What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [79]
WERE SCENTED MOVIES simply gimmicks? John Waters thinks so. He tells me that his inspiration for Odorama was William Castle, whose promotions in the 1950s were the very definition of Hollywood gimmicks. Castle, for example, hid vibrating electric motors under random seats and set them off during the Vincent Price horror film The Tingler. Castle’s stunts were cheap and easy—no inventors spent long years in the lab perfecting them, and no lawyers were paid to file patents, incorporate companies, and draw up licensing agreements.
I ask Waters if movie smells can be anything other than a gimmick. “You mean for real in a drama? No. I think it will always be a gimmick, because it takes you out of the movie.
“To me, what made Polyester work were bad smells. All the movies had good smells. We started with a good smell, and ended with a good smell, but we had bad smells all through it and that’s what made it successful. Never is it going to be successful if it’s good smells. It’s boring. You have bad ones, it’s funny. If it’s ever used again, it will always be for comedy.”
But despite his protestations that it’s all in good fun, when the Rugrats Go Wild feature-length cartoon came out in 2003 with scratch-and-sniff “Odorama” cards, John Waters hit the roof. Attorneys for his studio, New Line Cinema, went to work, and in short order the Rugrats and their corporate owners at Nickelodeon and Viacom dropped the use of the name Odorama.
At the heart of every gimmick is an idea worth defending. The notion of scented entertainment—whether in the movies, a dance club, an opera, or a concert hall—remains attractive and widely popular. As an added dimension, it offers all the possibilities of sight and sound: compelling realism, surprise, and emotional transport, as well as sly commentary, comedy, and ironic distance. I have no doubt that a director with sufficient olfactory genius could create a superbly entertaining smellie. It’s unfair to ask such a person to develop the necessary technology as well. Somewhere in our wireless and digital world there is an elegant way to deliver scent to an audience. When it becomes a reality and falls into the right creative hands, we may see a new dawn of Smell-O-Vision.
Aftermath
The golden age of scented movies was brief but spectacular. It began in the spring of 1958 and was over by the summer of 1960. Neither Smell-O-Vision nor AromaRama would ever be used again.
The equipment Reade used for AromaRama—whatever it may have looked like—has vanished. When Mike Todd’s Cinestage Theatre in Chicago was about to be gutted in 1994, cinema buff Marc Gulbrandsen sneaked in to take a last look around. He spotted the old Smell-O-Vision equipment in the basement, but it was never recovered.
Carmen Laube, the daughter of the man who invented Smell-O-Vision, has an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her father was fifty-six years old when she was born, so she is too young to remember his excitement about Scent of Mystery. She does remember his passion for scent, and the disappointment of his old age when his entrepreneurial spirit waned at last. She showed me photographs of her father. He is dapperly dressed and always wears his signature dark-framed eyeglasses. The snapshots are from the deep past: Laube behind the wheel of a racing car in Switzerland in the 1930s, in a dinner jacket on board the luxury liner Andrea Doria, and finally at the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair, standing next to the packing crates that carried the Odorated Talking Pictures equipment from Zürich to Flushing Meadow for the screening of My Dream.
Carmen opens a box of memorabilia and hands me tickets and an invitation to the Chicago premiere of Scent of Mystery: “Mrs. Eddie Fisher and Mr. Michael Todd, Jr. take pleasure in inviting you…” There is the printed menu from the post-film supper party—a glamorous midnight affair