What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [72]
In any case, the idea of odorized movies had taken on a life of its own. Walt Disney got excited about it when he was planning Fantasia in 1938. He considered floral perfumes for the Nutcracker Suite, incense for the Ave Maria and Credo, and gunpowder to stoke the devilishness of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence (his conductor, Leopold Stokowski, was especially keen on this). Disney, while reluctant to give up on such a “great publicity angle,” eventually decided to steer away for cost reasons. A 1944 Warner Bros. cartoon called “The Old Grey Hare” followed Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd into the distant future; an elderly Fudd reads a newspaper headline in the year 2000: “Smellovision Replaces Television.” The Soviet Union, sensing another Cold War technology challenge from the Americans, tried to get in on the act. The Russian movie director Grigory Alexandrov claimed in 1949 that the Soviet film industry “was on the verge of producing smellies,” but there is no record they ever did.
The Path to Smell-O-Vision
Smell-O-Vision was the lifelong quest of an obscure Swiss-American entrepreneur and fragrance enthusiast named Hans E. Laube. The saga began in 1939 when Laube, a tall, bespectacled, thirty-nine-year-old advertising executive from Zürich with a flair for invention and a passion for fragrance, developed a theatrical scent system that released multiple smells during a film. Along with financier Robert Barth and movie producer Conrad A. Schlaepfer, he formed a company called Odorated Talking Pictures. As a showcase for their new technology, the partners spent 30,000 Swiss francs (about $101,000 in today’s terms) to make an English-language feature film called My Dream. Its rudimentary plot included twenty smells: “A young man meets a pretty woman in a park. She disappears, but lets fall a handkerchief which diffuses a perfume. On the basis of this smell the man takes up pursuit. The public can also smell along: Rose scent, hospital atmosphere, car exhaust, and finally incense during the wedding of the pair in a Gothic chapel.”
The OTP partners unveiled their system at a press conference in Bern on December 2, 1939, garnering a mention in the New York Times in February 1940. Even better, they arranged to have My Dream shown in the Swiss Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair.
On the evening of Saturday, October 19, 1940, Laube’s scented film was shown in public for the first—and evidently last—time in the United States. The film historian Hervé Dumont describes what happened: “At the conclusion of the performance the O.T.P. equipment, along with the only copy of the film, is seized by the American police under the pretext that a similar, patented system already exists in the USA. The promoters stay in town and press various lawsuits in order to get back their material. In vain: Barth dies there, after he—like Schlaepfer—lost his entire investment.”
Despite this disaster, Laube refused to quit. He stayed in America during World War II to promote his inventions. Laube pitched supermarket ad displays with smells to accompany slides of food. He developed a device he claimed could release odors in synchrony with a television broadcast—more than 2,000 odors-on-demand available in your living room. Film and television deals continued to elude him, however. He became disillusioned and returned to Europe in 1946.
Enter Michael Todd
Laube, a quiet and intense inventor, might not have gotten very far had he not met Michael Todd, a Broadway impresario and flamboyant force of nature. A risk-taker and a feisty competitor, Todd spent freely on special effects to draw big