The impetus for the creation of this blog in 2013 was a rash decision to decorate my basement, home to my Olhausen pool table, with framed billiards movie posters. A short-list that started with The Hustler and ended with The Color of Money ultimately extended to more than 200 full-length and short films, albeit most are not represented on my walls.

So, it’s only fitting that ten years later, for my 250th blog post, I am honoring the cinematic garniture that adorns my cellar with my list of the Top 10 Billiards Movie Posters.  

Most assuredly, this is not a list of the top billiards movies; some of these movies were terrible, and some never escaped pre- or post-production. But, each of these posters superbly achieves its goals of marketing its movie. It previews plot, tone, and visual aesthetic; more important, it creates a memorable imprint on the intended audience that hopefully sparks interest, conversation, and of course, viewership.

One additional note: where possible, I have credited the designer of the movie poster. However, this information is often not known. The substantial majority of movie posters are created and designed by marketing agencies. Sadly, the art directors or graphic designers behind this iconography are rarely recognized; their achievements are subsumed behind the corporate doors of their employers.

10.  8 Ball

Created by graphic designers Cindy Conklin and Tina Lowry, the poster for 8 Ball foregrounds an eight-ball, which sits at the center of shattering glass to reveal the side profile of an unidentified gunman. The numerical character on the ball also doubles as part of the movie’s title. The poster screams urgency, instability, and the promise of darkness and danger. It’s not surprising that similarly-themed posters have been used to promote a variety of horror, suspense, and supernatural films. Unfortunately, 8 Ball never made it to the theaters. When I first interviewed David Barosso, the film’s executive producer, in 2014, his film had already been 10 years in the making. Now, almost 10 years later, it seems any interest drummed up by the poster will have to look elsewhere for its billiards suspense mash-up.

9.  Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (Czech version)

Alan Clarke’s loopy, snooker musical, Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, is unlike any movie you’ve seen. The same, however, cannot be said about the film’s original release poster or its more popular DVD cover; both are woefully unimaginative and confoundingly forgo the opportunity to showcase the film’s protagonist, a snooker-playing vampire! Fortunately, the poster for the film’s Czech release more than compensated. Designed by Věra Nováková, an icon of the Czech art scene, the poster mixes styles, colors, and perspective, to create a memorably compelling invitation to the film.  And while the snooker is visually present (with the seven balls on the baize), it is Alan Armstrong’s vampiric character that unabashedly consumes the poster’s real estate.  More of Ms. Nováková’s posters are viewable here.

8.  Bred in Manila

Another movie that unfortunately ran out of funding before it could get made, Bred in Manila was a passion project for director Phil Giordano. In 2019, a post on the movie’s Facebook page said he had been “working on the script for the last three years and has done countless hours of research, location scouting, interviews, late night anecdote-filled drinking sessions, script revisions, pitches, meetings, begging, crying, cheering, and overall filmmaking heartache to make this film possible.” Based solely on the film’s poster, I held high hopes for this movie. The poster, which was created by Karen Abarca Giordano, is creatively bifurcated to show two intersecting environments. On the top, the movie’s protagonist, back to the viewer, passively competes in a billiards game. But, her body seems to continue, past the gun and the caution tape, into the poster’s bottom half. There, her legs are replaced by overgrown tree roots that extend into the slums, where people are passed out, lying in filth.  The poster enforces the movie’s tagline about “gambling with her life” by visually reinforcing the player’s delicate straddling of a world of possibility (top) and a world of deadendness (bottom).

7. Metal Billiards

In Bai Xinyu’s 2019 Chinese billiards drama Metal Billiards (or Alloy Billiards), the main character is an industrial design student who creates a robotic arm that he uses to advantage his billiards game and ultimately to avenge his father. Along the way, he befriends a group of hipsters and competes against a rogue’s gallery of opponents, who look like they might have stepped out of Smokin’ Aces or The Suicide Squad. Similar to the posters promoting much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Metal Billiards poster acknowledges its comic book-like cast by making them the focus and cramming them all around a pool table. Heck, the main character even looks like Marvel’s Winter Soldier. I still have yet to locate the complete film to watch, but based solely on the power of the poster, Metal Billiards remains at the top of my must-see list.

6.  The Baltimore Bullet

The Baltimore Bullet should have been a much better billiards movie. Aside from starring two past Oscar nominees (Omar Sharif, Ronee Blakley), the film also featured a who’s-who of billiards professionals:  Mike Sigel, Willie Mosconi, Steve Mizerak, Jimmy Mataya, Lou Butera, Irving Crane, Allen Hopkins, Pete Margo, Ray Martin, James Rempe, and Richie Florence. How did this film flatline? Well, you can’t blame Jack Davis, a founding cartoonist of Mad and the creator of the original artwork for the film. His wonderful, madcap, kitchen-sink style poster, featuring his signature cartoon characters with big heads and distorted anatomy, captured the movie’s aspirational rip-roaring zaniness. It’s a shame the movie couldn’t deliver on the promise.  Interestingly, the posters for the European releases considerably toned down that harebrained bravado. Perhaps they resonated more with their international audiences, but in my mind, those posters (e.g., France, Italy, Spain) were far less original or effective. 

5.  Kisses & Caroms

I watched Kisses & Caroms in 2013 thinking I had discovered the Porky’s of billiards entertainment. The titillating (pun intended) poster, suggesting a woman’s private parts covered by a perfect rack (pun intended?), lured me in like an adolescent horndog. The movie promised humor, billiards, and sex (or at least sexual innuendo), none of which was remotely present in the actual movie.  Though I found the poster effective (especially in the billiards movie genre, where the posters are rather light on both sex and humor), I acknowledge the artwork also falls into stand-up comedian Marcia Belsky’s poster category of “Headless Women of Hollywood,” a problematic trend that crops out women’s faces completely in favor of butt and boob shots. Perhaps not surprisingly, this treatment extended into multiple promotional posters for the film, including the “uncensored director’s cut” and the originally-titled American Balls version.

4.  Death Billiards

This psycho-fantastic, mindfuck of a billiards movie will leave you reeling in a hallucinogenic poppy field. Directed by Yuzuru Tachikawa and produced by Madhouse Studios, Death Billiards is a 26-minute Japanese anime film from 2013 that not only had audiences spinning in a whirlwind of WTF-ness, but also took the billiards movie genre through the looking glass. (In addition, it spawned a follow-up anime TV series called Death Parade.) To tee up this pilgrimage to pool purgatory, the promotional poster needed to be particularly wild. And, on this front, Death Billiards did not disappoint. Created by Long Beach-based graphic designer spencerlinds, the stained glass-like poster shows the film’s two competitors beginning a death game of billiards, while other, larger eerie characters hover disinterestedly in the background. The poster asked more questions than it answered, which is exactly the sentiment I had emerging from the movie.

3.  The Hustler

One film that needs no introduction is The Hustler, which 60 years later is still the beau ideal of the billiards movie genre. However, 20th Century Fox blundered with its initial promotional poster for the 1961 release. It showed a hand-drawn Paul Newman cradling and kissing Piper Laurie beneath a cringeworthy tagline –  “It delves without compromise into the hunger that lies deep within us all!” – that feels more appropriate on the cover of a Kozy Books novel. Fortunately, the movie’s popularity warranted a re-release in 1964, and this time, the studio (credit unknown) nailed it. The new re-release poster eschewed the pulpy sensationalism of its predecessor. Jumping on the Pop Art bandwagon that had recently kicked off in the US, the new poster creatively bisected the space with a cue stick and then featured tinted stills from the movie inside of abstract billiards balls. The chartreuse background, a sickly substitute for the baize of a billiards table, accentuates the primary colors of the balls. And thankfully, that original ill-begotten tagline was now replaced with the instantly quotable, “They called him ‘Fast’ Eddie.”

2.  The Hustler (French version)

Disappointment with the first release poster for The Hustler was not limited to the United States; across the Atlantic in France, moviegoers were equally underwhelmed by the initial French poster for the film (aka L’arnaqueur). Created by Boris Grinsson, the hand-drawn poster is oddly disconnected from the film’s subject matter. While visually interesting, it’s baffling that the poster focuses on three faceless individuals attempting to subdue Fast Eddie. Thankfully, in 1982, French artist Jean Mascii corrected the problem with a positively brilliant reissue poster.  Mascii, who designed more than 1500 cinema posters and 250 book covers, recognized the centrality of billiards, both as a driver of the plot and as a metaphor for the characters’ precarious situations. Building on the American poster’s concept of putting the characters in the balls, Mascii’s art is both more dynamic (with Fast Eddie bouncing off the table) and more focused on the arcs of its characters. Thus, Bert Gordon comfortably sitting inside the red ball, or Sarah Packard bleeding out the crack of her ball’s exterior.¹ Within Mascii’s poster, the whole film comes to life in magnificent fashion.

1.  Petrichor

As noted in my original review, there is so much to like about Louis Jack’s 2020 short film Petrichor. The director said his film is about the “psychological warfare on the billiards table, a life lived from a suitcase and relentless losses that have left [the main character] a shell of a man.” Everything – the acting, the music, the pacing – all create an intentionally unsettling and spookish experience. The film’s movie poster (credit unknown) is no different. Simply by rotating the table’s angle 90 degrees from horizontal to vertical, the player’s world – and therefore the viewer’s world – is thrown topsy-turvy. Every shot becomes a literal uphill battle, and the full 2500 pounds of the sport is visually and metaphorically close to crushing the pool player. The jet black background further enhances the effect. The player is losing his corporeal identity, fading into a billiards abyss.  While The Hustler is the unparalleled leader in billiards movies, the little-known Petrichor wins my top spot in the Best Poster category.

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1. To my knowledge, The Hustler was not the first artwork to situate characters inside billiards balls. That honor seems to belong to a 1940s “Put Them Behind the Eight Ball” WWII billiards war poster. However, since The Hustler, it has become a periodic metaphor, most often used on magazine covers (e.g., Sinteza, 2014; India Today, 2013).