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Shooting movie posters was something Michael Muller always wanted to do. Yet even his impeccable photographic credentials — ad campaigns for Speedo and Mercedes, magazine covers of Spider-Man Tobey Maguire for Premiere and Adrien Brody for Flaunt — hadn’t won him the chance to shoot those dazzling film promos we see on billboards and bus stops. It was a self-assigned, movie-themed art project that finally brought movie-poster opportunity knocking.
Muller’s project, called Superfamous, was a series of portraits of the superhero-costumed souls who parade around Hollywood’s famous Chinese Theatre, where for five bucks they pose for tourists’ cameras. “Most of the money goes to feed a drug habit,” says Muller, “and one of the key pictures is of Batman smoking crack in the alley.” The marketing head of Fox Studios saw a 4×6-foot print of that image at the home of Joaquin Phoenix, who Muller befriended when he was doing publicity photography for Walk the Line, in which the actor played Johnny Cash.
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