What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [74]
After the funeral, twenty-eight-year-old Mike Todd Jr. took the reins of his father’s production company, where he had been working for years. Though the son had little of his father’s charisma and outsized appetites, he was a smart and sociable young man with ambitions of his own. Perhaps hoping to establish himself with a blockbuster new film process, Mike junior threw himself and his company’s resources behind a smell movie project called Scent of Danger. He signed Hans Laube to an exclusive, long-term contract and lent him the company’s New York warehouse space to work in, and the Cinestage Theatre in Chicago for installation and full-scale testing. Glenda Jensen, then a secretary in Todd’s New York office, recalls that Laube was intimately involved in planning the film. He met regularly with Mike junior and scriptwriters William and Audrey Roos in the spring and summer of 1958, crafting a script that would showcase his scent effects. United Artists, which had distributed 80 Days, agreed to underwrite the film. The widowed Elizabeth Taylor was cast to play the woman at the heart of the mystery in a ten-second-long, smellable cameo.
At the end of the summer, Film Daily reported that a public-relations executive named Charles Weiss was planning his own scented feature film. The Weiss Screen-Scent Corp. had lined up Rhodia, a well-known fragrance company, to supply smells to be blown over the audience via the theater’s air-conditioning system. The paper reported that production would begin on March 26, 1959, and that release was slated for late 1959 in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit. Nothing was said about a director, producer, stars, or studio. It would have been hard for Todd and Laube to know how credible this threat was.
Todd began filming in Spain on March 30, 1959, and Bill Doll, the Todds’ superstar press agent, set to work building a buzz in the media. A story in Film Daily revealed the cast, a new title (Scent of Mystery), a new name for the process (Smell-O-Vision), and a release date (an August premiere in Chicago). The story ran with a now-famous photo of Mike junior and Laube on either side of the scent generator’s mechanical brain. The Los Angeles Times disclosed the movie’s ad slogan: “First (1893) they moved, then (1927) they talked, now (1959) they smell.”
Laube, meanwhile, began installing and testing his system at the Cinestage in Chicago. The odors in his machine were contained in a set of forty 400 cc cylinders or “cells.” A syringelike pickup nozzle descended into a cell, extracted 2 cc of fragrance, and injected it into a blower. Scented air was carried into the theater through plastic tubing and released from perforated cylinders (eighteen inches long and three quarters of an inch in diameter) mounted on seatbacks.
Laube shuttled between New York and Chicago every week for months; he hated flying, so he took the train seventeen hours each way. Around June, Laube, joined by his close friend and collaborator Bert Good, began long hours of experimentation in the warehouse space at 1700 Broadway. They were there on a daily basis, fine-tuning the delivery of scent to a mocked-up row of theater seats in their makeshift laboratory. Hal Williamson, then a new employee of Todd Productions, remembers that Mike junior was a frequent visitor to the test site. Finally the system was ready to demonstrate to the United Artists brass, including president Robert Benjamin. Elizabeth Taylor, who now owned Todd’s estate and was herself an investor in the project, flew in for the evening demonstration. There was a lot at stake, but the studio execs were impressed with the new technology and agreed to continue their support.
Shooting wrapped on July 4 with the production already badly behind schedule. The planned August premiere was pushed back to year’s end; Mike junior told the New York Times they