The
look was vintage movie poster, bordering on 1940s noir, imbuing Mr.
DiCaprio with a mysterious allure befitting Humphrey Bogart back in the
day.
Mr.
Dimitriou, 78, has never met a Hollywood star, but he has painted
thousands of them. Nearly every week since the age of 15, he has
immortalized legends of the screen in dreamlike friezes of love, anger,
pride or temptation — often deftly, sometimes not, but always with
flair.
Heroes
are depicted as if from the pages of a comic book in a moody haze of
luminescence and shadow, with an atmosphere that flits between reality
and fantasy. The romanticized images evoke an earlier age of celluloid,
movie magazines and cigarette-smoking starlets, incongruous in an age of
DVDs and downloads, digital marquees and movies on demand.
Today,
he is the last living movie billboard painter in Greece, and one of
only a handful in Europe, his craft on the verge of extinction. When
silent films took off in the 1920s, Hollywood studios employed graphic
designers to convey the glamour and excitement of new releases, and
handmade billboards came to adorn theaters around the world. The rise of
the automobile helped spur a booming industry of painted highway
billboards across America, Europe, Africa and in Asia.
But
in an era of mass-produced printing, the practice has been all but
snuffed out. Only a tiny number of people like Mr. Dimitriou keep up the
tradition.
“Painting
is always on my mind,” he said one recent evening in his brightly lit
atelier, surrounded by a kaleidoscope of paint pots and billboard-size
canvases. “When I finish a poster and put it in the theater, it’s a
thrilling feeling, knowing that people will see it and feel some magic.”
His
left hand is stiffened with Parkinson’s disease — the result, doctors
suspect, of a brief stint as a boxer in his youth. He no longer climbs
paint ladders easily, and his arm can tire after hours of holding a
brush. But none of that deters the trim, feisty Mr. Dimitriou.
Athenians
of all ages are familiar with his work, even if few have ever met him.
“There was something stylized and nostalgic” about the painted
billboards, said George Athanasopoulous, 50, who remembers being
transfixed by them as a child. “Like for James Bond, he would do a
portrait of Roger Moore surrounded by guns,” he recalled.
Today, “there is a sameness to everything,” Mr. Athanasopoulous added. “But what he does is very special.”
For
a near-octogenarian, Mr. Dimitriou has a daunting schedule. Each
affiche takes three to four days to complete, and he paints one to two a
week for the Athinaion, which has employed him for more than 40 years
and is the last theater in Athens to eschew studio-made photographic
posters. Dressed in a wool cap and a black sweater, he bustled about his
small work space, a low-slung stucco building with one wall made to the
exact dimensions of the Athinaion’s billboards. A cropped image of Mr.
DiCaprio’s head rested near paint pots, while Penélope Cruz, smoldering
in a studio shot from the 2001 movie “Blow,” pouted from a wall. “My
girlfriend,” Mr. Dimitriou said with a smile.
Nearby,
a scrapbook bulged with photos of his renderings: “The Exorcist,”
forebodingly painted in chiaroscuro, blood oozing down the Greek letters
of the title; “Lolita,” with a lithe, prepubescent Dominique Swain
stretched in a wet dress on the grass, her toe pointed in the air;
“Ali,” with Will Smith’s boxer face tensed like a bull’s.
Mr.
Dimitriou grew up poor in the Athens suburb of Kypseli. His father was
often absent during World War II to fight in the Greek resistance as the
German Army advanced. To bide time, the boy began drawing, and a
passion seized him. Lacking money for pencils or even paper, he would
scrounge chalk and sketch pictures on sidewalks.
Then
the war crashed in on his reveries. After his eighth birthday, Nazis
stormed their home and took his father away. Miraculously, his father
survived execution, crawling from a mass grave and making his way back
to the house, covered in blood. He went to stay with comrades and
continued fighting. It was the last the boy would see of him for two
years.
Mr.
Dimitriou took refuge in his drawing, and after the war ended, it would
become his ticket out. Penniless, he and his friends climbed trees at
an outdoor cinema to catch the latest films. One night the manager
chased them, and Mr. Dimitriou jumped into the theater, where the
projector operator collared him and suggested he volunteer in exchange
for watching films.
Soon,
the manager noticed Mr. Dimitriou’s drawing talent and asked him to try
painting movie posters. “I would interpret the scene my own way,” he
recalled. His favorite stars got the best treatment. “If I saw Gary
Cooper and Marlon Brando, I’d paint Brando,” who had a rawer allure, he
said. Eventually, 10 theaters around Athens would commission his work.
For
Mr. Dimitriou, it was a golden age of cinema. “Back then, you would go
to the movies in a suit and tie,” he recalled. “Women would wear
beautiful dresses. There was an intermission, and half the theater would
go the foyer to have a drink and discuss the movie. Now that’s gone.”
So, too, is the industry that he and a small army of artists used to keep alive. But his local legend remains.
This
month, Mr. Dimitriou tacked up a canvas in his atelier and sketched a
montage for “Winter’s Tale,” featuring Jessica Brown Findlay in her
cinematic debut after “Downton Abbey.” To make paints that won’t run in
the rain, he boiled glue on a makeshift stove and added it to powdered
pigments: chrome yellow, red, lapis blue, turquoise.
He
worked silently and methodically, climbing a ladder and squatting on
stools as he made his way across the canvas. When it was ready, he drove
to the Athinaion with his son-in-law to hoist the poster on the
marquee. A man approached. “I’m a huge fan,” he said, giving Mr.
Dimitriou a hug.
Later,
back in his atelier, Mr. Dimitriou sighed. Recognition was gratifying.
Still, he said, “it doesn’t feel so good knowing that this is a dying
art.”
He
leafed through the pages of his scrapbook, and gazed at oil paintings
he had done for himself, including a red-hued homage to Ms. Cruz.
“As long as I can keep painting, I’ll do it,” he said. “When I stop breathing is when I’ll stop painting.”
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