Strictly for the Marbles
(See Cover)
More buttered popcorn was sold at retail last month than in any,other month in world history, and most of it disappeared from circulation in the darkened caves of U.S. movie theaters. Surveying the technological development that set the corn rolling, the Russians formally announced that they had invented the thing first. A Chicago beanery produced the 3-D Special, and a Midwestern minister gave a sermon on "Prayer--the Third Dimension." Exuberant Cinemogul George Skouras kissed Pageanteer Mike Todd in public. Somebody else brought out a Polaroid lorgnette. "Whaddya mean, vulgar?" cried one movieman. "Isn't the public entitled to be hit in the face?"
Three-Dimension, "the four-eyed revolution," had hit the land hard. Quite by accident, as it walked around in a daze of depression, Hollywood had tripped over a firing cord and shot off a telling reply to television. "Third-dementia," the newest entertainment craze, was luring crowds back to the movies in such numbers as Hollywood had not seen since the end of World War II. By the millions they came, to peer through an eye-straining haze of alcohol and iodine (the basic ingredients of the H Polarizer) at a simple optical illusion whose principle was known to Euclid and whose practice put grandfather to sleep on Sunday afternoons.
One day the movies had been just a mental transom the public was half-tired of peeking through. The next day the movies were a gap in the mind's defenses through which a roaring lion leaped and landed in the delighted moviegoer's lap. Spears and guns threatened his head, spiders walked on his face, beautiful girls reached alluringly from the screen. Then, just when a man's guard was up, came a roar of sound from the balcony, and, caught from behind and before, he was yanked into the screen and taken for a thrilling ride on a roller coaster.
Slap in the Face. Had Hollywood really done any more than recapture the public's attention by slapping it in the face? Had a real technical and artistic revolution been started in the movie world?
Said one moviemaker confidently: "Hollywood is at the beginning of a new age of prosperity." There were signs that he was right, portents that he was wrong. The Sick Man of Southern California has a long case history of an intermittent fever, in which booms and busts succeed each other with violent frequency. The great successes of the teens and '20s brought on the "fall-of-Babylon" parties that led to the Morals Crisis of the mid-'20s. In the late '20s the introduction of sound set Hollywood on its ears, but it was followed by an era so fantastically prosperous that one frosty night Myrna Loy, it is said, left her mink coat wrapped around the roots of a chilly little peach tree.
Depression followed, and an ambitious male secretary at a major studio who asked for a raise was awarded a key to the executive washroom instead. The day was saved again by Technicolor, and in the sunlight of wartime prosperity, Hollywood made hay. But after the war the foreign market collapsed, and the domestic box office took a dive. The U.S. Supreme Court divorced the movie producers from their theater chains, and the studios no longer had a guaranteed outlet for their pictures.
Television, it seemed, was the final blow. The weekly audience was down from 80 million to 46 million, with the bottom not in sight, and theaters were closing three a day. (Since 1946, some 5,000 of them have become ghost houses, or been converted to supermarkets.)
Strangely, even while TV boomed, the big movies, e.g., Quo Vadis and The Greatest Show on Earth, were doing a bigger business than ever. But the ones that cost only a million dollar or so were hardly paying their way. The "habit public" had deserted to television. Last year most of the major studios barely managed to show a profit, and their position was dangerous because they were stuck with tremendous plants which they no longer needed to make the few pictures that brought in the big green.
Big Screen. In the last three years, the studios have slashed their contract lists from 900 to just over 300 people. At Fox, where production was cut by two-thirds, there was sometimes not even a fourth for bridge in the steam room. At mighty Metro, where production was halved, a whole wing was closed in the Thalberg (executive) building. Beverly Hills began to look like an abandoned anthill. All through the stylish canyons, For Sale signs sprouted. Hedy Lamarr set a fashion in elegant liquidation when she turned over her whole house to the auctioneer in June 1951. Everything went, including a wedding band inscribed in German ("You are my only love") and an evening gown with built-in, foam-rubber falsies.
The biggest names in the business took off for Europe--Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck --through a loophole in the tax law that forgives all if a taxpayer is out of the U.S. for 17 months out of 18. Van Johnson, Betty Hutton and Dorothy Lamour went back into vaudeville; Roz Russell and Bette Davis tried a retread on the legitimate stage; television sopped up Lucille Ball, Ann Sothern, Eve Arden and George Raft. Mike Romanoff, the royal restaurateur, made it final: "The motion picture community can no longer support me."
The Sick Man was feeling pretty weak when all at once there appeared on the market two wonder drugs which seemed to cure precisely what ailed him. They were called Cinerama and 3-D.
Cinerama, photographed on three strips of film at once, is thrown by three projectors on a deep-curved screen so huge (64 ft. by 23 ft.) that it cannot possibly be built into the average movie house. Its effect on audiences at Manhattan's Broadway Theater was startling. It ran over the customers like a colossal vacuum cleaner, sucking them up into whatever it was doing. When the screen went for a roller-coaster ride, the whole theater seemed to heave and be dragged, screaming, after it.
Trick Glasses. Before the moviemakers could recover from the shock and decide how to make Cinerama practical, Fate and an ardent film-hobbyist named Milton Gunzburg were jimmying the back door to salvation. Gunzburg, a mild little man of 42 whom one Hollywoodian has dubbed "the least likely Messiah in the history of hope," saw some home movies he had shot in 3-D, and had a great idea. "Why," he asked himself, "shouldn't a big studio be using this wonderful mechanism?"
Thereupon Milton and his optician brother Julian found a veteran camera technician named Friend Baker, who jiffy-built a stereo-camera by lashing together two standard 35-mm. Mitchell cameras geared to shoot "in sync." Early in 1951 Natural Vision, as the Gunzburgs called their company, began to peddle its process to the big studios. Fox, Columbia and Paramount said no; Metro took an option and let it drop.
At this point, desperate enough to swallow the first kind word he heard, Gunzburg agreed to let a fantasy merchant named Arch Oboler (once known in the radio business as "the daytime Norman Corwin") make a movie called Bwana Devil in Natural Vision. "The truth is," says one moviemaker, "that the movie industry didn't have the sense to follow its own nose into 3-D. They had to be led by a dog." And Bwana Devil--which may prove to be the most important motion picture produced in Hollywood since The Jazz Singer introduced sound in 1927--was indeed a dog. The script, a sort of veldt opera about how two lions interfered with the building of a railroad in Africa, was so bad that at the Los Angeles premiere last November, nobody noticed that the stereography was worse.
Nevertheless, Bwana Devil had what it took. Three-D had arrived. The next morning a half-delirious theater manager was shouting at Gunzburg over the telephone: "It's the most fabulous thing we've ever seen! They're standing four abreast all the way down to the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood and all the way around the block downtown!" In its first week Bwana smashed house records at the box office, rang up $95,000 at the two theaters. Rushed into a Chicago theater, it broke some more records.
That did it. The old lions of the movie industry--Nick and Joe Schenck, the Skourases, the Warners, the Cohns, Freeman and Zukor--came roaring out of their dens, heads up, alertly sniffing the trade winds.
At Paramount, for the benefit of 80-year-old Adolph Zukor, an antique stereo-camera was hauled up from the basement. Out the window went twelve days of production on Sangaree, a costume epic starring Fernando Lamas, and the whole thing was shot again in 3-D, with Technicolor. "Whaddya mean they won't wear glasses?" demanded Producer Bill Thomas. "They'll wear toilet seats around their necks if you give 'em what they want to see!"
The Gimmick. At Universal, Bossman Bill Goetz put his shops to work 20 hours a day on a 3-D camera, then sped into production on a work he felt was suited to the new medium: It Came from Outer Space. Fox announced three pictures to be made in 3-D, and Metro declared for two.
At Warners, Brother Jack hired Gunzburg to rush production on a remake of that ancient horror about murder in a wax museum. "We'll be the first major studio to produce a 3-D picture," Jack gloated, "just the way we did with sound." To stereoscopic photography, Jack added stereophonic sound, thus making "3D squared." To direct his first three-dimensional picture, he selected, with a fine sense of Hollywood fitness, the only director on the lot who cannot properly perceive depth: one-eyed Andre de Toth. Not at all dismayed that he could not see what he was doing, De Toth remarked serenely: "Beethoven couldn't hear music either, could he?"
At Columbia, two cameras were strapped together and something called Man in the Dark was cuffed off in eleven days--three days before House of Wax was finished. Whooped Columbia's Production Chief Jerry Wald: "Now we got a gimmick . . . We'll throw things at the public until they start throwing them back!"
Bwana Devil has set records almost everywhere it has played; Man in the Dark set new records too; House of Wax --by now, according to Variety, the top U.S. box-office attraction for the fifth straight week--is well on its way to joining company with the biggest money-winners of all time. Together, the three pictures seem certain to gross more than $20 million.
Not from a Genius. In short, the public had spoken. "The unconscious genius" (as Showman Mike Todd calls the national audience) had uttered the collective grunt of assent. Exhibitors are cheering because even the old "flatties" are pulling in more customers since the "deepies" arrived. Best of all, the popcorn, Coke and candy sales--which in some theaters actually match the box-office receipts--are booming as never before. (In most theaters, 3-D requires an intermission to allow for a change of reels.)
Stock in the Polaroid Corp., whose refinement of its product in 1946 made 3-D more readily possible, has doubled in value in the last year. Gunzburg and Co. are sore-handed from accepting checks: Hollywood has guaranteed them 5% of the national gate on all pictures made in Natural Vision, and Polaroid has granted them exclusive rights for one year to the distribution of the glasses. Since Bwana's release, Gunzburg has bought 100 million glasses at 6.7-c-each, sold them for 10-c- and pocketed more than $2,000,000 profit (before taxes).
Open Up Wide. Hollywood had forgotten that revolution breeds revolution. One night in January, the moviemen went to bed and slept soundly. The next morning, between the taking of a Danish and coffee, the town got a severe shock. 20TH, said the top line in the Hollywood Reporter, GETS BIG SCREEN PROCESS.
In all the excitement over 3-D, the other studios had almost forgotten about Cinerama. Had Fox found a way to make it practical? Apparently, Fox had. The system was called CinemaScope, a trade name for a reduction lens that can be screwed into an ordinary movie camera to widen its range of vision (see box). All Fox pictures from that day forward, announced Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century-Fox production head, would be made in CinemaScope. Then he proved he meant it by announcing that the first of these pictures would be The Robe, the cinemadaptation of Lloyd Douglas' bestselling Biblical story.
Fox gave a semiprivate demonstration of CinemaScope on a slightly curved screen 65 ft. wide by 25 ft. high. The japesters hailed it 'a poor man's Cinerama,' but there was a plaintive ring of envy in the phrase. CinemaScope could not, like Cinerama, clothe the watcher in its grand 3-D illusion; but it did trick his eye with a generous sense that life is lived on a broad terrace, with a noble view before it.
There was more than a suggestion, however, that at first Producer Zanuck hardly knew how to fill the view. In the only close-up shown--a scene from The Robe in which Victor Mature gazes up, with his usual unreadable expression, at the figure of Christ on the Cross--the screen looked a little like a Technicolor dollar bill that needs some engraver's doily-work to fill up the edges.
As usual, it was a statistic that affected the esthetic sensibilities of the cinemoguls. "Did you hear," whispered one, "that Mature's upper lip is twelve feet high?" Pitchman Zanuck leaped in to pound home the point. "The third dimension is useless!" he cried. "Anything that compels you to wear glasses is destined to fail . . . So you throw things at the audience. You throw fire and water in their faces. How long can we keep that up? We don't need depth. My brain gives me all the depth I need. I've been supplying my own third dimension all my life. What we need is to open up--open up wide!"
Not Too Exclusive. Fox's Skouras offered to rent CinemaScope to the worried movie industry for $25,000 a picture. The industry hesitated. What, the cinemoguls asked themselves, would happen--if, as and when they all went CinemaScope--to the $330 million worth of pictures already made for small screens and not yet released? To Paramount, for instance, with its $42 million backlog, the subject was painful indeed.
But, to everyone's delight, the lawyers claimed that the CinemaScope-type lens --which Skouras had personally purchased only last December from Henri Chretien, a Frenchman who invented it back in 1931--did not belong exclusively to Fox. Paramount promptly laid one on the table to prove it: Chretien had made a similar deal with Paramount in 1936.
The order rang out for a counter-counter-revolution. If the old screen, as Zanuck had said, was just a "postage stamp," then CinemaScope was nothing but a "letter slot." The "ribbon effect," said the esthetes, might be all right in Radio City Music Hall, but what about the little theater in San Luis Obispo, which can hold a screen no larger than 13 ft. by 10 ft.? With CinemaScope, the screen would be 13 by 5.
Meanwhile, the counter-counter-revolutionaries hatched a plot to have their cake, eat it too, and pinch a few of Skouras' box-office cookies into the bargain. Each announced, in portentous succession, that after years of arduous research it had developed at last its own wide-screen system--with "stereophonic sound." Paramount came out with Paravision, to be shown on a screen 1.66 times as wide as it is high (as compared with 1.33 to 1 for the traditional screen and 2.66 to 1 for CinemaScope). Metro sedately favored 1.75 to 1, and Universal went to 1.85 to 1.
What Next? Actually, the momentous innovations involved nothing but the use of a wide-angle lens in the same old cameras, and a new screen for such theaters as cared to go to the expense. No prosceniums would have to be torn down, no costly lenses bought. Best of all, the backlog would be safe. Almost all the old pictures could be projected to fill the new, not-so-wide screens. True, about 25% would be lost from the top or bottom of the picture, but as Metro's Dore Schary sanely said. "All you lose is air, anyway." For a few actors' heads the public would probably not argue the point. The first of the "retreads" to be shown on wide screen, Paramount's Shane and Universal's Thunder Bay, have done a huge business.
By the middle of last month, in short, the wide-screen revolution was looking more and more like an inventory sale; the three-dimensional revolution had still not proven itself to be anything more than a freak show; and Hollywood was in confusion, with production at a standstill.
Which way would the movies go? Fox was sticking with CinemaScope, and last week Warners announced that they would make 22 pictures in 3-D. Nevertheless, only one thing was sure, and Darryl Zanuck said it: "The small screen is through, through!" It was up to the public to decide what comes next, and last week the theater owners of the U.S. were moving at top speed to give the public an early chance to decide. Thousands of them had signed orders for "all-purpose screens" that can show everything from Cinema-Scope on down.
But the public could hardly make a fair decision until sometime next fall, when it sees The Robe in CinemaScope or some other carefully made picture in 3-D. Meanwhile,there were many more fascinating things than screens to be considered.
"Mediocrity Magnified." CinemaScope will abolish, at one stroke, the art of the film as it has been practiced since that memorable day in 1907 when Rescued from an Eagle's Nest was released and people hurried in by the dozens to watch a baleful old bird, unmistakably stuffed, clutch a helpless infant in its claws and fly away to eat it up. Gone is the viewer's sense of eavesdropping on activities that are, after all, going on in another room. In CinemaScope, the illusion in the other room outflanks the beholder in his theater seat and overwhelms him with a frontal attack of enormous images and sounds. Audiences will be put, especially with the addition of stereophonic sound, somewhat in the position of Tennyson's lancers in the Light Brigade. They will have to ride unreasoning through volley and thunder into any old melodrama Hollywood cares to spread before them.
"To be overwhelmed by great art is one thing," commented a New York critic, after seeing CinemaScope. "But to be drowned in mediocrity magnified is another . . . What's bad in most Hollywood pictures will be exactly 2.66 times as bad in this."
Rene Clair, most famous of the French moviemakers, foresaw another consequence of the wide-screen revolution. Quick, frequent shifts from one image to another would be impossible in CinemaScope. The eye cannot take in so large an image in one glance, and the mind is irritated by too rapid change of an image so encompassing that it seems like an environment.
The moving picture may therefore have little motion. The screen will become more like the stage, with the flow of action carried more by the words and gestures of the actors. It will have to become more "literary." Hollywood's actors, accustomed to memorizing one or two lines at a time and saying them just the way the director did, will actually have to act.
The Golden Section. Another tremendous problem introduced by CinemaScope is the question of composition--filling the frame with a satisfying picture. Western art since the time of Pythagoras has sanctioned the esthetic mystery of "the Golden Section." Applied to a rectangle, the rule evolves a geometrical figure about five by three, or 1.61 to 1--almost exactly the proportion of the Paramount wide screen.
Zanuck may argue, in his own defense, that great artists have frequently defied the rule; after all, Michelangelo was said to favor a figure "pyramidal, serpentine, and multiplied by one, two, and three," which is at least as peculiar as 2.66 to 1. Yet only by a master stroke of organization was Leonardo da Vinci able, in The Annunciation, to connect in one esthetic whole a frame that is only slightly more extreme than Zanuck's. But Zanuck of course has a bigger budget. One moviemaker summed up the problem this way: "Marilyn Monroe will have to lie down before the audience can get a good look at her."
In real 3-D, the problems are not so much esthetic as technical, scientific and medical. The object of all good stereoscopy is the fulfillment of the 26th Theorem of Euclid's Optics,* which was paraphrased by Poet-Physician Oliver Wendell Holmes back in 1859: "By means of these two different views of an object, the mind, as it were, feels around it and gets an idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes as with our arms . . . and then we know it to be more than a surface."
Good for Gorillas. The difficulties of clasping a cinema cutie in this way, without getting a severe eyestrain, have been more than Hollywood can cope with, so far. In the first three pictures, the depth illusion could scarcely have been more cruelly mismanaged if Hollywood had deliberately set out to destroy the eyesight of the nation. For all their skill in 2-D photography, the technicians still knew little about stereoscopy. One expert solemnly told Hollywood that the stereocamera sees things just as human eyes do because its openings are fixed four inches apart--"just as human eyes are"--and its lenses converge on the object of attention. Hollywood accepted this statement literally.
As a stereo expert in New York said later: "Any schoolboy with a ruler can tell you that a human's eyes are not four inches apart, but two and a half. The nearest thing to a human being with a four-inch interocular distance is a gorilla. All these 3-D movies so far have been shot for an audience of gorillas."
Even when Hollywood has mastered 3-D technique, there will still be discomforts. With it, at least for many years to come, the audience will have to wear glasses--and sit up straight. The problem of glasses is even more acute at drive-in theaters, where managers estimate that half their customers belong to "the horizontal audience," and where the new-fangled windshields stop what little light the Polaroid lets through.
The Last Chance? The public is obviously ready to give Hollywood a chance. But is it a last chance? Perhaps the television honeymoon is over, and the public has come back for another fling with its old flame, the movies. But even Hollywood admits that audiences in recent years have become more severely selective: it is an era of "the premeditated purchase." Can Hollywood reclaim, and retain, its prodigal audience? Or will the entertainment business settle down into a running fight between TV and the movies?
In that case, says British Moviemaker Sir Alexander Korda, "the fatal fascination of the little TV square, and the charm of keeping your slippers on instead of going out into the cold, will finish the cinema in no time." After all, TV has already learned to use color, and there is nothing to prevent the addition of 3-D.
Yet Hollywood's fate, many experienced onlookers feel, lies well within Hollywood's power to determine. "If this fuss over 3-D and wide screen has done nothing else," says United Artists' Chairman Bob Benjamin, "it has lifted the industry out of its appalling lethargy." But what will Hollywood do with its fresh release of energy? Says Columbia's Jerry Wald: "In a year it will be a tie score in the gimmick game. Then it will be the same old question--who has the story?"
Can the moviemakers match all the technical to-do with some creative excitement, add some psychic dimension to the physical sense of depth? Old Hollywoodian Dick Breen says with a grin: "This isn't being done for art's sake. It's strictly to save some of the marbles." "Revolution?" laughed a onetime Hollywood scriptwriter last week. "The only revolution I hear is the sound of Hollywood turning over in its grave."
But the movies have, from their beginning, been the luckiest of the arts, and Hollywood's have been the luckiest of movies. It may be that the villainous old eagle, stuffed as he is with ill-got gains and moth-eaten with artistic sins, can still regain his grip on the wide-eyed public, and flap away in screaming triumph, as of old, with the innocent and apparently contented victim dangling from his claws.
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