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3 TIMES THE
FUN...
Now that my eyes have uncrossed, I can tell you about
the incredible experience of attending The World 3-D
Film Expo this past month at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.
Photo by Juan Tallo, © 2003
SabuCat Productions
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A happy audience delights in double-system 3-D (note
the light beams from two projectors) at the Egyptian
Theater.
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I knew it would be fun to see a lot of vintage 1950s
films in genuine, double-system 3-D—the
best method of all, which uses polarized filters and requires
two projectors in “interlock” synchronization.
But I didn't know that the festival would turn into
a happening. My friend Michael Schlesinger, who helped
to host the festival and provided many prints through Sony
Pictures Repertory Division, likened it to Woodstock, and
that's exactly what it was: Woodstock for movie geeks.
Those geeks included a hardy handful of contemporary
filmmakers who are also world-class film buffs, including
Joe Dante, John Landis, Curtis Hanson, Guillermo Del Toro,
and Quentin Tarantino, who confessed to me on opening night
that he was playing hooky from finishing the sound mix
on his new movie Kill Bill. He so harangued
his editor, Sally Menke, that she finally agreed to let
him go to see Andre De Toth's The Stranger Wore a Gun if
he'd take her along, too.
I was lucky enough to have seen some of the more popular
titles during the last big 3-D  revival,
during the late 1970s and early 1980s in New York City. Both
the 8th Street Playhouse and the venerable Thalia
showed double-system prints of Kiss Me Kate, House of
Wax, Drums of Tahiti, Second Chance, and Dial M
for Murder.
That's also when I saw the Three Stooges shorts Pardon
My Backfire and the better-known Spooks, which
contains one of the single greatest moments in 3-D
history, when a mad scientist extends a hypodermic needle
toward the camera and holds it there with a menacing grin. How,
I wondered, could the makers of a cut-rate comedy short
understand what big-time directors failed to get: it
takes time for your eyes to focus in 3-D. By
holding that needle in place, it enabled the audience
to zero in on the three-dimensional object, coming to
feel as if it was jutting out into the theater! Far
too many feature filmmakers believed, incorrectly, that
one could achieve the same effect by throwing things at
the camera. (The Stooge comedies also grasped the
idea of simple mechanical tricks, like making the hypodermic
needle absurdly long, or building a headboard for Moe,
Larry and Shemp's bed in forced perspective.)
It was Andre De Toth who, despite the loss of one eye,
provided my other all-time favorite 3-D
moments: the paddle-ball man in House of Wax,
and the incredible, rarely-imitated moment when Charles
Bronson seems to leap into the frame from the foreground. Smart
filmmakers (including cinematographers and production designers)
made good use of foreground pieces in many other 3-D
films, but no one ever got as good a scare out of audience
as De Toth did in that perfectly-staged scene.
The Woody Woodpecker cartoon Hypnotic Hick surpassed
any other animation I'd seen by imitating the look of a
Viewmaster slide, with Woody sharp and clear in the foreground,
dramatically separated from the backgrounds. Even
the Disney 3-D cartoons didn't
replicate this effect. (Interestingly, the technical
advisor on the Walter Lantz Woody cartoon was Bill Garity,
who had been a key member of Disney's staff when the multiplane
camera and stereophonic Fantasound were developed years
earlier.)
But if I thought I knew and appreciated 3-D
movies before, the World 3-D
Film Expo opened my eyes much wider. Thanks to three
cheerfully obsessive fellows (Jeff Joseph of Sabucat Productions,
Dan Symmes, co-author of the book Amazing 3-D,
and film preservationist
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| This promotional piece was handed
out in facsimile form to the sell-out crowd attending Money
from Home at the 3-D fest. Guests included Dina
Martin, Dean's daughter, costar Patricia Crowley, screenwriter
Hal Kanter, and art director Henry Bumstead. |
Bob Furmanek) the Expo went far beyond any festival
of this kind ever staged before. They attempted to gather
every feature, every short, and every scrap of film extant. They
pulled favors from local film labs and sound studios. (Some
of the most extraordinary footage, shown during a
program called 3-D Rarities,
included tests from the 1930s and raw footage for Pete Smith's
Metroscopix shorts that were digitally scanned from their
unprojectable source material, then transferred to 35mm,
and reoriented to the Polaroid system, with astonishing results.)
They even persuaded archivist Grover Crisp of Sony to strike
nine brand-new prints of Columbia feature films. Grover
became so enthusiastic that days before the festival began
he even provided new prints of some 3-D
preview trailers.
Stereovision enthusiasts maintained an exhibit
of contemporary 3-D
photography in the lobby, while others mounted
displays of original posters and advertising art
from the 1950s for each new program.
The festival organizers also invited actors
and filmmakers involved with these productions
to attend and participate in panel discussions. Julie
Adams proved to be as big a draw as ever,
accompanying Creature from the Black Lagoon,
while director Richard Fleischer 
confessed that he hadn't seen his rodeo film Arena since
it was finished fifty years ago. William “Biff” Eliot won over
the crowd when he appeared with Mickey Spillane's I, The Jury,
while I, for one, never dreamed I would get to meet Revenge
of the Creature's Lori Nelson in person. At age 85,
Herbert L. Strock was disarmingly candid, and lucid, about directing Gog, and
assessing which aspects of the film dated and which held up.
Some two hundred souls purchased full festival
passes, and spent the better part of ten days
inside the Egyptian Theater (normally the home
of the American Cinematheque). I attended
as many shows as I could, but I missed a few because
my eyes were starting to feel the strain. No
one ever conceived of these films being projected
in marathon style!
Few if any of these movies could be called great,
yet somehow it was just as entertaining to watch
Edmond O'Brien in The Man in the Dark and
Guy Madison in The Charge at Feather River as
it would have been to screen genuine classics
of that era.
My teenage daughter expressed no particular
interest in this festival, because she's seen impressive 3-D
films at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, just
as others have seen the latest that IMAX has to
offer.
I was too young to experience the brief 3-D
boom of 1953, but I always regretted missing out
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on it. It was just a few years later, during
the waning days of Saturday matinees in the late
1950s and 1960s, that I developed my passion for
moviegoing. Looking around at the Egyptian,
I saw a preponderance of people in my own age group,
and realized that beyond curiosity and film scholarship,
much of what drew us all to the 3-D
Expo was a chance to re-live an emotion we rarely
feel when we attend films nowadays: enthusiasm.
Everyone in that theater was having a great time, not just
because of the specific films but because of the shared experience,
and, I suspect, an unspoken nostalgia for a time when we always
felt that way walking into a movie theater.
(For more information, and to purchase the souvenir DVD, which
I highly recommend, go to www.3dfilmfest.com.)
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