..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

'Twas the Beast That Killed the Beauty

Some don’t do windows, I don’t predict box office. The past weekend underlines why there are certain lines that should not be crossed. However, that’s the subject of an upcoming column.

The striking thing about weekend business was the degree to which pundits failed to take into account two factors. The first is that despite all the current summer anomalies, the movie going audience will bypass most sequels if there’s a compelling original in theaters. I know that sounds a lot like the recent political cant about why American intelligence agencies don’t function well, but the essence is basically correct. For some mystical reason Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life looked like a retread of the first screen Lara whereas such summer popcorn fare as The Matrix Reloaded, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and even Bad Boys II got the message across (true or otherwise) that the films were significantly different and improved variants on popular originals.

Still, and I’m not convinced this is a specifically American trait, what North American audiences fall for almost every time is a gimmick. And one of the most enduring movie sucker punches has been the 3-D film. To the informed observer, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over was a tired kid’s franchise desperate to revive itself. It cast Rocky as the bad guy and hauled out those lame two-colored glasses. No one was going to bite on such a hackneyed lure.

With apologies to Lincoln, it should not be forgotten that: you can fool some of the people all of the time; all of the people some of the time; and that’s usually more than enough. Spy Kids 3-D proved to be the most popular movie of the moment by, let us say, four furlongs. This despite the filmmaker’s choice of an inferior process (the red/blue anaglyphic rather than Polaroid) and tepid reviews.

Now, I wasn’t quite old enough to experience the full force of the 3-D craze back in the early 1950s. The first stereoscopic film I saw in theaters was either The Mask circa 1962 or a revival of 1953’s House of Wax. I remember a brief flurry of soft core 3-D films and Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein in the early 1970s and another wave a decade later propelled by the surprise success of the mediocre spaghetti western Comin At Ya! and followed by Jaws 3-D, Amityville 3-D and Friday the 13^th in 3-D. There have been other forays in the past two decades but most such as Michael Jackson in Captain Eo (directed by Francis Coppola) have been confined to theme parks or, like James Cameron’s non-fiction Titanic redux Ghosts of the Abyss, heightened the Imax experience.

The part of me that still embraces the pre-teen boy trudging through the snow to catch The Three Stooges, Rocket Man serials and Looney Tunes at the neighborhood movie house can’t wait to line up for the next release in Cinerama, Sensurround or that low-tech favorite Smell-o-Vision. When I should have been catching up with new films from Bulgaria at the Toronto Film Festival two decades back, I was playing professional hooky at that edition’s rather exhaustive retrospective of vintage 3-D movies. It was a lot of fun.

About a month ago, I received a flyer for the World 3-D Film Expo that will unspool from September 12 – 21 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. The program certainly resembles my memory of the Toronto retro. But that’s not surprising considering that there were only about 50 Hollywood features made in the process during its brief heyday. Bwana Devil (“A Lion in Your Lap”), by dint of starting the craze, House of Wax and Creature from the Black Lagoon are probably the best known of the 1950s stereoscopic movies. Kiss Me Kate and Dial M for Murder endure but almost always in 2-D versions. In fact, those two films and Hondo and House of Wax are probably the best movies produced in 3-D not necessarily because of the effects or thrills (few have ever topped Wax’s bat-a-ball sequence) but simply because they had superior stories that could be enjoyed with or without the gimmick.

The Expo is the brainchild of Jeff Joseph, someone too young to have encountered 3-D at the pinnacle of its popularity. He is part entrepreneur, part preservationist. He actually managed to mount the event in a little more than a year and apart from Hondo -  produced by John Wayne and controlled by his heirs - secured prints of all the movies on his wish list. In addition to the perforce westerns, horror and sci-fi pics, there are such oddities as Martin and Lewis in Money from Home, an adaptation of Mickey Spillaine’s I, the Jury and Miss Sadie Thompson with Rita Hayworth, Jose Ferrer and Aldo Ray. The program also includes Walt Disney Cartoons, a Three Stooges short, a musical interlude with Nat King Cole and a program of rarities with 3-D efforts dating back to the 1920s. Joseph is in the final process of scheduling many of the artists and technicians involved with three dimensional films, now and then.

“I’d say maybe 10 or 12 of the features have been properly preserved,” said Joseph. “Some of the things we’re showing are the only known existing prints. The studios basically weren’t interested in the process as more than a craze and little care was shown to maintain the negative or elements.”

He’d like to be able to put on the 3-D Expo in other major centers in the U.S. and internationally but the prospects for that are complicated by the fragility of those few projectable copies. Obtaining permission to run certain films was predicated on single, sometimes supervised screenings and his head swims at the thought of going back to his sources to do a similar event in New York, Paris or Tokyo. The audience interest is certainly there with requests and ticket purchases already flooding in from Europe and the Far East. And he’s delighted by the serendipitous coincidence that the nearby Arclight Cinema (formerly the Cinerama Dome) will be playing a nearly struck Cinerama print of How the West Was Won beginning the same day as his Expo.

I recall asking Raoul Walsh about his experience with 3-D making Gun Fury (playing Sept. 21) and he responded with a degree of disdain, saying that the studio imposed it on him at the last minute. Walsh was an unlikely candidate anyway having but one good eye and no depth perception. The same was true for the singularly optically challenged Andre de Toth and John Ford. The fear that television would empty movie theaters spurred the mania and directors were simply told to shoot arrows or toss rocks at the camera.

Joseph feels that Cinemascope and other wide screen efforts were the number one demise of 3-D. There was no fooling around with glasses or special projection equipment and the audience had the sort of epic experience and unusual frame not to be found emanating from the idiot box. He also cites inferior lab work and poor projection as contributing to its rapid demise. Apparently virtually all 50 of Hollywood’s stereoscopic efforts were made during a six month window in 1953 though their release was staggered out into 1955.

There probably is some truth that financial considerations were a major part of the meteoric rise and fall of the fad. In addition to filming with a special camera that had two lenses (one for each eye), the ideal viewing experience required two projectors. More commonly a single projector was employed and the separate film images were overlaid and offset. But regardless of presentation, the studios and film chains had already committed (as they would for the short history of Cinerama and Sensurround that generated a tiny fraction of the 3-D output) to the additional costs of the equipment.

The true undoing of the process was cynicism. The unexpected success of the independently produced Bwana Devil had every major charging head long into what looked like easy money. As occurred with Walsh, a string of programmers were elevated to a special status sometimes based on no more than the availability of 3-D equipment. For many films it provided, at best, a few extra cheap thrills and once the audience got it, it became doubly hard to get them back for a second helping. Top filmmakers displayed no interest in employing it and the studios were so busy creating a marketplace glut, the possibility of developing an event or prestige status for stereoscopic fare had been squandered.

Subsequent mini-revivals have also sold the sizzle, propping up mediocre sequels or providing undistinguished fodder with a marketing hook that roped in patrons for a few days. I cannot ascribe altruistic reasons for director John Frankenheimer’s pursuit of the process for his 1979 horror film The Prophecy. However, when I queried him about its abandonment, he said its usage was scrapped due to failings in a new process that didn’t require the cumbersome glasses. The sticking points were that the effect only worked within a narrow viewing range in an auditorium and the illusion of depth was shattered every time you moved your head, a decided problem for a film meant to shock.

“I’ve seen 3-D films and experiments that didn’t require glasses and frankly none of them really works,” insists Joseph. “The effect requires two images and a means to fool the brain into separating them to give the illusion of depth. You can do that for a moment using all kinds of methods but it simply cannot be sustained without the polarized lenses.”

James Cameron, who developed lightweight portable video cameras to create the 3-D effects of Ghosts of the Abyss, (and apparently inspired Robert Rodriguez to go stereoptic on Spy Kids) has said he wants to make his next theatrical feature in the process. And with close to two dozen Imax productions having successfully employed 3-D, there’s no evidence its appeal will diminish in that arena any time soon. So, are the chances any better that the process will finally elevate itself from cheap trick into a practical storytelling tool?

“You know, all movies are gimmicks,” observes Joseph. “What were sound or color after all when they were introduced? Maybe we all needed the distance of time to give 3-D some perspective but that’s not my concern. This is about the legacy and, if nothing else, this is going to be a blow out celebration that can never happen again.”

 

- by Leonard Klady