(CNN) - How would you design a movie poster for a Hollywood blockbuster you'd never seen, filled with characters you knew nothing about and actors you'd never heard of?
Would Jean-Claude Van Damme look like a surgical glove stuffed full of walnuts? Would Cujo the killer dog look like a guilty spaniel that'd devoured the cake at a child's birthday party? Would James Bond have the stunned expression of a man who had just received a large electricity bill?
If your only brief was to pack a crowd into a mobile African cinema hall, you might also want to add some incidental aliens shooting laser beams from their eyes.
In Ghana -- where the Golden Age of movie posters during the 1980s and 1990s produced these lurid, vibrant and outlandish originals -- the movie poster may be a dying art form but it has since become big business.
Western collectors now pay thousands for prime examples of the genre and the artists who once churned out the posters to fill Ghana's dilapidated cinema clubs are finding a new lease of life reproducing them for art aficionados.
Jeaurs Oka Afutu, 39, began painting the posters when he was 14 years old but now works from his home in Accra, Ghana, to produce them for art dealers, selling them for between $75 and $100 apiece.
Currently putting the finishing touches on a canvas cut from a flour sack, he's producing a distinctively Ghanaian take on the biopic "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom."
"Action and war works a lot ... and women too: both actually," Afutu told CNN, showing that Hollywood's time-honored recipe of sex and violence is an international language.
"It all depends on what the audience prefers."
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