Welcome to summer movie hell—another blockbuster season filled with costly digital effects that disappoint more often than they surprise. During a University of Southern California film symposium in June, two directors guilty of creating this trend, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, predicted the imminent collapse of their mega-budget film industry. In its place, they suggested a future of immersive technologies, where theaters would offer thrills you couldn’t get via Netflix.
In fact, Hollywood tried this more than 50 years ago, when filmmakers like William Castle pushed the boundaries of the movie-going experience to make it more interactive. Equal parts technical innovation and publicity stunt, the gimmick craze of the 1950s put special effects in your face and under your seat, literally: Some audiences got a whiff of the action in scented screenings, while others were jolted out of their seats by electric buzzers.
Richard Peterson, who’s the director of programming for the Smith Rafael Film Center, says that features we take for granted today, like surround sound and widescreen projection, were initially seen as novelties. Even color was originally a gimmick. “In the 1920s,” explains Peterson, “before they had full Technicolor, they had what’s called two-color Technicolor, and films like The Phantom of the Opera had these two-color sequences.”
Top: A 1959 poster for The Tingler 1959 hints at the film’s interactive experience. Above: The curved, widescreen projection system called Cinerama was a precursor to IMAX.
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First released as a silent film in 1925, The Phantom of the Opera included black-and-white footage that was tinted various shades to influence the mood, such as blue for night shots or yellow for bright exterior scenes, a fairly common technique for silent films. However, a few select sequences were also filmed with Technicolor’s new Process 2 film, which utilized both red and green tones for an eerie, desaturated version of the full color spectrum. Full-color films began appearing in the 1930s, culminating in the ultimate Technicolor trick, the sepia-to-color opening for The Wizard of Oz in 1939.
After the Great Depression hit, the slump in theater attendance inspired the film industry to fill seats through marketing gimmicks like price cuts or prize giveaways. No longer could directors rely only on the strength of a film’s plot or celebrity stars; instead they learned to build hype that would spread through word of mouth. But this was only the beginning.
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Following World War II, the film industry was dealt two major blows that compelled filmmakers to explore new forms of gimmickry: the rise of home television sets and a court decision dismantling studio monopolies. With the Hollywood antitrust case of 1948, the Supreme Court ruled against Paramount Pictures, forcing studios to divide their production, exhibition, and distribution streams. As a result, all the major studios, including MGM, RKO, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros., had to sell their national theater chains and slow production efforts to focus on releases with a legitimate chance of box-office success.
Film buff and ephemera collector John Cozzoli, who runs the blog Zombo’s Closet, explains that the Paramount-case decrees helped level the playing field, giving the five biggest studios some competition. “The shortage of movies from the major studios led to a surge of independent production companies taking up the slack,” says Cozzoli, “and the use of even wilder gimmick campaigns to bring people back to the theater experience.”
For decades, studios had produced marketing packets, known as pressbooks, which were distributed to theaters to help advertise each film, with the ultimate aim of growing box office receipts. But in the 1950s, industry executives became nervous enough to try a bunch of wacky new publicity methods and in-theater gimmicks to help fill seats. Elaborate pressbook sections on showmanship, or “exploitation” as it was commonly known, helped theaters plug their films to the local media and potential audiences. “Pressbooks provided ideas like holding a local contest, or maybe doing an impromptu parade down Main Street with people dressed in monster masks, holding up a sign heralding a double-feature of terror not to be missed,” says Cozzoli.
