CHAPTER 8

Hollywood Psychophysics

[T]he producers of this film believe that today’s audiences are mature enough to accept the fact that some things in life just plain stink.

—from the prologue to Polyester

I SAW JOHN WATERS’S FILM POLYESTER ON ITS FIRST RELEASE in 1981, in a packed theater in Philadelphia. Like everyone else, I scratched and sniffed my Odorama card as an onscreen character named Francine Fishpaw (played by the obese and outrageous Divine) let one loose under the bedcovers. The audience groaned; we knew what was coming, yet we all inhaled. To this day, Waters delights in his cinematic coup: he tells me “audiences worldwide paid me money to smell a fart.”

The idea of smelling a movie has been a joke for so long, it’s easy to forget that scented films once played at major venues in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. History has not been kind to Smell-O-Vision or its rival, AromaRama; they have been relegated to books like Arts & Entertainment Fads, and Oops: 20 Life Lessons from the Fiascoes That Shaped America. The Times of London wrinkled its editorial nose and called them “cinematic stinkers” and “historic blunders.” Smell-O-Vision made Time’s list of the 100 Worst Ideas of the Century, along with Hair Club for Men, leisure suits, and New Coke. Michael and Harry Medved nominated it for a Golden Turkey Award in the category of “Most Inane and Unwelcome ‘Technical Advance’ in Hollywood History.”

The loud mockery of the pundits strikes me as a cheap shot for a couple of reasons. First, I feel a warm emotional connection to the smelly moments of Hollywood history, perhaps because of my personal role in the odorific failure of Blind Trust, or my involvement during the dot-com boom with a startup called DigiScents, Inc., that aimed to bring smell to the Internet via a PC-linked scent generator. Why is it so difficult for critics to believe that people have a sincere interest in the possibilities of scented entertainment? My second reason is a lingering suspicion that the magazines and media professors are missing something important: If it’s really such a bad idea, why does the public remain so fascinated by it? I decided to take a closer look for myself, and began spooling through miles of microfilm and talking to people who had experienced Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama for themselves. My goal? To find out whether there was something more to the story than all the snark would suggest.

 

THE FIRST ATTEMPT to odorize movies dates back to the earliest days of silent film and was the brainchild of Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel (1882–1936), the legendary cinematic impresario who ran New York venues such as the Rialto and the Strand. The lavish movie palace he created and named after himself—the Roxy—became a generic name for cinemas across America. The man helped make Hollywood what it is today, but the story of Rothafel’s smelly movie has a few holes in the plot.

According to Film Daily, Rothafel “tried the rose bit back in 1906, in a silent-film house he ran in Forest City, Pennsylvania. For newsreel clips of the Pasadena Rose Bowl Game, he dipped absorbent cotton in a rose essence and put it in front of an electric fan.” This charming story is repeated in book after book on the history of movies. There’s only one problem with it: there was no Rose Bowl game in 1906. The first one was played in 1902; it was such a blowout (Stanford conceded in the third quarter, trailing Michigan 49–0) that the Tournament of Roses gave up on football and ran chariot races for a few years. Football didn’t return until 1916 (Washington State 14, Brown 0). So at what movie was Roxy blowing rose essence in 1906? Pasadena had hosted a New Year’s Day Rose Parade since 1890, and the Vitascope Company filmed it for the first time in 1900. It’s more likely that Roxy scented a newsreel of flower-trimmed floats in the 1906 Rose Parade.

Roxy never repeated his improvised stunt, but it was imitated by others. In 1929 the manager of Boston’s Fenway Theatre poured a pint of lilac perfume into the ventilation system; he timed it to hit the audience just as the movie’s title—Lilac Time—flashed on screen. The same year, an orange scent was dispensed at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles during showings of MGM’s Hollywood Review; the smell came during a big musical number called “Orange Blossom Time.”

 

SCENTED ENTERTAINMENT as an art form needs something more than a projectionist with a screwdriver and a flask of perfume. At around this time other people were giving serious thought to the artistic and dramatic potential of smell. Aldous Huxley offered a whiff of the possibilities in his 1931 novel Brave New World:

The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio—rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord—a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig’s dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause; the lights went up.

It’s a great fantasy: smells arrive at the nose in precisely timed pulses and disappear just as quickly. But as I learned in Blind Trust, moving scent through a big space is an inexact art form. Fan-blown air masses move slowly and linger too long; it’s easy to end up with olfactory sludge.

There is another problem. Even if a scent organ delivered odors with the brisk precision that Huxley imagined, the audience would have trouble keeping up. Fragrance arpeggios would blow by too quickly for the human nose to perceive distinct notes. (A mouse, on the other hand, might get it. Mice generate a fresh impression of the smellscape with each sniff, and since they sniff several times a second, they can easily keep up.) The human nose works on a longer time scale; it can’t follow a smellody the way the ear follows a tune. Anything faster than largo ma non tropo would leave an audience in the dust.

Bill Buford encountered a typically sedate olfactory tempo when he worked as a line chef in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant:

By midmorning, when many things had been prepared, they were cooked in quick succession, and the smells came, one after the other, waves of smell, like sounds in music. There was the smell of meat, and the kitchen was overwhelmed by the rich, sticky smell of wintry lamb. And then, in minutes, it would be chocolate melting in a metal bowl. Then a disturbing nonsequitur like tripe (a curious disjunction, having chocolate in your nose followed quickly by stewing cow innards). Then something ripe and fishy—octopus in a hot tub—followed by overextracted pineapple. And so they came, one after the other.

Another obstacle to olfactory cinema is clearing the air between performances. The movie-industry veteran Arthur Mayer found this out in 1933 when he installed the first true in-theater smell system. He had just taken over Paramount’s Rialto Theater on Broadway, when he was approached by an inventor who claimed he could deliver scent to an audience in synchrony with a movie. His demo film about a pair of young lovers was accompanied by all sorts of smells. There was a hitch, however, as Mayer recalled:

The blowers which wafted these odors out with such precision were supposed to waft them back with equal efficiency, but unfortunately this part of the invention had not yet been entirely perfected. The auditorium was so full of a mingling of honeysuckle, bacon and Lysol that it took over an hour to clear the air and for several days afterward there was such a strong smell of those mature apples around that a friend asked me if I was making applejack on the side. It was a long time before I finally lost confidence in the smellies, but my man and I—I had become a zealous partisan if not a partner—could never seem to master the backwards waft.

Mayer didn’t name his olfactory accomplice, but a cartoon in his book provides a clue. It shows Mayer in a projection booth, peering down into the house. Next to the film projector is a large device with tubes labeled “rose,” “honeysuckle,” “Lysol,” “ripe apple,” etc. The scent tubes lead into ventilating ducts that open into the theater. This arrangement is precisely the system described by John H. Leavell in a U.S. patent issued three years before Mayer met his unnamed inventor. If it was indeed Leavell who installed scent at the Rialto, then despite his short-lived partnership with Mayer, he deserves to be recognized as a pioneer of scented cinema.

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 crowds to his shows, and every one of his hit musicals featured an extravagant set or stage effect.

Yet Todd had more than a showman’s interest in special effects: he helped invent and commercialize several movie-making technologies. Todd’s Broadway hit, The Hot Mikado, was playing at the 1939 World’s Fair, and while keeping an eye on the show he met Fred Waller, who was demonstrating an eleven-projector wraparound movie film system called Vitarama. Cinerama, a three-camera, wide-screen format that was projected onto a specially shaped screen, was another Waller invention, and Todd became an investor in it. Expense and complicated technology were no barrier for Todd; his enthusiasm and salesmanship persuaded movie distributors to pony up and install the new equipment. He made a splash with This Is Cinerama (1952). Audiences thrilled to a sequence filmed on a roller coaster at Coney Island. It was the IMAX of its time, and eventually led to today’s Panavision system.

Mike Todd may have noticed another promising technology at the World’s Fair: Hans Laube’s Odorated Talking Pictures. It’s not clear whether Todd and Laube actually met there, but somehow Todd caught the scent bug. By 1954 Laube was back in America, trying to bring aroma to movies and television. That year he gave a demonstration to Todd and the producer decided to invest in the new system.

In his 1954 application for a U.S. patent, Laube described a device in which odor canisters were placed on a turntable. An electronic scent-track on the motion picture film triggered the turntable, which rotated the desired canister beneath a pickup nozzle, which sucked up scent and pumped it into the theater through tubes attached to the seatbacks. The liquid fragrances were filtered to remove the heavier notes and prevent the scents from lingering too long. To help clear the air between smells, one canister contained an “odor neutralizer.” The odors could be played in a fixed sequence or the scent-track could advance the turntable to any desired canister. Laube’s idea was that theaters would receive a standard set of odors; if a movie had unusual scent effects, a custom set would be shipped along with the film reels.

By 1955 Laube’s career was gaining momentum. He gave a private demonstration of his system at the Cinerama-Warner Theatre in New York, using a short version of My Dream. It must have been a success, because he persuaded the Stanley Warner Corporation, which owned the rights to Cinerama, to fund further development. To secure international rights to his invention, he filed a European patent application, and then applied for a second U.S. patent. In May, Laube married for the second time after a month-long romance. In July he received shares in a newly formed company called Scentovision, Inc.

In September 1956, Scentovision held another private demo for industry executives at Mike Todd’s Warner Cinema in New York. The 16 mm film ran for eight and a half minutes and used seventeen aromas. Motion Picture Daily hinted that Laube’s system would be installed in a top theater within nine months, and that Scentovision was negotiating with film producers who wanted to use the process. In November 1957, Laube and a partner were issued U.S. Patent 2,813,452, “Motion pictures with synchronized odor emission,” and were mentioned in the New York Times.

 

MICHAEL TODD’S first movie, the 1956 blockbuster Around the World in 80 Days, capitalized on his marketing strategy of heavily hyped limited openings, and heavily marketed accessory items (the movie’s soundtrack album was the first nonmusical soundtrack to earn big money). Early in 1957 he married Elizabeth Taylor—the third marriage for each of them—and a month later the newlyweds attended the Academy Awards, where 80 Days won the Oscar for Best Picture. With movie profits rolling in, Todd was looking about for his next project, and he felt the time was right for a push into smellies.

Things were finally looking good for Scentovision. Hans Laube had a patent, a prototype system, and a company to promote it. Mike Todd had committed to funding the technology and was considering it for a major movie. Then, on March 21, 1958, Todd was killed when his private plane went down in a storm over Grants, New Mexico.

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 needed extra time to finalize the sound and scent tracks. Laube worked furiously. Fortunately his second U.S. patent was issued in September; it got him and Mike junior another mention in the papers.

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 or an in-your-face marketing gesture. The premiere was not a particularly classy event; Joan Didion covered it for William F. Buckley’s National Review:

The glory that was AromaRama began even before the theater darkened. Outside, a gentleman in a Tartar falconer’s costume strolled about Seventh Avenue with a stuffed falcon on his arm; the lobby crawled with acned, pigtailed youths in coolie hats and usherettes with Maybelline-slanted eyes and rayon-brocade sheath dresses slit past their knees. Except for the inscrutable fact that everybody on the scene at the DeMille was pure Bronx Caucasian, the ambience seemed roughly that of the old honkytonk International Settlement in San Francisco. Upstairs, tea was poured for the customers “courtesy of Chin and Lee,” who were pushing their canned chow mein in conjunction with this Third Wonder of the Entertainment World.

As for the film itself, the opening sequence featuring a sliced orange was a crowd pleaser. The New York Times found the other odors to be “neither so clear nor pleasurable.” Luz Gunsberg had the same reaction. Her husband, Sheldon Gunsberg, was Reade’s assistant and closely involved with AromaRama. She remembers, “When the film started…in the little prolog, he cut an orange and that was incredible. That was fabulous—just wonderful. But after that the smells got all mixed up and they couldn’t get them out; so it was a terrible situation.” The odors that poured from the overhead ventilation ducts were potent. Time magazine reported that they were “strong enough to give a bloodhound a headache,” and The New Yorker called the experience “quite a massive assault on the olfactory nerves.” Says Gunsberg, “my husband would come home and we would have to hang his suits all over the house and open all the windows because we couldn’t get the smell out. It really permeated the whole place.” Todd employee Hal Williamson bought a ticket to scope out the competition: “Your clothes reeked when you came out of this stuff that had been dumped into the air conditioning system. As I recall there was even a fine mist in the air.”

The smells, created by Rhodia perfumer Selma Weidenfeld, were criticized for a lack of subtlety. Time thought they “will probably seem phony, even to the average uneducated nose. A beautiful old pine grove in Peking, for instance, smells rather like a subway rest room on disinfectant day.” (I sympathize with Weidenfeld; a formula that smells great on a test blotter can fall apart completely when it fills an entire room. Asking her to design at her desk fragrances meant to be smelled throughout an auditorium was like expecting the guy who etches your name on a rice grain to do it in skywriting.) The sheer number and range of the AromaRama smells were overwhelming: jasmine, grassland, incense, spices, soy sauce, a tiger, and a pungent waterfront, among others. Instead of heightening reality, the smells were distracting, according to the mass of critics at the New York Times, Variety, and The New Yorker.

Then there was the problem of synchronization. Every so often, said Variety, “the machine-made olfactory flavors don’t correspond with what’s on view.” Time complained that “the smells are not always removed as rapidly as the scene requires: at one point the audience distinctly smells grass in the middle of the Gobi Desert.” Paul Baise, who worked for Reade in advertising and public relations, experienced this firsthand. He tells me that AromaRama “worked part-time but not over a period of time, because after a while all the smells melded into one, they overlapped into each other, and they were coming out onto the screen with the wrong image. It was doomed because it got off sync.”

More than a whiff of cynicism hovered over Reade’s project, beginning with its name: AromaRama made fun of Michael Todd’s Cinerama. In the only original footage he added to the movie, Reade took a swipe at Lowell Thomas’s introductory appearance in This Is Cinerama. In the opening sequence of Great Wall, Reade had NBC television news anchor Chet Huntley demonstrate AromaRama by slicing the orange in half. The choice of Great Wall as a movie vehicle was another dig at the Todds; travelogues were a Cinerama specialty: Cinerama Holiday (1955) and Cinerama South Seas Adventure (1958), for example. Reade’s tactics got under Mike junior’s skin. On his Christmas card for 1959, he printed a verse that began, “Let kind oblivion overtake / all other ’scopes and ’ramas,’” and continued, “Into this world of much dissension / I bring you some fun in a brand new dimension.”

Reade’s actions were not those of a man expecting great success; according to Variety, he made only enough prints to show the film in six theaters simultaneously. He produced no ancillary merchandise, and his openings had none of the celebrity buzz that Todd’s did. He didn’t bother to incorporate AromaRama Industries, Inc., until one week before the picture opened. Reade promoted his smell system harder than his movie, printing AROMARAMA in gigantic letters atop the ads, with the movie name below it in letters a quarter the size. (The Smell-O-Vision tagline appeared in smaller letters below the title.)

The largely negative reaction to Great Wall threatened to spoil the upcoming release of Scent of Mystery. Variety noted that AromaRama’s New York ticket sales were good but not great, and that Reade’s people “apparently aren’t expecting any overwhelming jubilation on the part of the trade.” Variety was prepared to dismiss the idea of “smellies” before Smell-O-Vision had even opened. When I asked him about Reade and Weiss’s impact on Smell-O-Vision, Hal Williamson said, “in retrospect they probably did more to harm our cause than the occasional failure of [our] scents to work exactly as they were supposed to. It left a very bad taste with the press after the Reade opening in New York.” Even Reade’s people admit to the problems. Paul Baise says it “was doomed before it even got off the ground, but we went ahead with it anyway and presented it as a piece of new innovation.” AromaRama, he says, “belonged in the laboratories, and not presented to a paying public.”

Todd Junior Fights Back

Scent of Mystery premiered in Chicago on January 12, 1960, with all the hype the formidable Todd PR machine could provide. A chartered plane flew Elizabeth Taylor in from New York, accompanied by members of the press. The producers threw a preshow cocktail party at Fritzl’s, a showbiz watering hole. The film was preceded by The Tale of Old Whiff, a cartoon with fifteen Smell-O-Vision scents and Bert Lahr (of Cowardly Lion fame) as a character voice. At a late dinner following the movie attended by nearly 250 people, the entertainment included Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and Mort Sahl. Cohosting the event with Todd junior was Elizabeth Taylor, recently married to Todd senior’s showbiz buddy Eddie Fisher. At the New York opening on February 18, Taylor’s presence drew a huge crowd of fans and reporters.

The film itself was received warmly, if not enthusiastically. Most critics liked the exotic scenery and action sequences. Variety’s take was typical: “Diverting tale told with nostril-appeal.” The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther was the rare critic who disliked the film itself, from the “whole silly plot” to the acting (“downright atrocious” and “virtually amateur”). As for the smells, Crowther seemed to have trouble getting them; he said they were “the least impressive or even detectable features of the show” every so often, he detected something “faint and fleeting.”

The Smell-O-Vision scents played off the screen action in clever ways. When Peter Lorre’s character drank coffee, the audience smelled the brandy in it. When Denholm Elliott slipped and almost fell in an outdoor market, the audience smelled (but didn’t see) a banana—an aromatic twist on a very old sight gag. Topping it all off, the smoke from Peter Lorre’s pipe holds the key to the plot’s mystery.

Who Won?

Comparing Smell-O-Vision to AromaRama, Hollis Alpert, writing in Saturday Review, was even-handed but unsympathetic, saying that “neither is particularly successful or desirable. Differ though they may in technology, the smells are equally synthetic, and equally erratic.” Most other reviewers gave Smell-O-Vision the edge in aesthetics. Time said its odors were “on the whole no more accurate or credible than those employed by AromaRama, but at least they don’t stink so loud.” According to Variety, “The Smell-O-Vision odors seemed more distinct and recognizable and did not appear to linger as long as those in AromaRama.” The New Yorker’s John McCarten said, “After a lot of thoughtful recollective sniffing, I should say that Glorious Smell-O-Vision is subtler than AromaRama. Professor Laube seems to have mastered the quick change; in any case, he is able to get the smell of coffee out of the place before the loaf of fresh bread appears on the screen.”

But it wasn’t just Laube’s efforts that gave Smell-O-Vision its edge. Many years later, Mike Todd Jr. credited his press agent Bill Doll with the idea of reversing the odor pump after each delivery to reduce lingering of previous smell. “Bill got this idea after the third opening. It was used, and it worked perfectly, but by that time the ship had sailed.”

Back in 1939, when he was promoting Odorated Talking Pictures, Hans Laube had said ten smells would suffice for a feature-length film, because more would be “too much for the public’s nose.” In his 1956 patent application, Laube increased the optimal number to between twelve and twenty. Scent of Mystery was released with thirty. In the competition to show off their new systems, both Todd and Reade had oversaturated their audience.

 

A QUESTION OF personality lingers over the battle of the smellies. Mike Todd Jr. had little of his father’s fire. He was polite and tentative. Anticipating ridicule, he adopted a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward Smell-O-Vision that signaled a lack of seriousness to critics and distributors. The movie critic Hollis Alpert Jr. found him “a somewhat timid revolutionist.”

The elder Todd took great pleasure in gambling on his own talents. According to his son, “He was at his best when the odds were against him and a show was in trouble and he needed to utilize all of his energy and ingenuity.” Todd senior was strongest late in the game. His contribution to a show began after rehearsals; he switched into top gear only during out-of-town preview performances. “He thought best on his feet, under pressure,” said his son. He was legendary for last-minute adjustments to shows and promotions that made winners out of questionable properties. And not least, he was a great motivator of other people: he knew how to drive technical wizards to produce workable, show-worthy effects.

One is tempted to ask: Would Smell-O-Vision have taken off if Michael Todd Sr. had lived? It is easy to imagine him pushing perfumers to the limit, stalking about the floor of the Cinestage before opening night to tweak the scent delivery. Todd senior’s showbiz sense would have kicked in; the film would have been snappier and the scent effects more polished. His genius for promotion would have taken flight—imagine him pushing Scent of Mystery perfume with the help of his glamorous movie star wife. He would have schmoozed the stuffy-nosed Bosley Crowther and his colleagues in the press. Above all, he would have reacted quickly to Reade’s tactics, and maybe played them to his advantage.

Hal Williamson says, “if we could have survived another couple of months probably, the fine-tuning could have been done. But at that point the critical and public reactions were such that Michael and Elizabeth decided not to keep going with it.”

Smell-O-Vision—its technology, its film, and its promoters—was a serious entertainment gamble, even if it was a long shot. AromaRama, in contrast, never had any legs at all. Technologically, business-wise, and aesthetically, it was a cynical rabbit punch of counterpromotion. Smell-O-Vision was more than a gimmick, but AromaRama was something less, a mean-spirited exploitation. Walter Reade ambushed Mike Todd Jr., then dogged his every turn. Temperamentally unsuited for the rough-and-tumble of showbiz, Todd gave his more aggressive rival too much room to maneuver. Although critical opinion tilted toward Smell-O-Vision, Reade had effectively killed any prospects for its commercial success.

 

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 at the Ambassador West Hotel, with two bands and “impromptu entertainment by our friends from the world of show business.” There is the neatly folded stock certificate embossed with a corporate seal: 200 shares of Scentovision, Inc., to Hans Laube.

I speak on the phone to Hans Laube’s widow, Novia, who now lives in Florida. Through her heavy Estonian accent I hear fierce determination and loyalty. She tells me how she met and married this tall, handsome, intellectual European; how particular he was about his clothes—the fine suits and custom-made shirts. How hard he worked, often late at night, and about the seven months he spent commuting to Chicago to prepare Smell-O-Vision for its debut. For the Laubes, a lot was riding on Smell-O-Vision. She tells me, “Michael Todd and everybody said the name Laube would be known all over the world. Because we anticipated that this would be a great success.”

When I ask about the competition with Walter Reade and AromaRama, her tone sharpens. “He came out just a few weeks before us, or just a month before us. He spoiled the entire idea because when people went to see his movie the smell clung to their clothes and they said, ‘Oh no, no, we don’t want that.’…[Reade] wanted to make money, he wanted to come out before us, and he stole my husband’s idea.” The failure of Smell-O-Vision was a financial blow to Laube. Novia says Michael Todd promised her husband a nickel for every ticket sold. The film ran for months, but “they did not give Hans one single penny. So that was a terrible disappointment too. They did not keep their promise.” It took a psychological toll as well. “It killed my husband mentally,” she says.

After the movie closed, Laube rented laboratory space on East Eighty-fourth Street, where he developed an electronic home fragrancer called the Bestair, but the device was ahead of its time and never made it to market. The organizers of the U.S. exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair approached him about a scented movie project, but dropped it at the last minute. With that final, crushing disappointment, Laube threw in the towel. “I had to take care of my husband for twelve long years…to support him after that because he ended up penniless, totally penniless.” After years of declining health, Hans Laube died in 1976, at the age of seventy-six.

 

IN THE CORNER of Carmen Laube’s living room, topped by a collection of ornate table lamps, sits a shiny stainless-steel cabinet. Behind its clear Plexiglas face I see motors, pumps, gauges, and dials, and above them a turntable ringed with glass bottles. I’m looking at the ultimate Smell-O-Vision artifact, the working prototype her father used to fine-tune scents for Mike Todd’s movie forty-seven years ago. A lever arm above one flask is frozen in place like the Tin Woodman’s arm, forever poised to descend and extract the next scent. The smell has long since evaporated.