Once in a while I shake things up and do something I would never consider doing. This past weekend the L.A. Auto Show was going on downtown at the Convention Center. Auto makers from all over the globe were represented, and the floor was teeming with car fans of every kind.

As a way of avoiding THAT, I took my date to a popular movie on opening weekend.

Specifically Robert Zemekis’ BEOWULF, showing in spectacular DLP digital projection and 3-D. Digital projection is great, by the way. Razor sharp focus, rock-steady image and no matter how long it plays it will never scratch or get dirty. More likely it will just crash. But the best part, the luscious juicy fruit of it all, is the flawless 3-D. If you sit all the way back it’s like looking into a long box with tiny actors in it; if you sit up close you may spend the show dodging spikes and flying barrels, gasping in horror as an 8 foot tall Grendel throws danes at you by flickering blue torchlight.

I’m not sure if the movie would be all that enjoyable without the 3-D. First of all, the idea of making a movie out of Beowulf brings to mind a story about George Stevens, who directed THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. He insisted on scoring the scene where Christ rises from the dead with the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah. When one of his assistants questioned the decision, suggesting it might be a little too on the nose, Stevens said “nonsense! My movie will make this music immortal!” And indeed, this Beowulf is a little too on the nose, kind of a downer, and unpleasantly visceral. But like I say, to hell with all that because the 3-D is awesome.

Like me, Hollywood shakes things up every once in a while, and 3-D seems to come back every 26 years for just that purpose. First introduced in the 50’s by producers who were scared that TV would kill the movies, it returned in the early 80’s because… well, I’m not sure. I don’t think anyone is. I do know this: in its last two flare-ups, 3-D was a fad mostly used by filmmakers who were trying to spruce up mediocre product. There are some 50’s 3-D films which stand up on their own, like DIAL M FOR MURDER, KISS ME KATE and THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, but the majority was more along the BWANA DEVIL/ROBOT MONSTER/IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE tip.

All 3-D works on this principal - you shoot the image with two lenses, one to represent each eye, then project it back to an audience which is wearing glasses which block the wrong image in each eye. In the fifties they superimposed a red image and a blue image, and you wore glasses with red and blue cellophane. The red side blocked out the red image. It required two projectors running two identically timed movies. If the red movie snarled and lost a few feet of film, you had to slice out the indentical frames in the blue movie.

The eighties 3-D craze came about because someone simplified, that is to say cheapened, the process. They put both images in a single frame of film, one on top of the other, and added a special projection lens which superimposed them with prisms AND added polarized light. With polarization you can turn the glasses so that it’s either transparent or opaque. It meant, essentially, that you could show 3-D color movies. The downside to this technically, by the way, is that you are watching a movie through sunglasses so you have to turn the light way up, and shortens the bulb life.

Back to aesthetics. Cheaper processes meant that people with less money could make movies, and those people tended to spend less on everything, especially scripts. The first 3-D movie I saw was TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS, a cheap Italian knockoff of the Indiana Jones saga starring the director and written by the guy who played the director’s pudgy sidekick. It wasn’t cinema’s finest hour. But it was a box office success, and a follow up to COMIN’ AT YA! another 3-D adventure by the same people. They got in early and reaped the benefits. Later efforts like PARASITE, METALSTORM and THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE weren’t so lucky.

After a while people equated 3-D with crap, just like they had in the 50s, and theaters discarded their prematurely burnt out bulbs and moved on.

The ride is starting up again, so prepare yourself. The industry is getting behind 3-D in a big way, largely because the box office numbers support it. THE POLAR EXPRESS, for example, made a very healthy chunk of its gross in a small number of 3-D venues. And it’s much cheaper to produce 3-D nowadays. For starters, any CG animation ever made can be converted to 3-D if you kept the vector information. And they’re able to convert any live action movie with software, though it’s not quite cost-effective yet. The plan, or so they claim, is to have every theatre in the country outfitted with at least one 3-D screen by 2011. It’s hard to imagine that they’re not kidding, but there is one more detail. Researchers have developed a screen which doesn’t require glasses. It’s just a matter of time before the can make it cheap and high-res enough to put it up at the local octoplex. And at that point, why NOT have everything available in three dimensions?

Except, of course, character development. It’s a great optical trick, but its no miracle.

-daniel k.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 5:08 pm and is filed under General, Motion Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.