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As the popularity of television grew in the
early 1950’s the motion picture industry found
itself losing customers. To regain viewers movie
executives began trying new and different things.
One of these was the release of 3-D movies.
Actually, using 3-D in film wasn’t a new phenomenon.
Innovators had experimented with various 3-D
technologies since the silent film era. However, it
wasn’t until the 1950s that 3-D was attempted on a
larger scale.
The basic principal of 3-D involved using two
cameras spaced apart so their images approximated
what two eyes would see. The exposed film from one
camera was laid over the film of the other to
produce a single movie print with offset images. The
print when projected would produce a double image.
Special polarized glasses could then be worn, and
the viewer would see a 3 dimensional scene.
The first 3-D film during the decade was
Bwana Devil. Premiering in November of 1952, the
movie starred Robert Stack (of TV’s The
Untouchables and Unsolved Mysteries),
Barbara Britton, and Nigel Bruce (Dr. Watson in the
Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films). The
film was set in Africa and dealt with man-eating
lions attacking railway workers. While the movie
itself was not very good, some of the 3-D effects
were.
Over the next couple of years many more movies were
released in 3-D. Among these were 3-D versions of
House of Wax, Hondo, Dial M For Murder and Kiss Me
Kate. For a time over 5,000 American theaters showed
3-D movies. There were also 3-D movies produced in
Germany, Britain, Japan, Mexico and Hong Kong.
However, the 3-D fad didn’t last. Some
viewers suffered eyestrain and headaches from
watching 3-D films. In addition, if the projection
wasn’t done perfectly by the theater the film was
just a blurred mess. As a result, the regular
version of a film often had more viewers than the
3-D version.
As the 3-D fad died the film industry turned
to other ways of competing with television -
widescreen aspect ratios, CinemaScope, etc.
However, use of 3-D in film did not disappear
entirely. Today’s technology has far surpassed that
of the 1950’s, and many 3-D movies are now shown on
huge screens at a number of IMAX theaters.
by
Guy Belleranti
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