Five directors who tried and failed to change cinema
Throughout cinema history, technical innovations have always pushed the medium forward. From the invention of sound, which gave us the “talkies”, to glorious Technicolour, to the digital revolution, the drive to change cinema for the better is always there.
Naturally, many directors have come along in the medium’s 100-year history and decided to add a new innovation to the rich tapestry of cinema. Some have effected change through advancements in technology, while others have approached their change from a storytelling standpoint.
For every director who is successful in altering how people think about and make films, though, spare a thought for the brave souls who went out on a limb and weren’t quite so successful. These people saw a way to do something new, and they likely had grand visions of the industry and audiences alike embracing their ideas. Instead, they were ridiculed and rejected, and cinema stayed resolutely unchanged.
From an attempt to introduce an extra sense into the filmgoing experience to experiments with frame rates and the abandonment of physical sets, these five directors set out to change cinema—and failed spectacularly.
Directors who tried to change cinema and failed:
William Castle (House on Haunted Hill, 1959)
William Castle never met a gimmick he didn’t like the sound of, and throughout his career, he employed a number of them in an attempt to get more butts on seats for his schlocky B-movies. Castle’s view was that cinema didn’t have to be an experience where audiences sit in a cushy theatre and watch events unfold on the big screen in a passive, safe manner. Instead, he wanted it to be more interactive, as he believed that involving an audience in proceedings in a more direct manner could be a way forward for the medium.
Some of Castle’s most famous attempts to change the way audiences watched his films included giving each viewer a “ghost viewer” through which to watch certain portions of 1960’s 13 Ghosts. This handheld device allowed ghosts in the film to be seen more clearly if the viewer looked through red cellophane, and they could hide them if they looked through blue cellophane. He also hooked up military surplus aeroplane wing de-icers to the underside of some cinema seats for 1959’s The Tingler. In the film, the titular “tingler” is a creature that attaches itself to the spine, and during the film’s finale, the vibrating motors of the de-icers were activated when star Vincent Price warned that a “tingler” had gotten loose in the cinema.
Castle’s most iconic gimmick, though, was reserved for 1959’s House on Haunted Hill, also starring Price. During the movie’s ending, a skeleton emerges from a vat of acid to chase one of the main characters – and at that moment, in select cinemas, Castle had a skeleton with glowing red eye sockets float over the audience on a wire. Unfortunately, it didn’t exactly terrify people or convince them all horror films should have props in the theatre – instead, kids just tried to knock the skeleton down as it passed over their heads.
Jack Cardiff (Scent of Mystery, 1960)
Have you ever watched a film in the cinema and wished you could smell what the characters are smelling in the story? No? Me neither. However, Jack Cardiff bet big on Smell-O-Vision being the next big advancement in cinema gimmickry, and in 1960, he gave the world Scent of Mystery, the first movie to pump odours into the cinema at certain important plot junctures.
Smells that wafted through the theatre to audiences at various points included coffee, wine, roses, gunpowder, peaches, and gasoline. Most interestingly, though, two smells were used that actually functioned as clues to the audience as to the identity of the film’s killer and which woman was about to be his next victim: pipe tobacco and perfume.
Unfortunately for Cardiff, Smell-O-Vision was widely rejected by critics and audiences. Showings were beset by technical difficulties, such as smells only reaching audience members after the corresponding moment had already occurred on-screen or scents being too subtle to be perceived by most people. Indeed, Cardiff remarked that critics felt most of the smells were too similar – or, as he put it, “all a kind of cheap eau de cologne.” Ultimately, he would call Scent “one film I want to erase from my memory. The reason for this is that, through no fault of my own, the film was a complete disaster.”
A few movies in later years offered scratch-and-sniff cards as a nostalgic nod to Smell-O-Vision, but it certainly didn’t create the revolution Cardiff may have hoped for.
Richard L Bare (Wicked, Wicked, 1973)
One day, writer/director Richard L Bare was on a leisurely drive when his idle mind began to focus on the line dividing the lanes on the road. He told the Oakland Tribune, “As I glanced from one side of the freeway to the other, I noticed how my mind was taking a picture over here, then another over there.”
Suddenly, a lightning strike of inspiration hit him: “Why not tell a film story with two simultaneous images?”
The result was Wicked, Wicked, a 1973 horror movie about a psycho killer murdering single blonde women who check into California’s Grandview Hotel. It was filmed in Duo-Vision, which we recognise today as split-screen. However, unlike most films or shows these days that adopt the technique for short moments to highlight important elements, Wicked, Wicked was entirely comprised of two images playing simultaneously for the runtime.
To give Bare credit, his innovation was undoubtedly a fascinating exploration of the possibilities of cinema. However, most audiences found it hard to take everything in, as it often felt like watching two films simultaneously instead of the duelling perspectives of the same film. Ultimately, the images were simply too busy to resonate much with viewers, which must have hurt Bare, who had overcome a logistical nightmare to put the movie together. For instance, he estimated the shoot was twice as long and twice as expensive as a regular film, and it took him 32 weeks to finish a rough cut instead of the standard six.
Kerry Conran (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, 2004)
In the early 2000s, the huge advancements seen in computer-generated imagery made some filmmakers think, “Why do we even need to shoot things on sets or in real locations anymore?” A Swedish film named Rest in Peace was released in 2000, which was shot entirely on a greenscreen, with backgrounds added after the fact in post-production. Shinji Higuchi’s 2002 Mini Moni the Movie did the same thing, before a series of 2004 movies pushed forward with even more detailed digital sets surrounding real actors and some full CGI characters: Japan’s Casshern, France’s Immortal, and US indie Able Edwards.
However, the first feature-length Hollywood movie shot on a “digital backlot” was 2004’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie. The pulp-influenced adventure was a great throwback to an older era of derring-do, and Conran’s experimental visuals were given plenty of praise at the time. In the following years, several other films were shot entirely on bluescreen with computer-generated backgrounds, most notably the comic book adaptations Sin City, 300, and The Spirit.
Though there is still some residual fondness for Sin City and 300 these days, Sky Captain doesn’t have the same fanbase. At the time, many critics accused the digital backlot of being just another cinematic gimmick instead of a viable method that could be applied to all kinds of films, and after a few years, it fell badly out of vogue. In the end, Sky Captain may have walked so films like Avatar could run, but even that visually stunning world created by the most successful director in history hasn’t fully convinced audiences that they want to be so divorced from tangible reality at all times.
Peter Jackson (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, 2012)
Have you ever been to a family member’s house or a hotel room and been horrified to find out their TV has motion smoothing enabled? It’s a pain we know all too well. In 2012, though, Lord of the Rings visionary Peter Jackson decided for some ungodly reason that his return to Middle-Earth – The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – needed the cinematic equivalent of motion smoothing applied to it. Thus, the “high frame rate cinema” experiment was born.
Naturally, though, when audiences clapped their eyes on the film being projected in 48 frames per second instead of the standard 24, they knew it looked weird. They mightn’t have known exactly why Tolkien’s magical world now looked so bizarre, and the characters’ movements were now so unnaturally smooth, but their brains knew enough to instantly think, “Nope. I don’t like this”.
In the end, projecting the film with double the number of frames per second made Middle-Earth look so real that it was almost like watching a stage play unfold on-screen instead of the cinematic look audiences were used to. It made the image so jarring, though, that even though the visual clarity was incredibly crisp and pristine, it somehow conspired to make everything look faker than before. Audiences summarily rejected this new innovation, and when Ang Lee attempted the same thing with Gemini Man but added extra frames – 120 FPS to be exact – the reaction was even more vociferous.
In essence, “This looks weird. Make films look like films again, please”.
