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Movie poster artists like to include motorcycles, even when they barely figure in the film. Take the Alan Alda movie SWEET LIBERTY, where he's riding a motorcycle for about 10 seconds. The ad showed Alan Alda on a motorcycle.
Elvis' last movie, THE TROUBLE WITH GIRLS, was released after his famous "Elvis '68" comeback TV special. The studio knew it had one more Elvis turkey on its hands, so they devised a concert-like poster declaring ELVIS '69. Only in the "fine print" near the bottom of the poster did it say the movie's title.
Ads for sequels to blockbusters tend to be really unimaginative, with only a minor variation on the original image. This extends to adlines. WAYNE'S WORLD had the clever line "You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll hurl!" and its sequel had the line "You'll laugh again! You'll cry again! You'll hurl again!"
Movies with ads that show the U.S. Capitol building in the background are about government treachery (ERASERHEAD).
Some ads show the lead characters in what are obviously different scenes. The BAD BOYS ad showed Will Smith and Martin Lawrence pointing their guns and apparently shouting "FREEZE!" while Tea Leoni stood between them with a world- weary "pouting" expression, indifferent to the confrontation.
Avoid movies with desperated adlines like "Just for the fun of it" or "Watch the sparks fly." Avoid movies where a single poster shows the star in two different images, as if he'd been cloned.
The ad for THE JOURNEY OF AUGUST KING either darkened or whitened the face of one of the two leads so they'd look like the same race. (Mustn't suggest miscegenation.)
Don't forget disaster movie posters that show the stars in little boxes at the bottom.
One of the most notorious Western cliches is the showdown. In real life, no gunfighter was likely to enter a situation where he had a fifty-fifty chance of getting killed himself. If he wanted to kill someone, he'd shoot him in the back while the latter had his guard down. (Jesse James was shot in the back while dusting off a picture on his wall; Wild Bill Hickock was shot in the back while playing poker.)
Women often confront their enemies on a high metal catwalk (I LOVE TROUBLE, THE NET).
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