top The Intertwining History of the ‘Avatar’ Papyrus Font and the ‘SNL’ Sketch That Spoofed It

A Monday morning pitch meeting in September 2017, Saturday Night Live writer Julio Torres broke the ice with one of his signature off-kilter jokes. Inside a room that included that week’s host, Ryan Gosling, he brought up a tweet he’d written several months earlier about a very specific annoyance: “Every day I wake up and remember that Avatar, a huge international blockbuster, used the Papyrus font for their logo and no one stopped them.” Torres had previously worked that observation into his stand-up material, but he had never quite considered its narrative potential. Until later that day, Gosling approached him with the vision of a tortured and obsessed soul plagued by this hackneyed, rudimentary graphic design decision—nearly eight years after James Cameron’s epic hit theaters. “The movie just felt so immersive and so technologically meticulous, which chooses font even funnier,” Torres says. In an era of Reddit sleuthing and YouTube rabbit holes, “Ryan latched on to that idea because he saw a character in it.” Over the previous year, Torres had grown used to expanding on whimsically ludicrous ideas, highlighting the sensitive and melancholic inner lives of outrageous characters—like in “Melania Moments” and its semi-sequel “Customer Service,” which cast the former first lady as a lonely housewife looking for connection. Though initially skeptical of fleshing out the Papyrus observation past its sentence-length substance, he began crafting a monologue for Gosling by leaning into his tunnel vision. “I’m naturally attracted to people who are very obsessive because I’m obsessive,” he says. “In many ways [the character] was like a surrogate for myself.” Still, after various rounds of approval, video editor Sean McIlraith looked at the script ahead of production and struggled to grasp its comedic potential. “At SNL, the scripts have certain formats and they’re bare bones,” McIlraith says. “Normally, you can get a good read, but that’s why it’s so special working with Julio—it’s so hard to picture these things until you’re working with the footage.” Two days later, once Ryan McIlraith, Sean’s brother and coeditor, uploaded the material and saw Gosling “was giving this true cinematic performance,” Ryan says, both of them agreed: “This is going to be incredible.” Shot in one night, the three-minute digital short “Papyrus” begins like a paranoid psychodrama and spirals into a third-act conspiracy thriller. It centers on a man named Steven (Gosling), who’s haunted by recurring dreams about the “professional” graphic designer who chose the generic font for Avatar’s logo. “He just highlighted Avatar. He clicked the drop-down menu, and then he just randomly selected Papyrus,” Steven tells his therapist, played by Kate McKinnon. “Like a thoughtless child, just wandering by a garden, yanking leaves along the way.” Despite a friend (Chris Redd) explaining the logo’s distinct modifications, Steven can’t accept its minimal differences. “Whatever they did,” Gosling screams before smashing a bottle, “it wasn’t enough!” The sketch, which eventually ends with Steven stalking the graphic designer outside his home, quickly became an SNL modern classic and has racked up more than 18 million views on YouTube—a testament to its utter randomness, Ryan Gosling’s commitment to a niche bit, and the general absurdity of a billion-dollar movie attaching itself to an overused and often-mocked font. Despite Avatar’s long-gestating sequel—and a new logo—debuting this week, “Papyrus,” more than five years later, continues to leave a distinct, “tribal yet futuristic” mark on the movie franchise’s legacy. “There’s something kind of charming about a director that’s not obsessed about a poster, or trailer, or marketing,” Torres says. “The fact that this subject matter is so trivial makes it so funny.” ThereThere actually is one single person responsible for Avatar’s Papyrus-esque logo: Peter Stougaard. The former senior vice president of creative advertising for 20th Century Fox willingly takes credit for selecting and tweaking the movie’s much-maligned font, but he doesn’t mince words. “I didn’t aimlessly pick Papyrus,” he insists. “I chose it very strategically.” In the summer of 2009, Stougaard was approaching his deadline to distribute the first official Avatar poster to theaters and entertainment news outlets. The studio had chosen BLT Communications to develop its look and feel, and eventually, the design company settled on highlighting the big blue face of the character Neytiri. Cameron liked the idea, especially when Stougaard suggested they turn the image into a lenticular poster that would give it a three-dimensional topography to reflect the movie’s 3D technology. “We had everything but the logo,” Stougaard says. “I’m getting to the point where I’ve got to get this son-of-a-bitch into theaters. I’ve got to deliver this.” While the movie takes place in the 22nd century, Stougaard knew Cameron wanted to emphasize the language and customs of the indigenous Navi people, especially since one of them would be the face of the movie. But BLT had sent him “75 to 90” logos that “were all chrome and futuristic and it just was not right,” he recalls. While scrambling to determine a better font, Stougaard and Fox marketing chief Tony Sella roamed the studio’s halls and bumped into Cameron, who Stougaard noticed was carrying his script that he’d clung to over the past five years, and a solution to the problem: “On that cover page was a title treatment for Avatar in Papyrus!” he says. A former graphic designer and illustrator, Stougaard easily identified the font, went back to his office, opened up Photoshop, and bega n crafting a logo based on the vaguely Middle Eastern, calligraphic typeface. Because its scratchy marks were too thin for a poster, and there was no “Papyrus Bold” option, Stougaard tweaked and thickened the letters. And that did the trick: “The moment I put that on the poster, Jim approved it,” he says. “It told the indigenous story and looked great on that big blue face.” In Stougaard’s mind, Cameron had become “pregnant” with the font, staring at it each day over the previous several years, though it’s unclear whether it was Cameron or someone else who originally put the Papyrus logo on the script cover. Cameron wasn’t available for comment. “I had to do my job, which was to deliver a poster to theaters for the most expensive movie we’ve ever worked on,” he says. “I couldn’t see it as a cheap font. I had to see it as James Cameron’s font.” “They picked a typeface, and it affected people and was sitting in people’s minds while they were working on it,” says Emrah Yucel, founder of Dreamogram, which also developed posters for Avatar. “It’s a very interesting psychological effect.” Throughout the next several months, Cameron expanded the font’s use, putting it at the end of the first teaser trailer and then requesting it again for the end title sequence. The latter task fell to Sean Wehrli, who worked for Pic Collective and had created a custom-made design in the vein of Papyrus. “There was back-and-forth with us where we didn’t want it to be Papyrus and they kept pushing us to make it Papyrus,” Wehrli says. As Pamela Green, Pic’s cofounder, attests: “What kind of design studio would we be if we did Papyrus? But if a director likes something, what are you going to do?” In an attempt to make the logo look cooler for the screen, “we presented other things as well, trying to veer him off from that,” she says. But just a month before the movie’s release date, Wehrli was asked to send his files, which he’d spent weeks building for 3D purposes, back to Industrial Light and Magic so the company could incorporate them into the movie’s final renderings. When Wehrli saw Avatar for the first time, the end title sequence looked different from what he’d built. “I don’t know if they used my files or based it on my files, but they definitely changed my font back to Papyrus [and] stretched it vertically,” he says. “Maybe they were getting frustrated that we weren’t just making it Papyrus.”