Television Was Supposed to Kill Cinema. It Failed.
The weird, unpredictable ways TV changed the movies
I. The Battle of the Smellies
December 2, 1959. Something is brewing in the bowels of the DeMille theatre.
Cufflinks, diamonds and champagne. On screen: Behind the Great Wall, the first feature-length documentary by a Western director in China. An afterthought.
Tiger hunts and orange slices. A fisherman’s jet-black bird retrieves an unsuspecting salmon; the crowd mumbles their approval.
Then: it’s released. Seeps from the air conditioning in a fine mist, catching the projector like dust in a streetlight. Citrus… bitter… not bad. Then more. Dozens of them. Each heralded by white subtitles splayed across the screen. Each welcomed with a groan. Jasmine, soy sauce, tiger, grass, pine. They combine into one big stink; a cinematic Dutch oven.
Pinched noses; scrunched brows. Pencils already scratching. “Strong enough to give a bloodhound a headache,” declares Time.
AromaRama was its name. The first “smellie” ever commercially released.
Not the last. A few weeks later, Scent of Mystery premieres, starring Casablanca veteran Peter Lorre.
AromaRama was a gimmick. Scent of Mystery uses a different technology. Smell-O-Vision is supposed to be the real deal.
Its mogul backer, Mike Todd Jr, pulls out all the stops. LP soundtrack; limited edition perfume; paperback edition; publicity stills. Elizabeth Taylor is flown out to demo the tech to eager studio executives. A defence contractor is tapped to manufacture hundreds more machines.
The film begins. One by one, thirty smells are released with a distracting hiss. A hint of brandy floats through the theatre as a character sips his coffee. Someone slips in a busy market; the scent of banana skin identifies the culprit.
Time offers a faint whiff of praise. “At least [the smells] don’t stink so loud” as the toxic fumes of AromaRama. It’s a Pyrrhic victory. The smelly winter is over. Neither technology would be commercially used again.1
II. Viva La Revolución
Something else lingered in the late 1950s Hollywood air. The smellies were just the latest desperate salvo in what was fast becoming an all-out war.
The defenders: the behemothic movie studios who had dominated American entertainment since the 1920s.
The aggressor: television.
The small screen had threatened to come for movies ever since the 1920s. War and depression had held it at bay. No longer. Television spent the 1950s mercilessly encroaching on cinema’s turf.2 The result: thousands of theatres in the red, with thousands more barely in the black.
Not since the introduction of sound had cinema faced such a threat. If any Tom, Dick or Harry could flip the box on from their couch, why would anyone pay their hard-earned money to go to the cinema?
Samuel Goldwyn (as in the “G” in “MGM”) saw the writing on the wall.3 “The thoroughgoing change which sound brought to picture making will be fully matched by the revolutionary effects […] of television upon motion pictures,” he declared in 1949. “I predict that within just a few years a great many Hollywood producers, directors, writers, and actors who are still coasting on reputations built up in the past are going to wonder what hit them.”4
By the late 1950s, the movie industry had spent nearly a decade scrambling for the silver bullet that would stop television in its tracks. The smellies were just the latest misfire. A few years previously, major studios had launched ambitious 3D projects, culminating in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder in 1954. The movie was a triumph; the technology…less so. By 1955, the 3D experiment had been abandoned.
Goldwyn was right. Television was revolutionary. American theatre attendance never returned to its pre-war peak. The studio system collapsed, ending the careers of hundreds of establishment figures who’d grown comfortable in the ancien régime. Movies changed, perhaps irreversibly.
But reports of cinema’s death were greatly exaggerated. The smellies were a wet fart of a response. But they weren’t the only response. Movies found new ways to combat, ally with, and learn from their cocky young rival.
Far from killing the movies, television caused a shockwave of technical, formal, stylistic, production and marketing innovations that endure to this day. These were complicated, diffuse and unpredictable. Some were positive; others weren’t. But none were terminal. Cinema endured. There was life in the old dog yet.
