James Cameron's Avatar is the highest-grossing movie ever. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland recently opened to a record-breaking box office haul.
What do these two movies have in common? No, not men with weirdly colored faces. No, not people having an amazing size-changing adventure. What? No, Alan Rickman wasn't in Avatar. Flowers? What are you ... no, shut up, I'll tell you. Stop guessing!
The answer is 3-D. Both movies are taking in loads of money in 3-D theaters, marking an unexpected comeback for a medium that was long thought to be relegated to '50s B flicks and recent documentaries about places you could go if you weren't gorging on popcorn in an Imax theater. America has rediscovered the joy of wearing goofy glasses indoors, and all of Hollywood is gearing up to shove the third dimension down your throat.
No doubt hundreds of producers, wannabe producers, ex-producers and waiters who are trying to convince people they're really producers are already asking themselves, "What other seemingly dead movie gimmicks are just waiting to be revived to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars?"
Let's take a look.
Smell-O-Vision
There have been many attempts to integrate smell – "the grossest sense" – into cinema. Some involved misting perfumes into the theater; others gave moviegoers a sheet of scratch-and-sniff scents. Somehow, it never caught on.
Modern application: Who hasn't longed for the chance to smell a strange alien world or fantastic land? Sure, Return of the King got an Oscar, but how much better would it have been with the scent of Ent moss and Hobbit toes wafting around the theater? Perhaps in his next movie, Johnny Depp will adopt a strange perfume that lifts his character – possibly some sort of half-deranged visionary outsider living at right angles to society, but I'm just guessing here – from the merely quirky to the memorably eccentric.
Sensurround
Introduced in the 1970s, Sensurround incorporated massive low-frequency speakers into theaters, which rumbled the entire hall and basically made the entire movie feel like the THX intro sound. However, this made the building shake, sometimes causing structural damage, and made many patrons sick.
Modern application: With recent improvements in architecture and medication, there's no reason the technology couldn't be revived. To maximize the impact of the low-frequency technology, I suggest the movie be about an earthquake during a dance party near a subway station. And it should star James Earl Jones.
Percepto
Percepto was a device that "shocked" audiences by vibrating their seats at appropriate points in the movie. It was so effective at startling viewers that many women saw the film over and over, asking the projectionist to skip to the shocking portions so they could be startled more frequently and intensely.
Modern application: The commercial implications of introducing the technology to the next wide-release historical romance are self-apparent.
Emergo
This was a gimmick by the same guy who came up with Percepto. (I guess he just really liked the letter "o.") Emergo was a term meaning "suspend an inflatable, glow-in-the-dark skeleton over the audience." That's it. You just put a fake skeleton on wires and make it float over the audience during the movie's climax, which also should involve a skeleton. Thus, the origins of the phrase "the old double-skeleton trick."
Modern application: None. Come on, it's a stupid inflatable skeleton. It's not even a real skeleton.
With this overview in hand, I expect the James Camerons of the future – a group that includes James Cameron, probably – to blow all of the following: my mind, my eardrums and my nose.
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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become an auteur, a provocateur and a liqueur.
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