Film gimmicks that worked (and a few that didn't)

Filmmakers have been fascinated with the immersive potential of stereoscopic 3D for as long as moving pictures have existed. After numerous short-subject experiments, enterprising techie Harry K. Fairall took the plunge and produced the first feature-length 3D movie, “The Power of Love”. The film premiered at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel (with viewers donning the same blue-and-red anaglyph glasses used during the format’s “golden age” in the 1950s) and played again for the press in New York City. Audiences were reportedly impressed, but the 3D print was never screened again. Though the movie received 2D exhibition throughout the 1920s, it’s one of countless silent films that are considered lost. Alas, Fairall was ahead of his time.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute… you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” With those eleven words, Al Jolson changed the course of motion picture history. There had been sound (musical and spoken) in movies before, but somehow Jolson’s toot-toot charm left a deeper groove than Will Hays’s keep-it-in-your-pants introduction to “Don Juan”. Unlike 3D, sound immediately caught on, and “talkies” became the standard form of exhibition, thus ending the acting career of Raymond Griffith.

Abel Gance’s hugely ambitious “Napoléon” utilized a heapin’ helpin’ of newfangled film techniques, but his biggest gamble by far was attempting to shoot the entire movie in three-strip Polyvision – i.e. the simultaneous, side-by-side projection of three film reels, shot in the boxy 1.33:1 ratio. Gance ultimately opted to use the format for the climactic sequence, but distributors, already put off by the movie’s considerable length (Gance’s version definitive ran over nine hours), wound up cutting the right and left reels out. Kevin Brownlow restored the Polyvision sequence, replete with three projectors, for his 1979 Telluride Film Festival presentation.

Master make-up artist John Chambers should’ve received top billing for this thoroughly entertaining John Huston mystery, in which four of the biggest movie stars of the early ‘60s (Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, and Tony Curtis) make cameos under heavy prosthetics. Though moviegoers were encouraged to guess who’s who, the performers are so unrecognizable under their make-up that you have to wait until the film’s denouement, where each actor strips off his make-up, for the big reveal. The film did poorly at the box office, likely because audiences weren’t hot on the idea of paying full admission to not see their favorite stars.

When Abel Gance widened the screen with Polyvision in 1927’s “Napoléon”, it was for artistic purposes; when 20th Century Fox introduced Cinemascope in 1955 via Henry Koster’s biblical epic, “The Robe”, it was out of panic. Movie theater attendance had dropped precipitously due to the advent of television, so studios needed to give ticket buyers something they couldn’t get at home. 3D was one option, but audiences complained about having to wear the glasses for a whole movie. Fox promoted “The Robe” as “The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses!”, and moviegoers were impressed. But while “The Robe” was a hit, the process gradually lost its popular appeal. Some filmmakers found the widescreen format ludicrous. In Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt”, Fritz Lang remarks, “Oh, it wasn’t meant for human beings. Just for snakes and funerals.”

Polyvision redux! Kind of! Given that Gance’s film was lost and all but forgotten by the 1950s, it’s said that inventor Fred Waller was primarily inspired by an eleven-projector system introduced at the 1939 World’s Fair. In any event, this was another only-in-theaters gimmick designed to combat the popularity of television, and it proved too unwieldy to catch on in a big way. Only two films were shot via the three-camera method, the first being the western extravaganza, “How the West Was Won”. Starring John Wayne, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, and Gregory Peck, the movie looked spectacular in true Cinerama and played in theaters for years; unfortunately, it looked godawful when spliced together in one widescreen print for non-Cinerama screens. Cinerama quickly segued to a single-camera process, but the image looked distorted if you weren’t sitting in the right spot.

Some consider 1903’s “Vie et Passion du Christ” to be the first color feature with its use of the Pathéchrome process, but forty-four minutes ain’t feature-length, mister. Michel Carré’s film of Karl Vollmöller’s “The Miracle” (as directed for the stage by Max Reinhardt) gets the title for the first feature-length color film (also via the Pathéchrome process) with its two-hour runtime. The hand-stenciled color was done in postproduction and was a far cry from Technicolor’s vibrant three-strip format, but filmmakers knew audiences had a clear preference. Technicolor’s investors did, too; they happily let the company lose money because they knew it was only a matter of time before they perfected the format.

Disaster movies were all the rage in the early 1970s, and Universal Pictures was determined to out-rumble the competition with a blockbuster about what it would look and, especially, sound like if the Big One hit Los Angeles. After a madcap development process that found executives pondering the efficacy of dropping Styrofoam bricks on the audience, they settled on Sensurround. Theaters were forced to rent special speakers for this format, which purported to mimic the experience of a quake by basically shaking the heck out of the audience. Though the film was a hit, some distributors reported structural damage to their theaters due to the excess rattling; the noise also wrecked movies playing on adjacent screens. Sensurround was quickly phased out, but new, more sophisticated audio formats like THX and, more recently, Dolby Atmos have successfully given audiences an aural experience they can’t get at home without cheesing off the neighbors.

Movie star Robert Montgomery got bitten by the directing bug whilst filling in for an ill John Ford on the set of “They Were Expendable”, and he went for it with his adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s “The Lady in the Lake”. The film is shot almost exclusively from detective Phillip Marlowe’s perspective – i.e. the subjective camera. This posed two challenges: how do you visually replicate first-person storytelling, and how do you sell a movie on a star’s name when the star is rarely seen onscreen? Critics hated it and audiences stayed away, but it’s a must-see if you’re at all interested in visual storytelling. It’s a fascinating exercise given the era’s technical limitations.

Patrick Hamilton’s real-time play based on the Leopold and Loeb thrill-killing of Bobby Franks was a perfect fit for Alfred Hitchcock. The macabre tone and structural gimmick offered the Master of Suspense the opportunity to flex his crowd-pleasing muscles by presenting an eighty-minute film shot entirely in one take. Technically, this was impossible, as film magazines only ran ten minutes. Hitchcock cleverly navigated this difficulty by designing each take to end on objects that covered the entire screen; then he’d switch out the magazine, and the audience, hopefully sucked into the story, would be none the wiser. The film can’t entirely shed its stage origins, but the real-time gimmick gives it a charge. Keep your eyes peeled for the director’s obligatory cameo; it’s one of his best.

A 300-year history of Saint Petersburg, Russia told in one long, nimbly choreographed Steadicam shot that wanders ghost-like through the expanse of the Hermitage Museum. Whereas Hitchcock had to stop and reload his camera for “Rope”, director Alexander Sokurov could let his film-less HD camera run until the battery died. The movie wasn’t a hit, but it did help kick off a one-take craze amongst filmmakers that lamentably exists to this day. The technology is there to keep the camera steady and the light consistent, but you’ve still got to know how to fill the screen. Sokurov never has that problem in “Russian Ark”.

“Leaving Las Vegas” director Mike Figgis was an early digital cinema adopter, which means he wasn’t precious about the image quality. When HD movies were blown up for film projectors (the exhibition standard until the mid-2000s), they looked like mud, so if you didn’t have a decent hook your film wasn’t getting distributed. Figgis’s “Timecode” had the hook: four cameras, shooting at the same time on the same day, capture a cast of characters preparing for a film shoot. It’s a juggling act, and, like “Lady in the Lake”, it’s of interest mostly to aspiring filmmakers. Reviews were mixed and the box office gross was disappointing, but in the age of multitasking, there might be reason to revisit the quadrant.

John Waters might be the greatest provocateur of the twentieth century. He made cheerfully filthy films with his cheerfully filthy friends, and relatively normal human beings shamefacedly flocked to his movies because they just had to see the vulgar results for themselves. 1981’s “Polyester” remains his most ambitious affront with its scratch-and-sniff “Odorama” cards, but we probably wouldn’t be discussing Waters’ singular oeuvre today were it not for the final show of “Pink Flamingos”, in which legendary drag queen Divine eats actual dog excrement. The gimmick worked. Waters’ bad taste eventually won America’s heart, culminating in eight Tony Awards for the musical rendition of “Hairspray”.

Making a movie out of a board game was gimmick enough, but producer John Landis upped the ante by developing a film with three different endings. The idea was to entice viewers to keep coming back, hoping to see a new ending, but shipping out new reels every week wasn’t feasible. Theaters got the ending they got, and, thanks in part to mixed reviews, people stayed home. When “Clue” hit home video, Paramount combined all three endings, and, well, they might’ve overplayed a strong hand. The film gradually found a cult following, and is now considered a first-rate comedy.

No one loved film exhibition more than director-producer William Castle. He made solid B horror films that enticed moviegoers with irresistible gimmicks like a $1,000 life insurance policy should they expire from fright during a screening of “Macabre” or a buzzer hidden in theater seats (sold as “Percepto”) that goosed patrons during showings of “The Tingler”. His pièce de résistance was “Emergo”, which entailed a skeleton prop soaring over viewers’ heads on a wire during “House on Haunted Hill”. 3D and D-BOX ain’t got nothing on William Castle.

This excruciatingly awful remake of “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” was allegedly hatched by Dino “When the Monkey Die, People Cry” De Laurentiis when he saw people lined up to buy lottery tickets. Naturally, he made a film starring Glad garbage bag pitchman Tom Bosley that challenged viewers to find a Glad garbage bag containing $1 million. The critics panned it, the film tanked and you couldn’t solve the mystery unless you bought a specially marked package of, you guessed it, Glad garbage bags. So many people guessed the correct location of the loot that they had to pick a winner at random.

Thirty-eight years ago, Douglas Trumbull, the visual f/x wizard who made moviegoers feel as if they’d gone to space in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, attempt to deliver an altogether new sensation to theaters. It was called “Showscan”, a high-frame-rate (HFR) process shot on 70mm film at sixty frames per second (as opposed to the standard twenty-four frames per second). The idea was to eliminate the perceptible flicker of theatrical projection, and those who’ve seen the Showscan demo reel will attest to its immersiveness. Exhibitors ultimately balked at the cost of installing new projectors to accommodate the format, and Trumbull’s feature showpiece, “Brainstorm”, turned into an unexpected disaster when star Natalie Wood died during filming. James Cameron and Ang Lee are champions of HFR, but they’re working on HD instead of 70mm. Trumbull’s vision was induced by the celluloid experience, and that is dead now.

The splitting of the projected image has fascinated filmmakers since Abel Gance’s “Napoléon”, and it became an especially big deal after Michael Wadleigh’s concert film, “Woodstock”. Richard Bare, the skilled television director of classic “Twilight Zone” episodes like “To Serve Man” and “Third from the Sun”, decided to stretch the split-screen format to its breaking point with “Wicked, Wicked” – a high-camp yarn told entirely in “Duo-Vision”. The movie stiffed with audiences, but it’s acquired a small cult following thanks to its go-for-broke commitment to the format.

The worst film in the mostly lousy “Fast & Furious” franchise ignominiously debuted the D-BOX experience. It’s the next best thing to the fictional “Feel-Around” in “Kentucky Fried Movie”, you can move the seat up and down and control the degree to which it rumbles. Actually, it’s a built-in Sensurround. The format didn’t really take off, but it’s fairly easy to code a movie with the technology, so you could conceivably go to see the new Greta Gerwig movie and discover your seat is primed to shake you silly.

It’s an insult to call IMAX a gimmick. It’s by far the most immersive motion picture format of the last fifty years, and some of the greatest filmmakers working today – James Cameron, Ang Lee and Christopher Nolan – swear by the experience. Unfortunately, the company had to water down its brand to stay solvent, which has resulted in smaller IMAX-approved theaters that fall well short of expectations. And those expectations have been sky high since audiences got a load of “To Fly!”. Though it’s not the first IMAX release (that would be 1970’s “Tiger Child”), it’s the film that most of us saw first, and we’ve been dreaming bigger than the big screen ever since.

Few films have been further ahead of their time than Steven Lisberger’s “Tron”. The vast majority of gamers in 1982 didn’t think about what went on in their consoles or computers, but “Tron” – with its groundbreaking mix of computer animation and live-action characters – got them dreaming about having an online avatar that represented them in competition with gamers from all over the world. Despite a massive marketing push (including spin-off video games), most moviegoers couldn’t wrap their minds around the concept and, thus, stayed home. But talented upstarts like Pixar founder John Lasseter were inspired to keep pushing the envelope Lisberger had essentially created. According to Lasseter, “Without ‘Tron’, there would be no ‘Toy Story’.”

In the fall of 1995, the future of a fledgling studio called Pixar was riding entirely on audiences’ willingness to watch a film animated completely with computer-generated imagery. Their first film out of the gate was top-lined by two of the biggest names in show business, but it lacked a pre-existing book or TV show or anything to entice moviegoers. It was just a movie about toys. And it changed everything. Computer animation was always going to supplant the hand-drawn process, but the transition might’ve been slower to occur had “Toy Story” not been one of the most entertaining films ever made. Its gimmick was magic.

Almost twenty years before “The Blair Witch Project”, Ruggero Deodato had the clever idea to build a movie around the “found footage” of an American documentary crew that goes missing in the Amazon rainforest. It’s a bit of a time bomb: the audience knows this footage won’t end well, but they don’t know just how bad it’s going to be. Grindhouse audiences got their money’s worth with a splatter flick that goes very hard (so hard that a French film magazine alleged it was a genuine snuff film), but Deodato played way too rough for mainstream audiences (no humans were killed, but lots of animals were). Still, the gimmick was a keeper, and horror filmmakers, as is their trend-chasing wont, ran it deep into the ground after the success of the cruelty-free “The Blair Witch Project”.

The horror genre flourished in the 1970s thanks to a combination of audaciously talented filmmakers and audaciously… well, audacious filmmakers. What the latter camp lacked in talent they made up for in envelope-shredding shamelessness. Take, for instance, John Alan Schwartz, an enterprising director who stumbled onto infamy and a small fortune with the “Faces of Death” series. The gimmick was the ultimate dare: want to see actual footage of people getting killed? While there is newsreel footage of fatal accidents, the film’s most notorious scenes – e.g. a man being jolted to death in an electric chair, a restaurant where patrons kill monkeys and eat their brains, and some unlucky fellow being eaten by an alligator – were faked. But in the pre-internet days, the truth was easily obscured. The film was a sensation with gorehounds, spawning multiple sequels, and a behind-the-scenes documentary.

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Michael Crichton’s bestselling novel is far from the filmmaker’s finest hour, but if you’re looking for the most iconic sequence in his oeuvre, look no further than the awe-inspiring introduction of the Brachiosaurus in the first act of “Jurassic Park”. The next act of Spielberg’s career (following the artistic failure of “Hook”) hinged on the big-screen dream weaver’s ability to make the audience believe dinosaurs could exist in the real world again. No one bought a ticket hoping to see one of the great sci-fi/horror epics of all time. They went to see dinosaurs. And Spielberg gave them dinosaurs.