I am not a movie typography buff, really, although I posted in the past about Kubrick's fetish for Futura Extra Bold.

But my most recent —Hey, what's that typeface? episode happened a couple of days ago, after I bought Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry (from Carturesti) and while playing it I was suddenly stroked by the obvious similarity between many of his opening/closing titles: white typography on black background, something I only held in the back of my head before. So I thought —How about some screenshots to document this relentless style consystency?

So I dug up my movies (okay, some are borrowed) and took some screenshots where the titles complied to the consistency rule:

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972) doesn't comply so I took no screenshot,

Love and Death (1975), doesn't comply so I took no screenshot,


Annie Hall (1977),


Manhattan (1979) doesn't have an opening title — except the famous monologue and a "Manhattan" neon building signage — but its closing credits comply to the rule,


A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982),


Zelig (1983),


September (1987),

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) complies but is a region 1 disk and I cannot play it in my PowerBook in order to take the screenshot (I'll add it later, when I'll figure how),


Mighty Aphrodite (1995), although set on two lines instead of a single one, this is also compliant,


Deconstructing Harry (1997),


Celebrity (1998),


Anything Else (2003) and


Melinda and Melinda (2004).

And screenshots I took, only to discover afterwards that others did the exact same thing before. But still, my effort is not totally useless because my list adds up to Contact Sheet's list, completing it further.

The typeface, as I also found out, is pretty renowned for that: Windsor-EF Elongated.

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Later edit: Only a couple of hours after this post got online, the mystery of Woody Allen's typeface of choice is solved by this amazing story posted by Randy J. Hunt in the comments:


Sometimes blogs are a wonderful thing — and this is a really small planet.