What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [69]
With initial fragrance formulations in hand, the next step was to adjust them so they smelled right in a big air space. This is not a concern for fragrance worn on skin, but it’s a critical step in developing an air-freshener scent. An oil that smells good on a piece of blotter paper takes on an entirely different character when it fills a room via aerosol or scented candle. The fragrance may “fall apart”: one component overwhelms the others, or is lost entirely. To get a sense of how a fragrance will smell in actual use, we test them in small rooms or, in our case, stainless-steel booths.
Within a week or so I was conducting informal scent-booth evaluations of the Blind Trust fragrances. Our staff, usually called on to rate the next “Country Meadow” air freshener, were amused to be judging pizza aroma. Still, their comments were useful (“more garlic,” “less basil,” “find a better cheese note”). When we tested the buttered-popcorn smell one afternoon, people wandered in from all over the building, asking who had microwaved the popcorn.
Blind Trust premiered in the planetarium of the Boston Science Museum on June 5, 1993. Tec’s artistic conception demanded that the audience experience everything as a blind person would—by ear or nose only. Instead of dimming the house lights, Tec plunged the room into complete blackness. Instead of a graceful word of welcome, he read aloud the program notes in their entirety. The music began and the singers stood next to the star-projector in the center of the room. Tec’s four odor-wranglers stealthily took up positions by the hall’s air inlets, located on the walls at head level. Armed with aerosol cans, they waited for their cues to start spraying. It was soon clear that even four cans at once were no match for the planetarium. Odors that were powerful in a living room seemed delicate in a hall this big. Also, the cues weren’t always well timed. Too often the smell arrived before the scene had been established, leaving the audience sniffing in puzzlement. Instead of building a multisensory realism, the scent effects sowed confusion. Smelling my contributions in action, I thought we could have improved upon them here and there: the pizza was overly garlicky, and the fresh-linen smell in the dry cleaner’s scene was too weak.
In the pitch-black hall, it was hard to know when a scene was over, leaving the audience uncertain when to applaud. At the end of this long and frustrating performance, Tec read the show’s entire production credits, thereby destroying whatever sympathy his beleagured audience had left.
The Boston Globe’s review was merciless: “Blind Trust: Hold Your Nose.” While noting that Tec’s troupe had “built a modest reputation for creating new, quasi-improvised operas on themes of political correctness, Cambridge-style,” the paper ripped the new production to shreds. The music was “worthless” when not “derivative and mechanical” in the Phillip Glass mode. The improvised singing consisted of “verbal, vocal and harmonic cliché.” And the odors, alas, were “confusing and unpleasant.”
In the end, Givaudan-Roure did not get the positive press it had hoped for. We didn’t even get credit for trying. When a show stinks up a storm all by itself, I’m not sure even the best of stage scents can salvage it. Roland Tec went on write a play and direct a movie. The last time I checked, however, Blind Trust was not part of his online biography.
CHAPTER 8
Hollywood Psychophysics