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IT MOVES! IT TALKS! NOW IT SMELLS! As the proverbial chip off the old block, Michael Todd Jr. aimed for his father’s showmanship with Scent of Mystery, the first and only reserved-seater attempting to give audiences the sense of smell to the movie-going experience via a mechanical gimmick called Smell-o-Vision. The $30,000 per theatre system had as chief components vials of scents, within a rotating drum, set for release when responding to the cues recorded onto an extra track. The smells were then pumped out by compressed air through narrow tubing below or in back of seats. According to the brochure given audiences (picture below), some 30 scents were used, including ocean ozone, pipe tobacco, garlic, oil paint, wood and wood shavings, boot polish, wine, roses, peach blossoms, baking bread, bananas, perfume, sugar cane, clover, brandy, peppermint lavender, carnation, train smoke and incense. In an effort to remove the previous smell before the next one, fresh air was released and not always successfully, as some audience members complained of the putrid mix of the lingering odors. (Early on both Todd Jr. and director Jack Cardiff worried the smells were like cheap ripoffs of then-famous perfumes.) Beyond the attempt at innovation, the reviews were expectedly negative, especially in New York, where Cardiff believed the Smell-o-Vision system was much less effectively controlled than in Chicago. Not unexpected, the younger the viewers the more enthusiastic the response to what they whiffed. Even if Smell-o-Vision had been able to rise above its oddity status, there wasn’t any commercially viable way to put the complicated “monster,” as Todd Jr. called it, into wide release; as with Cinerama, high maintenance was needed to ensure mechanisms were running properly and from viewer accounts they sporadically malfunctioned. In a second unsuccessful try as a roadshow in 1961 and early 1962 and sans smells, Scent was retitled Holiday in Spain, converted from TODD-70 to, so go the unchallenged claims, 3 panel Cinemiracle and 3 panel Cinerama as intended filler for Cinerama-equipped theatres waiting for MGM’s The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How the West Was Won. This would be the first damning example of the ruinous reductio ad absurdum to save 3 panel presentation: spending money to mutilate a mediocre 70mm movie into three strips—pretending moviegoers who loved Cinerama wanted those two nettlesome seams never there in the first place—and ignore its aromatic gimmick. (Scratch & sniff not yet available.) Neither the McVickers nor the Palace, Chicago’s 3 panel venues, would show the corruption. According to writer David Coles over at in70mm.com, Todd Jr. made an arrangement with National Theatres, the rights holder of Cinemiracle and Windjammer, to convert Scent to 3 strip Cinemiracle as Holiday in Spain. Apparently Todd Jr. paid for 5 sets of 3 strip prints, not aware at the time National Theatres was negotiating the sale of all things Cinemiracle to Cinerama. Coles claims Todd Jr. attempted to sue Cinemiracle for $10 million over the ruse, substantially more than what a Daily Variety article on 6/23/1961 reported: that Todd Jr. and stepmother Elizabeth Taylor had filed a suit against Cinemiracle for $2.5 million in damages for its failure to distribute Holiday in Spain as agreed after surreptitiously suspending the Technicolor and 3 strip processing of the prints. The final resolution of the suit(s) unknown but safely assumed: Cinemiracle and its new owner Cinerama satisfied the obligation in converting the movie to Cinemiracle. There remains, however, the scent of bamboozle: the best anyone can determine is Cinerama “rectified” the 3 strip Cinemiracle process to show and advertise the movie in Cinemiracle and Cinerama (see AD3 and AD4 below) and received roadshow treatment until the public wised up—that what was likely delivered to venues was a 3 X 35mm Cinemiracle or Cinerama transfer to 70mm. (Cinerama would try this switch on some prints for 1966’s Russian Adventure, as most Cinerama houses had already removed two of the three projection booths.) In 1986, duplicating John Waters’ Polyester screamer utilizing scratch-n-sniff Odorama, Holiday in Spain was shown in several major US cities in original widescreen and on MTV in pan and scan as part of a cross-promotion with 7-Eleven convenience stores, at which were provided scratch-n-sniff cards and coupons for store-purchased concessions. (Local independent stations followed suit, sometimes winning ratings wars against the national networks.) Via Blu-ray, SmileBox and other corrective technologies, Holiday in Spain was refurbished by David Strohmaier and released in 2014 as a Cinerama curio still minus raison d'être yet looking good in spite of its tortured reincarnations, with Denholm Elliott, Peter Lorre patting one of the buttocks of a sand-made nude, Beverly Bentley, Paul Lukas, Leo McKern, and Diana Dors wearing an ice cone halter. A running time of 148 minutes, including about thirteen minutes of overture, intermission & entr’acte and exit music. Strohmaier believes about twenty-five minutes of the initial S of M presentation are missing. Go to left column, four down and click to see it on YouTube. Scent of Mystery had a splashy January 6, 1960 world premiere at Chicago’s Cinestage Theatre, bought by daddy Mike Todd for the record long run of Around the World in 80 Days. The souvenir booklet either inserted a record with Eddie Fisher singing some of the movie’s music, including the song “The Chase,” or both were available for separate sale. A Cardiff interview in podcast form at the Smell-o-Vision website (go to bottom of that page). In Todd 70, with the absence of AO the only differential, the reserved seater ran for 13 weeks and the concluding four additional weeks, starting 4/3/1960, switched to popular prices and continuous performances (see AD below). The attempt at offering scent for movies in 1959 and 1960 was not a new idea. As far back as 1906, entrepreneurs tried releasing smells (primarily flowery perfumes) into single theatres through ventilation systems while projecting reels. In 1939, at the New York World’s Fair, Scentovision, providing several odors, was a novelty spearheaded by the Swiss professor Hans Laube, who would team up with Todd Jr. for S of M. In 1940, a theatre in L.A. and one in Detroit pumped the smell of crude oil through ventilation systems during Boom Town with Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. General Electric’s Smell-o-Rama was very briefly demoed in 1953. Movie companies took note of all the experiments but unconvinced of future success. Humorously described by the press as the “battle of the smellies,” the Walter Reade Organization import Behind the Great Wall opened as a Xmas, 1959 attraction in New York in AromaRama, sometimes referred to as AromaScope, with reportedly 72 smells, one month before S of M. (See AD 2 below.) There is limited life to Smell-o-Vision: Click here and here and here. For Terrance Malick’s The New World starring Colin Farrell, the Japanese added seven gelled scents dispersed by four small fan systems in a theatre in Tokyo and one in Osaka. ROLL OVER TO ENLARGE TITLE, SNIFF CARD, BROCHURE AND ADs
Text COPYRIGHT © 2002 RALPH BENNER (Revised 6/2024) All Rights Reserved. |
