John Solie

John Solie is another name that exploitation film fans should know, except that a lot of us don't, we're too young. Solie is no longer in the movie poster business because the movie poster business is no longer into art. Solie first went to work for Columbia pictures in the early 1960's despite his best efforts not to get the job. He kept increasing his demands but he got the job anyway and it turned out he loved it. He continued illustrating movie posters for the next thirty years, for major and independent studios including Roger Corman's New World Pictures.









In an interview in "What It Is... What It Was", Solie says that it was one of the funnest jobs he has had, with total freedom to come up with whatever he wanted, sometimes a sketch on a cocktail napkin  was the only draft he submitted. Most of the posters you can find online by searching for Solie are for either blaxploitation films or Corman productions. Solie did over 200 movie poster images, but I have only been able to confirm those I've listed or scanned here.  but by the 1980's posters with art were starting to disappear.

Once there was no longer a market for illustration in movie posters, Solie moved on to do romance book covers but these too became the realm of computers and he did work for TV Guide magazine which you can see at his website HERE. In addition he has done a number of fine art pieces with western and war themes as well as commissions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).


It is surprisingly hard to find the names of many of the movies Solie did posters for, much less the artwork itself. Below is a list of all the posters collected at IMPAwards as well as anything that readily turned up in an image search engine. The images I've included here are those not included in the first two categories. I would appreciate any confirmable contributions to this list if you come across them.

John Solie dot com

Big Bad Mama
Candy Stripe Nurses
Capone and Capone 2
Challenge to White Fang
City on Fire
Grand Theft Auto
Last Days of Man on Earth
Lili
Moving Violations
Piranha
Raid on Entebbe
Ryan's Daughter
Savage!
Shaft In Africa
Shaft's Big Score
Smokey and the Bandit
Soylent Green
Starcrash
Strange Brew
Street Girls
Summer School Teachers
Swashbuckler
Tarzan
Tender Loving Care
The Invisible Boy
The Swinging Barmaids
Tidal Wave
TNT Jackson

Solie's painting of the last cavalry charge in U.S. military history, commissioned by the U.S. Army.

 John Solie with a painting he did for the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Oregon.

A Solie painting of the Hubble Telescope.