Kevin Heffernan is Assistant Professor in the Division of Cinema-Television at Southern Methodist University. He is the coauthor of My Son Divine and co-screenwriter and associate producer of the documentary Divine Trash, winner of the Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.

Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold

Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953-1968By Kevin Heffernan

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2004 Kevin Heffernan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822332022

Chapter One

Horror in Three Dimensions: House of Wax and Creature from the Black Lagoon

In a historical survey of three-dimensional motion pictures, R. M. Hayes writes, “There have always been two thoughts on House of Wax: one, it is a classic film of the horror genre, and two, it is claptrap exploitation of the worst kind. There seems to be no middle ground.” Lowbrow associations continue to plague 3-D films, and modern viewers’ experience of 3-D movies is probably limited to an eighties or nineties revival screening of House of Wax (1953), Dial M for Murder (1954), or perhaps a midnight showing of camp sci-fi outings such as Space-hunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983), the campier westerns such as Comin’ at Ya! (1981), or the campiest sexploitation films such as The Stewardesses (1969). These films are often remembered as a collection of tedious linking scenes in between “gimmick shots” of body parts, hurled objects, or, in John Waters’s account of the all-male porn film Heavy Equipment (1977), “life itself” flying off the screen.

But the brief 3-D boom of 1952 to 1954 was a crucial time in which technological, economic, and artistic changes rocked the production, distribution, and exhibition branches of the movie business. The stereoscopic feature was one of a large number of technological innovations that had profound economic consequences for theater owners, and films such as House of Wax and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) were early indicators of the way genre films would be made, marketed, and exhibited over the next thirty years. Most important, the technological race of the early fifties, in which the production and distribution branch of the industry rapidly innovated 3-D, widescreen, and stereo sound, left many neighborhood theaters and subsequent-run theaters with huge bills for technological upgrades and a severe shortage of product to play. This would have a tremendous effect on the market for the horror film in the next decade.

The technological changes of 1952 and 1953 were part of an escalating struggle between manufacturers of equipment and centralized distribution on one hand, and the more diffuse branch of exhibition on the other. The newly divorced production-distribution branch of the industry sought to profit from the sale of new technology to the exhibitors both in the actual monies paid for the installation of the equipment and in increasingly confiscatory rental terms for the highly publicized films showcasing that new technology. In the case of 3-D, what was being sold to exhibitors was not so much the films themselves as the competing hardware systems needed to exhibit 3-D films (and the stereo sound systems with which the 3-D systems were packaged), which were vying with one another to become the new industry standard.

The first major-studio release in 3-D was House of Wax by Warner Bros. in 1953. House of Wax was able to negotiate the often conflicting demands of showcasing the new process and maintaining a cinema of narrative integration through the unique narrative and stylistic features of the horror genre. Despite the encumbrances of special viewing glasses and a complex interlocking mechanism that enabled two projectors to run in sync (a process that necessitated an intermission to change reels an hour into the film), House of Wax was one of the box-office sensations of 1953. The 3-D era’s other horror success was Universal-International’s Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954. Creature was released in a wide saturation campaign, booked into dozens of theaters in some areas and supported by massive advertising in television, radio, and newspapers. The upscale trimmings of House of Wax, such as color and period costumes, were completely absent from Creature from the Black Lagoon. The latter film was highly derivative of films like King Kong and The Thing from Another World, which privilege shock and gimmick shots over the moving camera and depth staging of House of Wax. For this type of exploitation of 3-D to occur, exhibitors had to wait for an inexpensive, single-projector system of 3-D to be introduced via the Moropticon process in 1954.

In 1953, almost all of the major studios were aligned with at least one major manufacturer in an attempt to adopt an image or sound technology that they hoped would become the new industry standard. The first major technological sensation of the “new era,” though, did not come from a major studio. Cinerama bowed in a program of shorts, This Is Cinerama, at the Broadway Theater in New York in early 1953. Developed by inventor Fred Waller, Cinerama consisted of three projectors running in synchronization on a 142-degree curved screen. Cinerama added to the illusion of depth with six-track stereophonic sound. The Cinerama program consisted of travelogue footage featuring the Grand Canyon, the canals of Venice, and a bullfight in Spain. By the year’s end, Variety reported that This Is Cinerama had brought in $6.5 million in its engagement in six cities. However, the tremendous outlay of money needed to convert a theater to Cinerama was a major impediment to its implementation as anything like an industry standard. Estimates of conversion cost varied from $70,000 for basic equipment to as high as $150,000 including construction costs, consulting fees, and labor.

The most successful technological innovation from this period is Twentieth Century-Fox’s development of CinemaScope, as detailed in John Belton’s Widescreen Cinema. According to Richard Hincha, the cost for conversion to CinemaScope was $25,000 for a large theater, $15,000 to $17,000 for a medium-size two thousand seat house, and about $10,000 for a small house. As Belton points out, both of the exhibitor trade organizations-Allied States Organization, which represented smaller independent theaters, and Theater Owners of America, the organization of larger first-run theaters and chains-objected to Fox’s insistence that exhibitors purchase the entire CinemaScope package, which included special lenses, an expensive metallic curved screen, and magnetic stereo sound. Eventually, Fox withdrew the stereo-only policy and saw the sale of CinemaScope packages increase significantly throughout 1954 and 1955. In fact, the sale of CinemaScope technology to the exhibitors was handled by a Fox subsidiary, CinemaScope Products Inc., and by September 1954, Fox had spent about $10 million on the development and marketing of CinemaScope, while exhibitors had spent nearly $67million for the equipment. Thus, according to Hincha, “Fox may have reaped sizable profits in this area.”

The most famous, and I think the least understood, technological innovation from this period was 3-D. As early as the twenties, filmmakers had begun to simulate binocular separation of the right and left eyes’ views by printing the left and right images in red and green on a single strip of film. During projection, the red and green viewers worn by the spectators filtered out the opposite eye’s views. The brain then fused the two images into one and was fooled into thinking that it was perceiving three dimensions through this “window.” Several short films were released in this so-called anaglyph process in the 1920s by Pathe, Educational Films, and others. It was the anaglyph process that was used by engineer John Norling to produce a pair of 3-D shorts that were released by Metro in 1936 and 1938 with narration by humorist Pete Smith under the title “Audioskopics.”

In 1939, the Chrysler Corporation contracted with Norling, now working for the Polaroid Company, for a 3-D film to accompany its exhibit at the New York World’s Fair. Norling and Polaroid developed a system for binocular 3-D cinematography based on the polarization of light through chemically treated filters. As with the earlier color filters, the polarized glasses worn by the spectator register slightly different images for the left and right eyes.

The first system of polarized 3-D cinematography used by Hollywood was developed in the late forties by a firm outside the Hollywood studio system. The Natural Vision Corporation was formed by Milton Gunzburg and his optician brother Julian who, along with camera-operator Friend Baker, developed a physically enormous system of two syncgeared 35mm Mitchell cameras shooting at a forty-five degree angle through two mirrors pointing at the subject. Projection of the Natural Vision system required two interlocked projectors with polarized filters installed in the port holes of the booth. Spectators wore Polaroid viewers, and the double-projector system required an intermission to change reels. Both the glasses and the intermission were seen as drawbacks, and several Hollywood studios rejected the process.

In 1952, independent producer Arch Oboler, who had become famous as a radio writer and director of both the long-running horror series Lights Out and the prestige anthology series Arch Oboler’s Plays, produced, wrote, and directed Bwana Devil in the polarized 3-D process. Oboler’s film was shot in Anscocolor and featured Robert Stack, Barbara Britton, and Nigel Bruce in a story of railroad workers in Africa plagued by repeated and violent attacks by ravenous lions (the “bwana devil,” or king of the beasts). Virtually every sequence was blocked to foreground the new process, with an almost static tableaux of carefully arranged actors in alternating dialogue and action scenes, the latter featuring hurled spears, growling lions, and rifles pointing into the audience for maximum 3-D effect.

None of the major distributors were interested in the film, but former RKO studio chief George J. Schaeffer, Gunzburg’s associate, secured bookings for the film in Hollywood and Los Angeles. Despite wretched reviews, the film became a huge novelty success. At Thanksgiving in 1952, when Bwana Devil was released in Hollywood and Los Angeles, the company was telling Motion Picture Herald that the system “can be installed in any theater in the nation at a cost a good deal under $100.” In fact, by the time all needed equipment was purchased, including a special high-reflection screen (the projection and viewing filters drastically reduced image brightness), the cost was more like $3,000. Oboler sold the rights to the film outright to United Artists, which immediately rushed the film into general release in February. Bwana Devil grossed over $1.3 million in its first month of general release in thirty key theaters, including a record-breaking run at the Warner Aldine in Philadelphia in spite of a huge snowstorm. Variety predicted that the film would gross between $4 million and $5 million domestically, but the film’s subsequent-run engagements came up against a glut of 3-D releases from the majors, and the film ended 1953 with a gross of $2.7 million.

Exhibitors who made a bid for first-run engagements of Bwana Devil found themselves paying a fifty-fifty split with United Artists as well as paying half the cost of the Polaroid viewers. United Artists claimed, as would other distributors of 3-D films, that these terms were the result of the high price of prints (each reel was printed twice, one for each projector) and the need to manufacture and circulate multiple trailers for the 3-D and flat versions of the film. This expense, as well as the confiscatory terms exacted by the distributor from the exhibitor, would later be a larger impetus for the development of a single-projector system.

Of course, exhibitors, not the public, were the consumers of the new technology, and money flowed into the Gunzburg coffers before a single ticket had been sold. In 1953, Natural Vision secured a one-year distribution deal for the special glasses crucial to the process. The Gunzburg company bought one hundred million pairs from Polaroid for 6.7 cents apiece and sold them to exhibitors at 10 cents apiece, realizing a two million dollar profit in 1953 from these transactions alone. Polaroid, who for a time had completely cornered the market on 3-D viewers, saw its stock rise 33 percent in the early months of 1953. The subsidiary role that the movies themselves played in 3-D’s financial success was noted by producer George Jessel, who bitingly predicted in early 1953 that “one year from now the studios will be making nothing but glasses.”

For Bwana Devil‘s highly profitable first run, the film was released only to first-run and first neighborhood-run theaters. Virtually all of the major chains installed 3-D for the first cycle of polarized features. Loew’s spent $300,000 to convert its New York chain of thirty-one theaters to 3-D for the release of Bwana Devil. Chain exhibitor Robert Lippert even installed 3-D in his Hollywood drive-in theater, the Starlight, with plans to install it in twenty-three more. The major chains were in the position to raise their ticket prices to pay distributors for the “new era” pictures. Cinerama had started the “ticket tilt” (Variety‘s phrase), and special releases in widescreen, 3-D, and later road-show releases in Todd-AO enabled first-run chains to raise their prices across the board, even for standard releases.

At a meeting of small-theater trade group Allied Central of New Jersey in summer 1953, affiliates claimed that 3-D was most profitable first for the manufacturers and deliverers of equipment, second for the producers and distributors of films, and finally for the exhibitor. The expense of upgrading houses to 3-D, the high rentals charged for stereoscopic features, and the excessive prereleases (high-profile, extensive engagements before a film’s official “first run”) in theater chains would frustrate the small houses throughout the 3-D period. In October, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers conducted a survey of the five thousand theaters that had converted to stereoscopic 3-D and found that 68 percent were circuit houses and only 28 percent were independents.

For a typical theater, the lenses, screen, and interlocking mechanism of the dual-projector system cost about $1,500, with stereo sound running an additional $10,000. A small exhibitor complained in Variety that “while the big chains use stockholder money for new installations, we have to dig into our own pockets.” This situation was exacerbated by International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees projectionist union rules that three projectionists be employed to run 3-D films. The owner of a six hundred seat independent house in Minnesota recognized that the films were merely a conduit through which to sell equipment to theaters. A letter to an exhibitors’ trade journal complained, “The distributors who sold us rock bottom budget pictures for big film rentals and the glasses manufacturers who charged us a dime for glasses that probably cost about a cent to manufacture, were the ones who made the dough.”

The subsequent-run playoff of Bwana Devil in 3-D demonstrated both how difficult the terms were for showing 3-D films for the small exhibitor and how important the glasses were to the economics of 3-D. Whereas first-run theaters could raise their ticket prices enough to compensate for the fifty-fifty split with United Artists on the cost of the viewers, subsequent-run houses found that patrons balked at the ten-cent ticket increase that kept the theater from taking a loss on the glasses. This was bitterly noted by a New Jersey exhibitor, who said, “We’re doing so much business with 3-D that we’re going out of business.” After spending $3,000 to convert equipment and paying the 55 percent distributor split, the neighborhood theater often found itself in the red.

Continues…
Excerpted from Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Goldby Kevin Heffernan Copyright © 2004 by Kevin Heffernan. Excerpted by permission.
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