When kottke linked to this article as "typography in the movies", I assumed he meant typography in opening titles. But he's talking about print within the mis en scene, as we used to say in film school -- printed material that's supposed to be there, in the 1860s.

To nitpick about specific typefaces is a fun exercise, but goes unnoticed by 99.99% of the population. More interesting, to me anyway, is the pop understanding of typeface. Cowboy letters, we all know, have giant serifs, almost as if they were to match the boot heels and wide-brimmed hats of the era. The coke-addled late seventies and early eighties are always announced by model-thin, glamorous avant garde gothic. A patch of wide-kerned, geometric Futura screams fifties (even though it should be more associated with Weimar Germany).

To be sure, these typefaces, or similar analogues, were used in the periods they're now emblematic of. I have a RAND corporation textbook on game theory (The Compleat Strategist) from the fifties with beautiful Futura titles. But they weren't the only typefaces in use. They've come to represent their eras through a process of selection: Their artistic resonance with the period, snowballing through the years with continued positive reinforcement, leaves us with a typographic shorthand for every human era.

And even eras before man: I've always wondered why the Jurassic Park logo was set the way it was. Is this how dinosaurs carved letters in stone? Or does it harken back to the use of rough-ewn sans-serif capitals in films like King Kong and Casablanca, where they were symbolic, for whatever reason, of romantic exoticism?