What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [75]
If Smell-O-Vision caught on, they would need to rush production of enough scent generators to equip moviehouses across the country. A deal was struck with Belock Instrument Company, a Long Island defense contractor that supplied guidance and control components for Atlas and Polaris missiles. Belock was seeking consumer applications for its technology, and they agreed to manufacture the scent machines and to provide state-of-the-art eight-channel stereo sound as well. The company featured a photo of a Smell-O-Vision machine in its October 1959 annual report.
The Todd Organization spent nearly $2 million ($14 million in today’s money) producing the film, not a trivial amount in 1959 Hollywood. Shooting on multiple locations in Spain was expensive, as was using 70 mm widescreen cameras and eight-channel sound. Established actors like Peter Lorre (famous for his roles in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon) came with a high price tag as well.
The Todd Organization also invested in a host of marketing tie-ins. The Schiaparelli company produced a limited-edition Scent of Mystery perfume, the same worn by Elizabeth Taylor’s character and smelled by moviegoers in the theater. A thirty-page souvenir program to be sold in theaters included a bound-in soft vinyl record. The movie’s title song, sung by crooner Eddie Fisher, was released as a 45 rpm single, along with an LP soundtrack album and sheet music. A novelization of the film by screenwriters William and Audrey Roos, illustrated with stills from the movie, was published as a Dell paperback. Press agent Bill Doll prepared and distributed more than forty individually captioned publicity stills to promote the film, and many of them ran in newspapers and national magazines. This level of expense and effort implies that the Smell-O-Vision team wasn’t indulging in a cheap gimmick—they expected a serious return on their substantial investment.
A Challenger Appears
On October 17, 1959, the New York Times reported that Walter Reade Jr. was “rushing plans to uncork a smell system of his own before Dec. 22, when Mr. Todd’s film opens in Chicago.” The forty-two-year-old Reade ran a chain of movie theaters and a movie distribution company (Continental Distributing, Inc.) founded by his father. For $300,000 he had just bought the rights to a previously released Italian travelogue about Red China, which he reedited and dubbed for scent. At a press conference, Reade revealed that his film, now called Behind the Great Wall, would use a new process called AromaRama: “You must breathe it to believe it!” Most alarming for Todd and Laube, the Reade picture would premiere in New York on December 2, three weeks before Smell-O-Vision’s debut in Chicago. Noting that Reade was “obviously rushing to beat Todd’s premiere date,” Newsweek went for the easy pun and declared that “Todd might be beaten by a nose.” Thus was born the epic competition between Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama, a duel that Variety dubbed “the battle of the smellies.”
According to Reade’s press kit, AromaRama dispersed smells through the theater’s existing air-conditioning ducts with a boost from Freon gas, while an electronic air purifier prevented odor buildup in the auditorium. A battery of premixed scents would last, it was claimed, for twenty-one performances. Installation costs ran from $3,500 to $7,500 per theater.
Detail for detail, Reade’s AromaRama was the system announced thirteen months earlier by Charles Weiss, who was now part of the AromaRama team. This raises a question: Had Reade acquired an independent business from Weiss, or had Weiss been a stalking horse for Reade all along?
BEHIND THE GREAT WALL became the first commercially released smellie when it opened at the DeMille Theater in New York on December 2, 1959. That Reade chose a venue directly across the street from Todd’s Warner Cinema was either a coincidence