During his 40-year career, Bass worked for some of Hollywood's most prominent filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese.

He graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx and studied part-time at the Art Students League in Manhattan until attending night classes with György Kepes at Brooklyn College.

[2] He began his time in Hollywood in the 1940s, designing print advertisements for films including Champion (1949), Death of a Salesman (1951) and The Moon Is Blue (1953), directed by Otto Preminger.

This was when Bass first saw the opportunity to create a title sequence which would ultimately enhance the experience of the audience and contribute to the mood and the theme of the movie within the opening moments.

Bass became widely known in the film industry after creating the title sequence for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955).

For Alfred Hitchcock, Bass provided effective, memorable title sequences, inventing a new type of kinetic typography, for North by Northwest (1959), Vertigo (1958), working with John Whitney, and Psycho (1960).

[5] Bass once described his main goal for his title sequences as being to "try to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story".

[6] Another philosophy that Bass described as influencing his title sequences was the goal of getting the audience to see familiar parts of their world in an unfamiliar way.

With the opening to Spartacus (1960), she was directing and producing title sequences, and in 1961 the couple married, beginning more than 30 years of close collaboration.

About this time away from title design, Saul said:[11] Elaine and I feel we are there to serve the film and to approach the task with a sense of responsibility.

"Fade In"...[12]In the 1980s, Saul and Elaine were rediscovered by James L. Brooks and Martin Scorsese, who had grown up admiring their film work.

"[15] In a sense, all modern opening title sequences that introduce the mood or theme of a film can be seen as a legacy of the Basses' innovative work.

Bass's posters, however, typically developed simplified, symbolic designs that visually communicated key essential elements of the film.

Bass's iconic Vertigo (1958) poster, with its stylized figures sucked down into the nucleus of a spiral vortex, captures the anxiety and disorientation central to the film.

His poster for Anatomy of a Murder (1959), featuring the silhouette of a corpse jarringly dissected into seven pieces, makes both a pun on the film's title and captures the moral ambiguities within which this court room drama is immersed.

For Spartacus (1960), Bass as "visual consultant" designed key elements of the gladiator school and storyboarded the final battle between slaves and Romans.

John Frankenheimer, the director of Grand Prix (1966), had Bass storyboard, direct, and edit all but one of the racing sequences for his film.

[37] The research of several film scholars on Hitchcock's production of Psycho validates the claim that Bass in his capacity as a graphic artist did indeed have a significant influence on the visual design and pacing of that famous scene.

Janet Leigh told Donald Spoto that "the planning of the shower scene was left up to Saul Bass, and Hitchcock followed his storyboard precisely.

[40] Bass introduced the idea of using a montage of fast cuts and tight framing to render a violent, bloody murder as an impressionistic and nearly bloodless one.

Hitchcock felt uncertain about Bass's conception of the scene fearing that audiences might not accept such a stylized and quickly cut sequence.

In an interview with film historian Pat Kirkham, Bass recalled, "Having designed and storyboarded the shower sequence, I showed it to Hitch.

In the end, Hitchcock gave his approval but, according to Kirkham, made two additions: a spray of blood on the chest of Marion Crane/Janet Leigh as she slides down the tiles, and a close-up of her belly getting stabbed.

In 1964, Saul and his wife and creative partner Elaine directed the short film The Searching Eye shown during the 1964 New York World's Fair, co-produced with Sy Wexler.