What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [70]
[T]he producers of this film believe that today’s audiences are mature enough to accept the fact that some things in life just plain stink.
—from the prologue to Polyester
I SAW JOHN WATERS’S FILM POLYESTER ON ITS FIRST RELEASE in 1981, in a packed theater in Philadelphia. Like everyone else, I scratched and sniffed my Odorama card as an onscreen character named Francine Fishpaw (played by the obese and outrageous Divine) let one loose under the bedcovers. The audience groaned; we knew what was coming, yet we all inhaled. To this day, Waters delights in his cinematic coup: he tells me “audiences worldwide paid me money to smell a fart.”
The idea of smelling a movie has been a joke for so long, it’s easy to forget that scented films once played at major venues in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. History has not been kind to Smell-O-Vision or its rival, AromaRama; they have been relegated to books like Arts & Entertainment Fads, and Oops: 20 Life Lessons from the Fiascoes That Shaped America. The Times of London wrinkled its editorial nose and called them “cinematic stinkers” and “historic blunders.” Smell-O-Vision made Time’s list of the 100 Worst Ideas of the Century, along with Hair Club for Men, leisure suits, and New Coke. Michael and Harry Medved nominated it for a Golden Turkey Award in the category of “Most Inane and Unwelcome ‘Technical Advance’ in Hollywood History.”
The loud mockery of the pundits strikes me as a cheap shot for a couple of reasons. First, I feel a warm emotional connection to the smelly moments of Hollywood history, perhaps because of my personal role in the odorific failure of Blind Trust, or my involvement during the dot-com boom with a startup called DigiScents, Inc., that aimed to bring smell to the Internet via a PC-linked scent generator. Why is it so difficult for critics to believe that people have a sincere interest in the possibilities of scented entertainment? My second reason is a lingering suspicion that the magazines and media professors are missing something important: If it’s really such a bad idea, why does the public remain so fascinated by it? I decided to take a closer look for myself, and began spooling through miles of microfilm and talking to people who had experienced Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama for themselves. My goal? To find out whether there was something more to the story than all the snark would suggest.
THE FIRST ATTEMPT to odorize movies dates back to the earliest days of silent film and was the brainchild of Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel (1882–1936), the legendary cinematic impresario who ran New York venues such as the Rialto and the Strand. The lavish movie palace he created and named after himself—the Roxy—became a generic name for cinemas across America. The man helped make Hollywood what it is today, but the story of Rothafel’s smelly movie has a few holes in the plot.
According to Film Daily, Rothafel “tried the rose bit back in 1906, in a silent-film house he ran in Forest City, Pennsylvania. For newsreel clips of the Pasadena Rose Bowl Game, he dipped absorbent cotton in a rose essence and put it in front of an electric fan.” This charming story is repeated in book after book on the history of movies. There’s only one problem with it: there was no Rose Bowl game in 1906. The first one was played in 1902; it was such a blowout (Stanford conceded in the third quarter, trailing Michigan 49–0) that the Tournament of Roses gave up on football and ran chariot races for a few years. Football didn’t return until 1916 (Washington State 14, Brown 0). So at what movie was Roxy blowing rose essence in 1906? Pasadena had hosted a New Year’s Day Rose Parade since 1890, and the Vitascope Company filmed it for the first time in 1900. It’s more likely that Roxy scented a newsreel of flower-trimmed floats in the 1906 Rose Parade.
Roxy never repeated his improvised stunt, but it was imitated by others. In 1929 the manager of Boston’s Fenway Theatre poured a pint of lilac perfume into the ventilation system; he timed it to hit the audience just as the movie’s title