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.

"And I Was Thankful To Have It!" or The Back-In-My-Day Post

It seems odd to me that, though I'm only 43, I'm actually writing a blog post called Back In My Day. Back In My Day is the sort of thing you usually hear cranky old men say, usually describing how horrible and tough things were and how people have no appreciation for how easy they have it today and how society has gone to hell because of it. It's also usually also tinged with nostalgia for a simpler time. I was born in the 1970s and a teenager in the 1980s. I freely admit to still enjoying music and certain movies from that time period, but I have no real desire to relive it and am actually not particularly nostalgic for it, either. Nonetheless, this is a Back In My Day post and it's being written for a reason.


Back in my day, if you wanted to see an old movie, you had to wait for it to be shown on TV. If it was a widescreen movie, it was being shown pan and scan, which meant you could be missing up to 2/3 of the picture. It was also edited for commercials, and there were commercials every five to ten minutes. And the TV screens weren't wide 16X9, they were square 4X3 screens.


Back in my day, we didn't have 110" screens with surround sound. The biggest TV we had was 25" and mono. My personal TV was 13", mono, and black and white. I watched many a late show on that TV. For those of you under the age of 20, the late show used to show movies on independent stations.


Back in my day, we didn't have Blu Ray or DVD. If you were lucky, you had a Super 8 projector with a 3 foot screen and could watch 10 to 20 minute digests of feature length movies. They were still putting these out in the 1980s, in fact. I have a 20 minute digest of The Empire Strikes Back still. If you had some money, you could get a VHS player. If you had some more money and the inclination, you could get a LaserDisc player, which gave a better image and had its movies in widescreen format. Of course, only 30 to 60 minutes of the movie would fit on a single side of a LaserDisc, so that meant either flipping the disc or changing it over. A simple two hour movie could be on two double sided discs. My family got the VHS player.


Back in my day, 3D TV was an occasional special shown on an independent station. You had to buy cardboard red and blue glasses from a local fast food or convenience store, turn out the lights, sit six to eight feet back, fiddle with the tint on the TV, and get next to no effect.


Back in my day, being a movie buff--especially a young one--really kinda sucked. The Three Stooges shorts and Looney Tunes cartoons were always cut up, Charlie Chan came on at 11 pm, and renting a movie meant going to a video store. And if the movie you wanted was out of stock...too bad so sad. Only a few video stores had a selection good enough to satisfy a classic fan. There was no On Demand or Netflix Streaming (which also sucks, but that's a different rant for a different day).


Why am I bringing all this up? Because it occurs to me that all too many movie buffs today--and not even the young ones per se--remember back in my day. And they should, because back in My day was--unless they're under the age of 25--back in their day, too.


We live in a high definition world now. We have Blu Ray with it's incredible image and sound quality. We have Surround Sound, to help put you in the middle of the action. We have widescreen TVs which allow 1:85 movies to be shown without black bars and Scope movies to be shown with minor black bars.  Our screen sizes are bigger, too. I have a 42" 3D TV. It's the largest TV I've ever had. Every so often, I think it's too small, but that's just a fleeting thought. This thing is a monster compared to what I grew up on.


When I was a teenager--or back in my day, if you prefer--the thought of seeing the 3D movies from the 1950s the way they were originally shown seemed like it would never happen. I watched most of those movies flat on TV, complete with commercial interruptions and no doubt editing. Except for the titles I saw on American Movie Classics, which were complete but also flat. Now I own four 50s titles on 3D Blu Ray, with at least one more promised to come out and have, in the past 14 years, managed to see nearly every one that still exists in 3D in the movies. I consider myself outrageously lucky in that regard. After all, 30 years ago, seeing Creature From the Black Lagoon in 3D meant tracking down the lousy anaglyphic VHS Universal released in 1980 or, if I was super lucky, seeing the anaglyphic 16mm print somewhere. Now, I not only own a 3D Blu Ray of it, which is gorgeous, I've managed to see it in the movies in full polarized 3D, exactly the way it was shown in 1954.  30 years ago, seeing Kiss Me Kate meant seeing it flat on VHS. There isn't a 3D Blu Ray of it (yet), but I have seen it on the big screen in proper 3D at least 4 times. Needless to say, I'm happy about both.


Point in fact, I have seen, either on TV or in the movies, 42 of the 43 movies that still exist in 3D prints from the 1950s. I may never get to see the 43rd in 3D, but I really can't complain about the rest of them.


I bring all this up because I have seen on the web and in person an awful lot of complaining about the so-called imperfect presentations of classic movies. The most recent bout has concerned the new Criterion Blu Ray of It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which has caused all manner of insane complaints, from the fact that the reconstructed footage doesn't look as good as the rest of the movie to the two or three scenes that have light Japanese subtitles to the complaints about the spaces between the radio calls during the intermission.


Good grief as Charlie Brown would say. Of course the reconstructed footage doesn't look as good. The trims were in bad shape to begin with. There's only so much that can be done. And as for the Japanese subtitles--try watching a whole movie like that. I've done it. I so wanted 3D copies of House of Wax and Dial M For Murder that for 10 years I had DVD-Rs of faded copies of the Japanese VHD disc in the field sequential format. And yes, I was thankful to have them.


When I first saw It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, guess what? It was the short version. On TV. In Pan and Scan. Mono. Edited for commercials. With the ending lobbed off, too! I didn't even know there was an intermission until someone taped the LD version off of TCM for me about ten years ago. Maybe I'm the easiest person in the world to please--I'm sure someone could accuse me of that--but I'm pretty happy getting to see this new extended version. Is it perfect? No, but I kinda knew that going in. Is it better than what I first saw 30 years ago? Oh, God, yes. I am in no way outraged by this Blu Ray. I am, however, a little outraged and disgusted by the people who are screaming that the Blu Ray is a rip off since it's not exactly what they want. Seriously? Seriously? Anyone who thinks that seriously needs to get a grip. This Blu Ray is far from a rip off.


Similarly, I went to the World 3D Film Expo III back in September in Hollywood. I'm surprised that this is my first mention of it on this blog as it was a really wonderful experience, but then again it may be like my friend Bob Bloom once said: when people enjoy something, they don't talk about it. They only talk if they hate it.


Well, I didn't hate the 3D Film Expo. I loved it. 10 days, 35 movies, 31 of which were from the 1950s. Some extremely rare material, including the 1947 Russian version of Robinson Crusoe. I was in my element for those 10 days, you can believe it. I am also willing to bet that that was my last time getting to see most of those movies in 3D. I think if I'm ever going to get to see them again, it'll be in boring old 2D. Some of them might hit 3D Blu Ray, some of them might get shown again in NYC. But I think I won't get to see quite a few of them in 3D ever again. Some of them, the last time I saw them in 3D was in 2006 at the second World 3D Film Expo. So yeah, it was pretty special for me.


Which is one of the reasons why certain people at the Expo drove me bonkers. They would sit in their seats and throw near full on temper tantrums about the presentation of some of the titles. One guy was literally slamming his fists on his chair because--are you ready for this?---Phantom of the Rue Morgue was being shown in 1:85 and not 1:33 like he wanted it to be. Really? Beyond the fact that 1:85 was the proper aspect ratio for the movie, really? How childish does one get? I could see getting up in arms if the movie was being shown out of sync, but it wasn't. Hell, I would have complained if it was out of sync, since that's a perfect way to get a 3D headache. But complaining that it's not in the aspect ratio you want it to be? Again, a grip needs to be gotten.


Part of the problem, I think, is that movie buffs--or at least certain ones--are so hung up on the presentation that they can't really sit back and enjoy the movie itself. All too often, I see complaints of one absurd nature or another--one guy complained about seventeen seconds of Digital Noise Reduction being used during opening credits (though nowhere else in the movie he admitted)--but nobody actually talking about the movie. Yes, we do have a right to expect certain movies to look perfect on Blu Ray--there's really no excuse for a new movie looking anything less than perfect and there are quite a few classics like The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca that should look perfect. But there are films that are rare and that rarity should be kept in mind far more than any perceived imperfections. Being able to see that rarity should also be cause for joy, not childish anger because it's not precisely what you want. You don't always get precisely what you want--and sometimes you don't deserve it either. I am of the opinion that more movie buffs should stop and consider the marvel of what they're seeing and be glad to see it once in a while. Because you never know. Something like it may never come around again.


Besides, back in my day, everything had imperfections. But we watched them and were thankful to have it!

3D CLASSICS COME TO BLU RAY

This month has seen the release of two classic 3D movies on 3D Blu Ray for the first time--and no, I don't mean AVATAR and THE AVENGERS (which came out last month anyway). Last week Universal released CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON in 3D as part of the UNIVERSAL MONSTERS Blu Ray set and this week Warner gave us Alfred Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER. I've only spot-checked the two discs--ok, I've watched half of DMFM already--but I'm impressed with what I've seen. This is what 3D should look like. Outside of a few titles like HUGO and THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN, most modern 3D movies aren't that impressive in terms of depth and/or effect shots. So if you think of THE AVENGERS as the ultimate 3D movie, you've seen nothing.

The 50s films were not shy about either depth or effect shots. This is not to say that those films were like their 80s counterparts throwing everything including the kitchen sink at the audience. They concentrated mostly on depth and keeping things behind the stereo window. However, when there was a gimmick shot, it was usually a memorable one. A perfect example of this is in DIAL M FOR MURDER.

For the better part of the first 45 minutes all of the action takes place behind the screen.  All this time we follow along as Ray Milland plots the murder of his wife, peering around lamps as if spying and being a co-conspirator. Then comes the movie's big moment when Anthony Dawson tries strangling Grace Kelly. Kelly desperately reaches out of the screen, almost as if imploring the audience for help. When she reaches it, it's a creepy and effective moment. We go from being in on the plot to being begged for help by the victim and not being able to do anything. It is, perhaps, the ultimate in audience manipulation and something completely lost in 2D showings.

Admittedly, DIAL M is far more subtle than CREATURE in terms of both depth and gimmick shots. But this does not make either film better or worse. CREATURE is a decent movie in it's own right and has an excellent use of 3D, especially in the underwater scenes, which are better than what JAWS 3D pulled off nearly 30 years later. The 3D really pops in this one, with fantastic levels of depth throughout and CREATURE even manages to be deeper than DIAL M. In fairness, Hitchcock confined his film to a Lomdon flat while director Jack Arnold has a jungle/water setting to play with. Arnold also uses more gimmick shots than Hitchcock. But, there's an important thing to bear in mind with Arnold's 3D films: (again) unlike their 80s counterparts, the gimmick shots related to the movie. For those who grew up seeing yo-yos and popcorn being tossed at the audience in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3, the idea of 3D movies not just tossing any old thing out of the screen may seem like a weird idea, but it's the center of both of these releases. I mean, Jack Arnold decided that a primary 3D effect for CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON should be the Creature himself clutching and clawing at the audience. Who knew? Then again, most modern 3D movies don't bother much with gimmick shots themselves. Then again, all too many of the modern ones are converted from 2D.

 This Blu Ray marks the first time CREATURE has been released (officially)  on home video in 3D since MCA put out a rotten anaglyphic VHS in 1980. I admit to having loved watching that release for years, but after seeing the Blu Ray, I'm convinced I was on good drugs I didn't even know I was on for all those years. This is the way to see CREATURE, unless you happen to get a chance to see it in dual strip polarized in the theater sometime. I got to see it that way twice myself and it's quite a treat. But this is definitely the next best thing. As for DIAL M, this is the first time since the Japanese VHD Disc in the 1980s that Dial M has gotten a home 3D release. Both look great on 3D Blu Ray, though CREATURE has some vertical misalignment issues. Depending on things, some eyestrain may be had while watching CREATURE. But that's the way the film has always been. It's also worth noting that both of these releases are the first time on home video that either film has been shown in it's original 1:85 aspect ratio.

In both cases, the image detail is beautiful. I noticed for the first time the bruise marks on Grace Kelly's neck the day after the attack. Okay, it was make up to look like bruise marks, but the point is that detail was never noticed by me before. Similarly, details in the shirts Julia Adams wore in CREATURE were made more apparent. Of course, that's the beauty of Blu Ray to begin with--that details you normally wouldn't notice become apparent. Both films look just fine and are well worth getting.

In fact, that's the bottom line. If you have a 3D TV, you seriously need both of these releases. They are truly top of the line films and ones you want to show people to show off your 3D system. The only one I can think of that can compare to them is HUGO, point in fact. And both releases have the promise of future classic 3D movies being brought to Blu Ray. Warners has already announced HOUSE OF WAX and Universal seems to be working on IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE and REVENGE OF THE CREATURE. Now if Paramount would only correct their error and put HONDO out on 3D Blu Ray, all would be right with the world. Sort of. Kind of. Not really.

Everything You Wanted to Know About 3-D Movies

Okay, not exactly everything. But a great deal of information at least on how the various technologies work. Being a 3-D filmmaker and buff, I figured I'm at least somewhat qualified to write this blog and maybe even set a few myths straight.

HOW 3-D VISION WORKS
First thing worth mentioning is how we see in 3-D at all. Humans are a rare species of animal as we are one of the few to have two eyes in the front of our face. A large number of animals have their eyes on the sides (such as fish). As a result, we see stereoscopically and they don't. For it takes two eyes in front of the face to see in 3-D. Each eye sees the world slightly differently and our brain tricks us into seeing the image whole.

Here's a little demonstration of the above. Hold your finger up roughly 12 inches in front of your face. Now blink each eye. You'll note that the left and right eye each see a slightly different part of the finger. This is also why when you were a little kid and you used to bring the pencil real close to your eyes, it seem to split into two.

Euclid and Leonardo Da Vinci had various theorems about stereoscopic vision and how our eyes work and there are books and websites all over the place on it, so I'm just going to skip ahead and get into the actual movie technologies of 3-D. One book, if you're interested, available as a free download online, is Foundations of Stereoscopic Cinema by Lenny Lipton. In the early part of the rather lengthy book, Lipton goes into the history of the science of our stereoscopic vision.

In terms of the movies, 3-D movies operate on the same basic principle as our vision. The average movie is shot with a single camera and a single lens, or eye if you will. 3-D movies are shot with either two cameras or a single camera with a special attachment, usually known as a beam splitter. The left and right eye views of each shot look just slightly different from one another and when viewed through the 3-D glasses, our brain tricks us into seeing the two images as one.

In terms of movies and TV there have been four main types of 3-D done throughout the last 90 years. They are anaglyphic, polarized, field sequential, and the pulfrich illusion. Field Sequential and Pulfrich are mostly for TV, so I'm not going to bother with them here. Maybe in a future blog.

ANAGLYPHIC MOVIES
Anaglyphic 3-D is probably the most familiar type of 3-D out there. I once referred to it, in fact, as the stereotype of 3-D. It's the type that has been used not just in movies, but in comic books, magazines, posters, T-shirts, photographs, and just about any other type of print form of 3-D. This is the type that uses opposing colored glasses. Most people say red/green, but actually red/cyan is the more commonly used type for movies and red/blue for comic books. Yellow/blue--which is tradenamed ColorCode--was used for the 3-D Super Bowl commercials and the Chuck episode earlier this year and magenta/green has been used on some recent 3-D DVDs (while others use red/cyan, go figure). This is, in some ways, the projectionist-proof form of 3-D in that no projectionist can screw it up (unlike polarized 3-D). The two images are printed on the same strip of film using the opposing colors. The glasses cancel out their color and our eyes each see the opposing color. We then put things together in our brain for the 3-D image. Pretty simple. Again, no projectionist can screw up the showing and no special screen are necessary. It can even be shown on TV. But, there are plenty of cons associated with this form of 3-D.

For one thing, though no projectionist can screw it up, any printing lab can. The colors have to be printed precisely or else the effect won't work. This goes for the glasses as well. This is also why until recently it has rarely worked on TV. The tubes in the standard CRT based tv vary their colors ever so slightly and therefore almost never match. Computer monitors and modern flat screen TVs have better color control, so 3-D, if printed right, does work on them.

Also, color anaglyph (sometimes called polybiochromatic!) plain out stinks. The glasses weaken the other colors in the film and if you're going to shoot a color anaglpyh film, you have to watch your color scheme (which people rarely do). I'm also not convinced that the depth in the color anaglyph image is as good as it is in the black and white image, but that might just be me.

The other big knock on anaglyphic 3-D is the amount of misinformation that swirls around it. For several years now, no end of so-called experts--just including one Roger Ebert (who must have been traumatized as a child by a 3-D movie since he so passionately hates them)--have posted over the internet and other media that all previously made 3-D movies were in the anaglyphic format. WRONG!

Now, first off, Ebert should know better since him and Siskel were reviewing films like Spacehunter and Jaws 3-D on their TV show in 1983. Come to it, if you look hard enough, their reviews of those movies might even be on Youtube. I still have my Jaws 3-D glasses and they were not red/blue, they were polarized. Beyond that, showings of 3-D movies from past years pop up every so often. The glasses are almost always polarized.

It is true that the earliest 3-D movies were anaglyphic. I've seen a couple from the 1920s and the three Pete Smith shorts (1936-1941) were all anaglyphic. There were a couple of early 1950s shorts shot that way, too. And post the 1950s, there has been a handful of movies released in anaglyphic format (the most recent being the two from Robert Rodriguez). But, every 3-D feature of both the 1950s and the 1980s, and most of the ones from the 1970s and 1990s, were polarized, not anaglyph. So where did this stupid rumor come from?

Two sources, I think. In the 1960s and 1970s, Columbia and Universal released to the home market on Super 8 and 8mm a couple of titles in anaglyphic 3-D. They were digests of Creature From the Black Lagoon, It Came From Outer Space, The Mad Magician, and the two 3 Stooges shorts. Likewise, in 1972, Universal had an idea to reissue Creature and ICFOS and did so in anaglyphic format. And in the late 1970s, Universal's 16mm rental outfit, Swank, rented anaglyphic prints of Creature, Revenge of the Creature, House of Wax, Dial M For Murder, and ICFOS. Similarly, another outfit called Kit Parker films released The Mad Magician, The Maze, and the two 3 Stooges shorts. This is also around the time the 7 anaglyphic porns made by Stephen Gibson were in circulation (met Steve, once. Nice guy and a 3-D enthusiast, but his choice of subject matter is unfortunate). And in the early 1980s, a company called 3-D Video Corporation--headed by, among other people, Dan Symmes (a 3-D expert)--coverted several 1950s titles to anaglyphic 3-D for broadcast on TV (none of which work, btw). The last of the 1950s films to show up on TV in anaglyph format was John Wayne's Hondo in 1991. So, that could explain where the rumors come from. But they are still wrong.

POLARIZED 3-D
Polarized 3-D is the better version of the format. There's been 3 major variations on it over the years: dual strip polarized, single strip polarized, and digital polarized (which is the modern form).

The 1950s movies were shown in dual strip polarized. This is arguably the best form of 3-D you can find. Each eye is shown through a separate projector. The two projectors are locked together with a mechanism and are (supposed to be) running in perfect synchronisation. The images are each shot through a cross polarized lens onto the screen and the glasses do the rest. The primary benefit to all this is since each image is going through it's own projector, loss of light is minimized. The image is brighter and sharper looking, which also makes for better depth. The primary con is that any lazy projectionist and/or theater owner can (and frequently did) screw it up.

For one thing, polarized 3-D requires an actual silver screen. White screens de-polarize the light which destroys the effect. And the screen needs to be silver and not just silver painted. But there were cheap theater owners who simply applied a paint of silver coat to their screens thinking that would work. It didn't. Also, the projectors, as noted above, needed to be in synchronisation. Projectionists would let them go out of synch and then not bother to fix them. To give you an idea of what that might look like, imagine watching a scene of somebody talking. Now imagine your left eye seeing them with their mouth open or their arm raised and the right eye seeing the arm down and the mouth closed. It's what's called retinal rivalry and it was the leading cause of the infamous 3-D headaches. Not the glasses, but the projection of the image.

In 1966, Arch Oboler, the man who started the 1950s craze with Bwana Devil, thought he had the synchronization problem beat. He developed a system where the two images were printed on the same strip of film (known as single strip polarized!). The images could be printed side by side or over and under (the more common version) and then shot through a special box known as a beam splitter. The beam splitter contained both polarized lenses. Oboler's idea also eliminated the necessity of having an intermission, which every 1950s film had (so the reels could be changed). While Oboler's idea looks good on paper, what he failed to take into consideration is the stupidity of the American projectionist and/or theater owner. If they could screw it up, they would.

For one thing, we were back to needing the silver screens (all polarized 3-D films need silver screens actually). If the theater didn't have one, you knew the effect wasn't going to work. Projectionists would fit the beam splitter on incorrectly in any sort of manner, including reverse 3-D (the background would pop out and the foreground would recede into the screen!). Think that's funny? I've seen it. At a 1996 showing of Dial M For Murder, the first 40 minutes were shown in reverse 3-D. Very aggravating. Also, if the film broke and the projectionist spliced it, if they didn't splice the corresponding left and right images, we were back to non-synched 3-D. Yuck. Combine that with the truly crappy 3-D movies released in the 1970s and 1980s and it's no wonder it didn't last.

Digital polarized might well be idiot--I mean projectionist--proof. The modern form uses a digital projector, a screen set up in front of said projector, and a silver screen along with circular polarized 3-D glasses. The film is made up of jpegs and put on a hard drive. The image alternates 144 times a second--6 times faster than the standard 24 frames per second film projector. Each second is composed of 72 movie images (36 left, 36 right) and 72 black images. The left image is shown, then a black, then a right. The special polarized screen in front of the projector also alternates the 144 times a second, changing the polarizing filter. Persistence of vision and the sheer speed of the projector allow us to see the 3-D image. And with the circular polarized glasses, you can do the one thing no other form of 3-D allows--tilt your head. Again, this seems to be projectionist proof, or maybe I've just lucked out and seen some competent showings. Only time will tell.

Okay, I hope you all took notes. There will be a test later. ;)

Next time I'll sing the praises of Hitchcock and/or Spielberg. See ya at the movies!