Why 3-D Isn't As Dead As You Think

Once again, another source, Cheddar News on YouTube, has proclaimed the Final Death of 3-D. Of course, they've done so with a ton of misinformation. What's particularly sad about this is the attempt to educate us about 3-D while knowing nothing about it. So let's go through this once again: 3-D is not as dead as you think or the haters want. Sorry to disappoint the haters.

Let's talk a little about the history for 3-D for a moment. The earliest 3-D experiments date back to at least 1915 with the first feature in 3-D being in 1922. The Cheddar News video does correctly attribute these to being in the anaglyphic (red/cyan) format. There was a mini-boom in the 20s, mostly shorts with a couple of features. Why did it go away in the 20s? I would think mostly because the big experimentation was for sound. Sound and the Great Depression put a kibosh on a number of film experiments at the time, including Widescreen.

During the 1930s, polarized 3-D was being developed. One of the earliest polarized films was shown at the 1939 World's Fair in NY, a stop motion film called In Tune With Tomorrow. It was remade the following year in color as New Dimensions. The shorts were done in dual strip polarized 3-D. According to Cheddar, polarized glasses as yellow and brown as opposed to red and blue. What this proves is that the person doing the video hasn't actually seen any 3-D movies, especially polarized ones. Polarized glasses are clear and made of polarizing filters that are at a 90 degree angle to one another. Yellow and brown indeed.

World War II put a hold on further 3-D experimentation until the 1950s. And frankly, 3-D has pretty much been with us in one way or another ever since. Don't believe me? Let's look at the evidence.

It's generally accepted that Bwana Devil kicked off 3-D in the 1950s, but you can actually take it back a year to the Festival of Britain in 1951. A number of 3-D shorts were shot and shown there and almost all of them ended up in America in early 1953 after the success of Bwana Devil. Bwana Devil and 99% of all the 3D movies of the 50s were done in dual strip polarized 3-D. There were a couple of part 3D Burlesque features in anaglyph, but the mainstream stuff was all polarized. How does dual strip polarized 3-D work? It's shot using two cameras, one for each eye. It's then projected through two projectors. The two projectors have to be in perfect synchronization. The screen has to be an actual silver screen to reflect the light back. And the polarizing filters that the image passes through on the projector have to be changed every few days. They also have to be clean of smudges and fingerprints, as do the glasses. In short, projection of dual strip 3-D was a very precise science and if just one thing went wrong, the whole presentation would blow up.

Naturally, projectionists didn't care to be that precise. If they couldn't get it to sync up right away, they'd just let it go. Even one frame out of sync can lead to headaches and nausea. There reports of film being a full 24 frames--one full second--out of sync. To give you an idea of what that might look like, picture watching House of Wax and your left eye sees a medium shot of Vincent Price and your right eye sees a two shot of Price and Charles Bronson. The theater owners would cheap out as well, painting the screen instead of installing a proper silver screen. The projectionist union demanded two projectionists in a booth for 3-D shows, 3 if the magnetic stereo soundtrack was involved. Theater owners fought that, too. The end result was many shoddy presentations which left patron sick. Audiences began avoiding 3-D movies for this reason.

While all this was going on, 20th Century Fox was developing CinemaScope, a widescreen process that only used a single projector and a special lens. Theater owners, projectionists, and eventually audiences preferred this over the precision of 3-D, so many 3-D movies started getting flat showings only. Universal rolled out one last 3-D movie in 1955, Revenge of the Creature, and that as they say was that.

But not quite. As early as 1957, 3-D movies were being successfully reissued. The first new 3-D movie after Revenge of the Creature was also the first one released in 3-D and CinemaScope: September Storm in 1960. September Storm became the last dual strip 3-D movie. The following year, The Mask became the first of the part 3-D releases, with 3 segments in anaglyphic 3-D. This was followed by a pair of Nudie Cuties also in part 3-D in 1962, The Bellboy and the Playgirls and Paradiso. A third Nudie Cutie, Adam and Six Eves, was shot in 3-D but released flat until it made a 3-D Blu Ray debut last year courtesy of the 3-D Film Archive and Kino. 3-D took another four years off before returning with 1966's The Bubble, the first single strip polarized 3-D film. Single strip 3-D was supposed to solve the problems of projection. Each image was printed on the same strip of film, either side by side or over and under. They were then projected--again on a silver screen--through a special beam splitter. The whole thing should have been idiot-proof. Never underestimate the idiocy of the American projectionist, however. I've seen far too many single strip presentations that were sometimes painfully mis-projected: the wrong type of screen, the wrong type of beam splitter, the beam splitter not put on correctly, as well as the film being cut incorrectly by the projectionists all could and did wreak havoc on unsuspecting audiences for literally decades.

Nonetheless, The Bubble begat a system that was used for decades. It was followed by Paul Naschy's La Marca del Hombre Lobo in 1968, released in the US in 1971 as Frankenstein's Bloody Terror. 1969 gave us the infamous porn The Stewardesses, which set off a decade of similar films. There were some mainstream films in the 70s, including the part 3-D horror film The Flesh and Blood Show,  the 1974 gorefest Andy Warhol's Frankenstein,  the 1976 South Korean Kaiju flick A*P*E, and a couple of Kung Fu movies. While not everything was mainstream, 3-D was still alive and kicking for practically the whole decade.

3-D took a 3 year break before returning with Comin' At Ya! in 1981. That film started a new mini-boom that lasted until 1985 and produced 18 movies in 3-D. Maybe not as much as the 50s boom, but 3-D was very front and center for a few years in the 80s. Why did it die this time? I suspect projectionists had something to do with it as well as the simple fact that all 18 movies are actually terrible movies. The 50s had some bad films, too, but by and large the 50s batch was pretty good. There wasn't a single good movie released in 3-D from 1981 to 1985. I know because I've seen most of them. I can't imagine that the few I haven't seen are much better than the ones I have.

Six years went between 1985's Starchaser: The Legend of Orin and 1991's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, which was another part 3-D anaglyphic affair. But that's not the full story, either since IMAX 3-D was ramping up starting in the mid-1980s and Disney was having a lot of success with Captain EO at their theme parks. In fact, IMAX 3-D (and porn ironically) carried 3-D through the 90s. And it was an IMAX 3-D release, James Cameron's 2003n Titanic documentary Ghosts of the Abyss, coupled with that same year's part 3-D anaglyphic release of Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over that set the current boom in motion. But even before that there were a few more mainstream releases: a terrible 1995 film called Run For Cover with Adam West in it and a 1997 Charles Band horror comedy called The Creeps. Plus there were 3-D made for video horror films in the late 90s like the atrocious Camp Blood. To say nothing of all the theme park attractions in 3-D like T2 3D: Battle Across Time, Shrek 4-D, MuppetVision 3-D, etc.

Ever since Spy Kids 3-D, there hasn't been a year without 3-D movies. Part of the longevity now seems to be the fact that projection is finally Projectionist-proof. Outside of forgetting to turn the 3-D filter for the projector on (I've seen this happen), there's no way the image can be screwed up nowadays. It also helps that there's much better movies being made nowadays as opposed to the batch from the 60s through the 90s. While there's definitely been some stinkers in the past 17 years, there's been plenty of movies like Hugo, Gravity, Life of Pi, the various Marvel and Star Wars movies, etc. that can stand alongside the classics of the 50s. The circular polarized glasses are better, too. More comfortable and you can tilt your head without losing the effect. Of course, Hollywood did itself no favors with some lousy rushed conversions like Clash of the Titans, but now even the conversions look great. Watching The Force Awakens or The Walk, you'd hardly believe they weren't actually shot in 3-D.

Yes, there's not as many 3-D movies as there were 7 or 8 years ago, but there's still some high profile releases. Yes, TV manufacturers stopped making 3-D TVS, but you can still get 3-D projectors for the home. Frankly, bigger is better with 3-D anyhow. There's a huge difference between seeing The Force Awakens in 3-D on a 50 inch TV screen and seeing it on a 100 inch projection screen. And while it is also true that not as many 3-D Blu Rays are being released in America, you can still get many of the big releases from Europe. I've gotten the last half dozen Marvel movies and the last 3 Star Wars movies all from the UK on 3-D Blu Ray, and all region free. On top of that, the 3-D Film Archive is still releasing several titles a year on 3-D Blu Ray. Taza, Son of Cochise will be out from the 3DFA and Kino later this month. And unless Covid-19 kills movie theaters totally forever, there are some high profile releases coming this fall like Black Widow and Wonder Woman 1984.

So no, 3-D is not totally dead. And it really hasn't been totally dead for nearly 70 years. Even when it goes away, it only goes away for a few years before poking back up in some fashion. The longest gap between movies since the 50s has been five, and that was right after Revenge of the Creature. All the other gaps have been an average of 3-4 years. So I have to say it: 3-D, like the Force, will be with us always.

3-D Thursday: The Mask (1961)

The Mask is one of those movies that I loved as a teenager. It was the first 3-D movie I recorded off of TV in 3-D back in 1986. I watched it repeatedly, even catching it in 2-D, until I got sick of it.

I recently revisited The Mask thanks to an astonishing 3-D Blu-Ray from Kino and the 3-D Film Archive and got to be reminded of what looney fun it was.

The Mask is a not too subtle allegory warning about the dangers of hallucinogenic drugs with the titular object standing in for said drugs. The story concerns respectable psychiatrist Dr. Alan Barnes (the seriously underappreciated Paul Stevens). One of his patients, Michael Radin--a hilariously hyper Martin Lavut--blames visions and nightmares on an ancient Aztec ritual mask. The mask may even have made Radin kill a pretty woman in the rain the night before. Barnes dismisses the notion that the mask is to blame so Radin goes home, mails the mask to Barnes and then commits suicide. Once Barnes gets the mask, he does what anyone would do: he puts it on. When he does, we put on our 3-D glasses and start tripping. Barnes enters a weird and violent world full of demons, human sacrifice, and disembodied body parts.

Barnes thinks the trips are cool but his square girlfriend Pam (Claudette Nevins) thinks he should return the mask to the museum Radin took it from in the first place. What a buzzkill. Luckily, Barnes steals it back before making out with (and trying to kill) his hot secretary. Of course, there's also a pesky piece of wood cop (Bill Walker doing a Jack Webb) who  keeps asking questions about Radin and the mask (but not the girl Radin killed--she's forgotten completely six minutes into the movie). You can tell he ain't hip with that ugly jacket he wears. Oh, sure, Barnes's mind deteriorates the more he trips, but come on--ain't the high the whole ride?

Like I said, the movie is not subtle at all about it's drug allegory.  In the movie's single worst acted moment, Nevins gives an embarrassingly bad speech outright calling the mask a drug. To his credit, director Julian Roffman does try to make the dream sequences look terrifying. However, like too many other "trip" movies, the dreams come off as pretty wild, especially in 3-D. And the 3-D on this is terrific. Like so many other vintage 3-D releases, there's a good amount of depth and a fun amount of pop out gimmick effects without being overly obnoxious.

In terms of the cast, Paul Stevens owns this film. Stevens is best remembered today as Codman in Patton and Dr. Legarde in Marlowe. The Mask was sadly his only starring role and he's a hoot to watch in it. His descent into total bug-eyed psycho is almost worth the price of admission alone. The rest of the cast is sincere and do their parts as such, but yeah. This is Stevens's movie. He should have been better known than he was.

The Mask is a part 3-D film, with three separate dream sequences in 3-D, each one running about five minutes. The rest of the movie is in standard 2-D. Originally shown in anaglyphic 3-D, this may be the best of the part 3-D movies. It certainly beats the pants off Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. The 3-D Film Archive got hold of the left/right separations for the 3-D sequences and have made the movie available for the first time ever in discrete 3-D. That's quite a feat. They restored the film in a few other ways, too.

Back in the 1980s this was one of the movies 3-D Video Corporation offered to stations forThe Mask on VHS and Laserdisc in 3-D, it was the cut version that was offered. The 3-D Film Archive, however, put those scenes back in and, for the first time since the film's theatrical release, included the original intro to the movie with mask expert Jim Moran. To boot, the movie is being offered in it's original widescreen format. So, basically, this is the version audiences saw in 1961, but even better.

broadcast. It was, in fact, one of only five or six the company made available to non-cable stations, the rest being saved for SelecTV. It came with a 3-D hosting segment featuring magician Harry Blackstone, Jr. and, as such, several scenes from the film were trimmed out to make room for the Blackstone segments. When Rhino offered

The Kino Blu-Ray also includes the anaglyphic sequences in their original format. The DVD has just the anaglyphic version, of course, as well as the Blackstone segments as extras and replicas of the original glasses patrons were given in 1961. I got the DVD for those two reasons as well as getting the Blu. I'll say this about the Blackstone footage: it was fun to watch again, but it is rough on the eyes. Ol' Harry is wearing a red tuxedo and this is in red/blue color 3-D. Just sayin'.

Michael Weldon, in his Bible of Exploitation Films The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, called The Mask one of the all time great gimmick films. As a gimmick film, it's a load of fun. Sure, it's not as good a movie as Dial M  For Murder or Kiss Me Kate, but it's far better than most of what came after it, at least until the modern run.

So come on, man. Put The Mask On--Now! Take the trip. You know you want to.

Dr. Strangefascist or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Ignore Jeffrey Wells

I'd like to have a very serious conversation with you regarding a problem facing the world today so monumental, there should be a Constitutional Amendment banning it: 1.85 Fascism. I'm not entirely certain what it is, but it must be pretty bad. I think--and anyone who knows better can correct me if I'm wrong--that it involves Studio Heads, Home Video Distributors, and various other people working in the Entertainment Industry wearing brown shirts with arms band with odd shaped film reels giving a Nazi type salute to their Mad Dictator Bob Furmanek as he commits unconscionable genocide on the tops and bottoms of all movies made after 1952. I know the seriousness of this issue because Jeffrey Wells has said so repeatedly on his blog.

Wait. Jeffrey Wells said so? Oh. That explains quite a lot. Strike that first paragraph. Move along. Nothing to see here.

By now, an unfortunate number of people have heard of Mr. Wells and his insane blog Hollywood-Elsewhere. Part of this, of course, is because of the blog itself. Part of it is the sheer number of people who have devoted countless energies to writing about the blog. Nico Lang at thefrisky.com opens his article on Wells by stating "To say Jeffrey Wells is America's worst film critic is to do a disservice to just how truly, incredibly terrible this man is at his job." Anna Merian at jezebel.com writes of "the disemboweling of Jeffrey Wells, film critic". Those two, among others, were posted in response to a ludicrous tweet by Wells that The Revenant was not intended for women. Nikki Finke at deadline.com once famously reprinted an e-mail from Wells to James Mangold begging for nude photos of Vinessa Shaw. Eric Snider wrote angrily of Wells blowing off a panel he was supposed to do for the Oxford (MS) Film Festival in 2099 due to not being able to get good Wi-Fi. Then there's all the angry reactions to his various fat-shaming articles.

Umm, hi, guys and gals: I know I don't post to this blog as nearly often as I should (time constraints) so you're probably all going to say "who the hell is this guy to give us advice?" but can we all agree that Wells is not a film critic or a cineaste (though he claims to be) and is literally nothing more than a troll? Some have actually correctly identified him as such and yet they still howl in anger at his antics. Seriously, why? Why is anyone paying any attention to him at this stage of the game? Oh sure, here I am writing about him saying that we should stop writing about him, which may or may not be self-defeating.

But of course he's a troll. Consider his tactics. He writes some lunacy that he knows will piss people off. When it inevitably does, someone inevitably writes about the lunacy. Other people, not believing that anyone could ever say that, goes to see if it was actually said. Once they see it, they comment or write about it. Rinse and repeat. The man gets views and in this business, views mean money due to advertising. Any schmuck can pull that trick and more than one has. He's just one of the more successful ones due to his infamy.

"Hey," Jeff Wells says, "if I post that Amy Schumer is fat and unattractive, the internet will blow up and people will come reading my blog". Of course the internet blows up with righteous indignation. Meantime, absolutely nobody bothers to take a look at the guy posting that comment and thinks that if him and Amy Schumer walked into a bar to pick people up, only one of them would have a major problem with that. If you need help figuring out who, it ain't Amy Schumer. Let's just say that I personally wouldn't throw Schumer out of bed for eating crackers.

Of course, Schumer isn't the only woman Wells has found unattractive. He's made similar comments about Melissa McCarthy, Lena Dunham, and even insulted Cameron Diaz for--gasp and horrors--aging! And while Diaz does have the unmitigated gall to be 43, like Schumer, I wouldn't say no to her.  Of course, I can't imagine the woman that would say yes to Wells. I'm not a particularly good looking guy but somebody broke the ugly stick while beating Wells with it.

I'm sorry. Was that a childish thing to say? Sure it was. But don't lie. At least some of you thought it was funny.

In fairness, Wells also obsesses on the weight of male actors like Vince Vaughn. He especially likes discussing their man-boobs for some strange reason. Personally, I don't pay that much attention to topless men in the movies I'm watching, but that's just me. Sorry Chris Hemsworth, your various shirtless scenes do nothing for me. But hey, if Jeff's all about that, go for it says I.

Some of you may have gotten the idea that I'm a little more flippant than some of the other people who have written about him. Though I will admit that I'd totally buy Anna Merian a drink for her article on him. But I'm flippant because I can't possibly take a thing he says seriously. Nobody who calls themselves a cineaste would write and say and do the things that have been attributed to him. Seriously, this is a man who, in a podcast with Jack Theakston (http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/images/column/dance13/jackdebate.mp3) actually at 42 minutes in says "Who cares what they wanted? That includes the Directors". Who cares what the Director wanted or intended? A so-called film buff says that with a straight face and expects people to ever value his opinions?

The final clue to the fact that he's not any sort of film buff or critic is the fact that anyone and everyone who disagrees with him is obviously a fascist. All those women who take umbrage at his various sexist and fat shaming remarks? Fascists. Clearly fascists. Bob Furmanek is a fascist for wanting movies to be seen the way they were originally meant to be seen. Imagine that! Wanting to see movies the way they were intended! What's next? Purists being against Colorization? The outrage of it all!

Anyone who has read this blog in the past knows that I've mentioned Mr. Furmanek on occasion for his work through the 3-D Film Archive. What the man has done for the preservation of our 3-D movie history alone gets him sainthood in my book. However, he has also done a ton of research on the widescreen era, carefully documenting not only what was shown in widescreen but what was supposed to be shown that way. In other words, he doesn't just argue for things to be released "cleavered" (as Wells puts it). One of his most famous anti-widescreen arguments involved the 3 Stooges short Goof on the Roof. He pointed out that though the short was released widescreen, it was clearly shot for 1.37 and should have been put on DVD that way. Sony didn't listen to him and released it in widescreen anyhow, but that's not his fault.

Wells's argument is that he's watched these 1.85 films in 1.37 for decades on TV. Yes, well, that's how CinemaScope movies were shown on TV for decades, too. Should we watch Jaws or Star Wars only in Pan and Scan since that's how they were shown on TV? Should we miss out on 2/3 of the picture because "boxy is beautiful"? How about 3-D? Since House of Wax and Creature From the Black Lagoon were shown for decades in a 2-D image on TV,is that how we should watch them now? For that matter, movies were shown with commercials every ten minutes for decades on TV. Should we watch them that way now, too?

Seriously, what "cineaste" claims that movies should be put on video they way they were shown on TV for years, even when that clearly isn't the way they were meant to be seen? No one who is a serious film critic, that's for sure. That and the fact that he just freely throws around the word Fascist ("That word? I don't think it means what you think it means", Jeff) prove the pure troll aspect. We're all being played and sadly, the man is making money off our being played. So yeah, can we come to some agreement that his opinions have all the importance of a five year old donkey turd and move on?

For the record, if by chance he is serious with his "boxy is beautiful" and "this is the way I watched these thing for years" arguments, I have a little message for him:

It's okay, Jeff. The 70s are over now. Disco is dead, all the TVs are color now, and LSD is no longer the cool drug. They even gave women the right to vote. We made it into the 21st Century and Y2K didn't blow us all up. You don't need to stick to the Castle Digest Super 8 anymore, Jeff. They have things now that let you watch the whole movie. They call them Blu Rays and DVDs. Technology is a wonderful thing. It's okay to come into 2016 and be part of the real world.