' ' Cinema Romantico: Entertainment Weekly Summer Movie Cover: Outtake

Friday, May 28, 2021

Entertainment Weekly Summer Movie Cover: Outtake

When I googled for “EW summer movie preview 1996”, the first correlating image I found was an Entertainment Weekly cover advertising “Twister”, this cover...


I must have looked at it for 30 seconds straight, maybe 60 seconds straight. I couldn’t get enough of it. I tapped My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife on the shoulder and told her to look at it too. It’s incredible! It was only looking at it for so long that allowed me to realize the words Summer Movie Preview were conspicuously missing. Alas, it wasn’t the Summer Preview at all. Still, that wasn’t going to stop me from posting about it. And while I considered including it in yesterday’s walk down EW Summer Preview lane as a kind of momentary fake out, I decided it deserved a post all on its own. Because rather than opting for a literal twister, like your less merry marketers undoubtedly would, they go for the pun. And if Chubby Checker’s “Twist” is a summer song, then this double meaning is perfect for a movie that set the 1996 summer movie season in motion, a pun putting into perspective how the summer movie season should just be, like, you know, fun. Hunt, meanwhile, is a little self-conscious in that smile but also totally game while Paxton, bless his heart, is just going for it as best he can, which isn’t all that much, though not all that much is just right in this context.

Who knows makes for an iconic magazine cover. It probably depends on your taste. Maybe you go for John & Yoko or Janet on the cover of Rolling Stone; maybe you opt for one of those covers as historical documents preferred by Life Magazine; maybe you want to call up some Rockwell for The Saturday Evening Post. I’ve always leaned toward the Seinfeld floating heads for EW, or Bruce unexpectedly showing off his ice skating skills for Rolling Stone, or Nicole screaming for the NYTM. But now I see it’s none of those. It’s this one. It’s the twist; IT’S THE TWIST!!!

2 comments:

Sarah Cole said...

“Twist” is a summer song?

Nick Prigge said...

It was released in June of 1960, but I admit I'm probably basing that off the line in "Let's Twist Again", "like we did last summer." I think that's always made it feel that way in my mind. That, and when I was a teenager I listened to A LOT of oldies radio in the summer which probably made me associate it with the season.