Forgives (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2013), and The Signal (William Eubank, 2014).
NOTEBOOK: I know it’s hard to choose, but I’d love to ask you if you could choose a few favorite Gravillis posters.
GRAVILLIS: I have a few. I have a few.
Above: Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (Betty Thomas, 2009).
GRAVILLIS: So I like when something can transcend a genre, meaning we do something, it works, but it doesn’t feel like it’s the normal approach to that genre. Because it’s so easy to fall into tropes. So the first poster that made me feel that we actually had a place in this industry was the Alvin and the Chipmunks poster. That poster still stays up in our office to this day, because I don't think many people would have shown that poster to Fox.
It was an example of us coming from a different space. Because, I mean, you know what Alvin and the Chipmunks is supposed to be, you know, it’s supposed to be cutesy, obviously it's CGI. But we ended up going this Lite-Brite route, because it was Christmas, and we also took the Lite-Brites from back in the ’70s, from when Alvin and the Chipmunks was first around.
There was guy named Tony Sella who was a big executive back at Fox in the day, super creative guy, and and I had a feeling that he might relate to that thing, and he did. And not only did he relate to it, but he pushed that through. I often talk about how great work comes from great clients, because that’s how the work gets pushed out. Like, we can do amazing work, and it can go nowhere if a client doesn’t get it. I always talk about this in regards to Spike [Lee]. As far as I’m concerned Spike is one of the most iconic living directors on the planet, and part of that is his brand. People that don’t even know Spike’s films know who Spike Lee is. And there’s probably not another director around like that. And part of what made him that iconic were his ads back in the day with Michael Jordan. So for me the only person that’s more of a genius than the guy at Wieden+Kennedy that pitches Nike and says, Hey, let’s get Mars Blackmon from this little indie movie She’s Gotta Have It and bring him together with Michael Jordan, is the Nike exec that said, “That’s a brilliant idea. I’m gonna go push for that.” All of which is to say that when I was driving in Hollywood, and I saw the Alvin and the Chipmunks poster in a bus shelter, that was when I was like, Oh, we have something to say in this industry. That poster’s always going to mean a lot to me.
Above: I Saw the Devil (Kim Jee-woon, 2010).
GRAVILLIS: So there’s a poster that we did a while ago that scares me still to this day, and I feel like that's kind of cool. So we did this poster for I Saw the Devil, and the movie itself is scary as all hell. You know, it's kind of like the Javier Bardem character from No Country for Old Men but even crazier, even scarier. And we did this one poster where you can barely see the guy. You can’t really see him. But he has this little axe, and it’s all really subtle. Something so unsettling about the whole freaking thing, dude. It’s like, bro, behind those letters is just evil. I think we nailed that feeling, you know? I just felt like it was very effective in terms of smart horror, not in-your-face horror.
Above: Logan (James Mangold, 2017).
GRAVILLIS: Another poster I love is the poster we did for Logan [2017] where it’s, like, just mad negative space. It’s Logan, very small, silhouetted against the sunset. You could still see the claws, but it felt more like a drama than a superhero film. And obviously this worked with the film, because the film itself was like that.
It felt inspired by one of those Steve Frankfurt–type posters from back in the ’70s. The fact that we got away with that for Logan… We got away with making a big superhero guy so small. I actually made this comment yesterday [at the Academy Museum] about Downhill Racer [1969]. I was saying that I need Steve Frankfurt to pitch my posters, because I don’t know how he was doing this. Robert Redford was the Leo DiCaprio of his day. And yet he’s not even on the poster. He’s cropped off with a kiss, and then he’s a silhouette, a skier silhouette. I don’t know how Frankfurt was pitching this. We were working on The Revenant [2015], and we had a shot of Leo but we put this goat head on him. And I loved this poster so much—you could only see his eyes—but the studio looked at me like, like, Kenny, come on. And I’m just like, it’s Leo, you still know it’s Leo, and his name is going to be on there… But they wouldn’t go for it. Don’t get me wrong, they still eventually did a Logan poster of him with bloodshot eyes and, you know. But the fact that we did that, and that was actually the main poster…I love it when we get away with stuff like that.
I talked about this yesterday: the level of subtleties back then compared to now. For instance, Kramer vs. Kramer [1979]. It’s basically a Polaroid of a very happy family, right? That's it. But Kramer vs. Kramer as a title is court language. But how subtle is that? I feel like, if we were doing Kramer vs. Kramer right now and we showed any executive that poster, the first thing that would come back is that, well, we kind of need more. Like, we need to show that there’s some kind of conflict, like a rip in the photo. It’s harder to get away with that now, because, for whatever reason, we’re not as willing to trust an audience that they’re gonna get that level of subtlety.
Above: I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2017).
GRAVILLIS: Okay, so this is a special one for me. So in our lobby we have three light boxes, and the two on the left switch out with whatever we have that that we’re working on currently, or that we’ve just finished. So for instance, right now, I think Captain America [Brave New World, 2025] is in there and Challengers [2024]. But the one on the right never moves, and it’s I Am Not Your Negro [2017]. We were doing a talk for Otis recently and someone asked, “Kenny, as a Black creative director, do you feel like you’ve influenced anything, you know, culturally with your work in terms of studios and stuff like that?” And there was this one time where I felt like we really influenced something, and I’ve never heard of a studio doing this before, but Magnolia came to us, and were like, Kenny, we have this documentary, and we don’t really know what to do with this title, and we want to be sensitive to it, and we understand that we might not understand it. We’re coming to you and we want you to be real with it, and show us, even if it’s uncomfortable for us. And that level of honesty and transparency, you don’t usually see with studios.
So, my whole thing was that it’s James Baldwin... it’s like, that shit has to be bold as all hell, you know? I feel like a lot of studios would have been afraid of that, and been like, Let's treat it with kid gloves. And we were like, No, we need to make this thing bold. So we make [the title] 90 percent of the poster, with just Baldwin’s eyes. I think most studios would have rejected it and been like, “It’s really in your face.” Magnolia were like, “Yeah, this is kind of uncomfortable, but we’re going to show it to Raoul Peck,” the director, and right away he picked it. Like, right away. So that’s why that poster stays in our lightbox. We really felt ownership of that poster.
Above: Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee, 2020) with art by Victoria Cassinova.
NOTEBOOK: You’ve been working with Spike Lee for the past ten years. Do you have a Spike Lee poster that you’ve done that’s a personal favorite?
GRAVILLIS: Yeah, Da 5 Bloods [2020] that we recently did with our friend Victoria Cassinova, where it’s the silhouette with the red blood. The style of it is based on this painter named Kerry James Marshall, a Black painter who does this thing where you kind of just black out everything, but you see the eyes.
We did a whole mini documentary about Da 5 Bloods and the making of this poster because we actually went to a Black Panther illustrator called Emory Douglas. Spike wasn’t liking anything we were showing him at first. He kept on saying that he wanted to make the Black experience for the Vietnam War. So every time we showed him stuff, it was too Platoon [1986], too Full Metal Jacket [1987]. So I end up showing him this Black Panther illustration of a soldier who had a tear in his eye, and inside his helmet there’s this crazy montage of all the shit that Black people were dealing with in America in the ’60s. So I showed Spike that, and he was like, “Find me that guy.” I was like, This guy was a Black Panther from the ’60s; how am I going to find this guy? But maybe three days later, Spike texts me and tells me, “He’s expecting your call,” and gives me Emory Douglas’s number. So I ended up calling Emory, and then I went to San Francisco to meet him and asked him to redo that poster for Spike’s film. And then I told Spike, “You’ve got to meet this guy,” so we ended up shooting this kitchen-table talk with Emory talking to Spike about what it was like back then. Once we met Emory, it sort of opened the floodgates for us creatively, and that experience inspired us to come up with the posters that we did. It was a super great experience.
NOTEBOOK: So are you now Spike’s designer of choice?
GRAVILLIS: I think so. I mean, you know, we’ve been working with him since 2015. I talked about this yesterday a little bit, because there’s a couple of designers back in the day that had relationships with filmmakers. And nowadays, like, David Fincher has Neil Kellerhouse, that he uses all the time. And I think PTA has someone as well. So we’re kind of that for Spike. It’s just this thing that sometimes happens where you connect with a filmmaker and they end up requesting you for a lot of this stuff. A lot of times, studios know that when Spike has a project, we’re more than likely the agency that he’s going to call. So yeah, he’s been incredibly, super supportive to our agency over the years, the last 10 years, for sure.
NOTEBOOK: I look forward to seeing what you come up with for Highest to Lowest [Spike Lee’s upcoming remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low]. It’s been brilliant talking to you.
GRAVILLIS: Yeah, nice talking to you mate. Take it easy, cheers.
Many thanks to Kenny Gravillis and Gravillis Inc. If you’re interested in the Otis scholarship program you can find out more about it here.