April 17, 2006
I Smell a Gimmick Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:00 PM EST According to the Associated Press, Japanese film exhibitors plan to accompany showings of The New World, last year’s Colin Farrell turkey about colonization in Virginia, with scents that will be released into the theater from specially designed machines. These scents will not try to reproduce what the people and places in the movie actually smelled like, and if you know anything about the seventeenth century, you’ll understand why that’s a good thing. Instead, they are supposed to fit the mood: “A floral scent accompanies a love scene, while a mix of peppermint and rosemary is emitted during a tear-jerking scene. Joy is a citrus mix of orange and grapefruit, while anger is enhanced by a herb-like concoction with a hint of eucalyptus and tea tree.” It all sounds very Japanese, and who knows? In time the technique could become as popular around the world as sushi, though it would help to find a better movie than The New World to use it with. Yet the idea of marrying scents and film goes back almost a century, as one of our sturdy hacks wrote in a sidebar to Tom Huntington’s excellent article on 3-D films in our sister publication Invention & Technology (scroll all the way to the end). As the sidebar explains, when Theodore Roosevelt was President, “S. L. ‘Roxy’) Rothafel, the famous theater owner who later founded Radio City Music Hall, spread rose perfume with a fan while showing film of the Tournament of Roses at a theater in Forest City, Pennsylvania.” The idea was revived occasionally in later decades, most notably in 1959 and 1960, when two competing systems with major-studio backing made brief appearances. (In 1981 John Waters tried a different approach by handing out scratch-and-sniff cards with his film Polyester.) Any scheme for adding scents to film runs into two main problems: (a) it’s hard to do it effectively and (b) there’s no point. From a technical perspective, synchronizing the scent with the action on screen is tricky because the scent takes time to diffuse throughout the theater, and then once it does, it tends to linger. One of the 1959-60 systems, Mike Todd, Jr.’s Smell-O-Vision, tried to solve the first problem by putting a nozzle on the back of every seat, while the other one, Walter Reade, Jr.’s AromaRama, used ordinary ventilation equipment but released a neutralizing agent between scents. Neither method worked very well, but even if they had (and even if realistic-smelling scents could have been produced cheaply enough), they would still have been solutions to a non-existent problem, because no one needs to be reminded during a movie what an orange or a bonfire smells like. Scented-film systems were simply a distraction, and once the novelty wore off (which happened quite fast), they disappeared, to be revived every now and then when some filmmaker needs a gimmick. Will the Japanese approach, which amounts to olfactory mood music rather than a literal rendering of smells from the movie, be more effective? Perhaps. But even so, if the long history of movie-theater innovations is any guide, the costs of installing and maintaining the system will be a strong deterrent to its spread beyond a handful of theaters.
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