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August 14, 2014:

SMELLY FILMS

Bruce Kimmel Photograph bk's notes

Well, dear readers, I must write these here notes in a hurry so I can get a decent night’s beauty sleep, as I have a morning meeting to discuss a commentary track I’ll be doing on the upcoming Blu and Ray release of Holiday in Spain.  As some of you may or may not know, Holiday in Spain played Cinerama theaters very briefly in the early 1960s, in the days when Cinerama was the real deal – three projectors and the huge curved slatted screen.  And yet, Holiday in Spain was not shot in Cinerama, it was shot in 65mm (ToddAO).  Cinerama had to go in and create a three-panel, three-projector “version” so that it could be shown.  Now, I must admit freely that I did not see Holiday in Spain back in the day.  So why, you might ask, would I be doing a commentary track?  Well, I’ll tell you why – because Holiday in Spain started life as a whole other film entitled Scent of Mystery, the first and only film presented in Smell-O-Vision, back in 1960.  Scent of Mystery was a huge flop everywhere it played.  I am one of the few who actually saw it back then.  I’d seen the ads for it in the newspaper and I had to see it.  But two or three weeks prior to its opening at the Ritz Theater on Wilshire Blvd. near La Brea, just down the street at the Four Star Theater opened a film called Behind the Great Wall, a documentary in AromaRama.  Yes, this documentary, which was just a regular old documentary, had had smells added to it quickly so they could beat out the real smelly movie, Scent of Mystery.  Of course, I was there to see that one.  The curtains opened and in a newly-shot prologue, Chet Huntley explained how we were going to smell things and then he cut an orange in half and suddenly the smell of an orange wafted through the theater, blown in through the air conditioning vents.  And then other smells came and went during the boring documentary.  But the problem with blowing the smells through the air conditioning vents was that the previous smells were still in the air, and by the fifteenth smell you wanted to vomit on the ground.

But Scent of Mystery was a reserved seat roadshow and I couldn’t afford it, so I began a campaign to have my father take me.  He refused, but then did what he liked to do – we left his restaurant one day and he drove down Wilshire and we ended up at the Ritz as a surprise.  He’d already gotten the ticket.  I was beyond thrilled.  I cajoled him into buying me the hardcover souvenir book.  Later I found out that there were very few of the hardcovers made – most people who’ve been able to score souvenir books have the softcover version.  Scent of Mystery began with an overture, with horns honking all over the theater.  Then the curtains parted and we were in an aerial shot following a butterfly.  There were no credits.  The butterfly zipped and zoomed for a minute or so, finally going down into a rose garden.  Suddenly the air was alive with the smell of roses.  The audience oohed and aahed.  The smell was not blown in through the air conditioning vents – every seat had a little tube under it, and by the time the film played LA they’d perfected clearing the air between smells.  Well, I loved every minute of it.  It was a mystery and colorful and I loved all the actors.  The ToddAO was amazingly sharp and the sound was spectacular.  The entire film was shot on location so the scenery was amazing.  At the end of the film, the mystery woman with the Scent of Mystery perfume is finally revealed to us.  As soon as she turned around the audience again oohed and aahed and I asked my father why they were doing so and he said, “That’s Elizabeth Taylor, the most beautiful woman in the whole world.”  Who knew?

The film disappeared a week or two later, before I could get back to see it again.  And for me it stayed gone because I had no idea that it had been converted into Holiday in Spain, Mike Todd, Jr.’s last-ditch attempt to get some money back.  The Holiday in Spain version never played LA, so I didn’t know it existed or that it had been cut down to something like 108 minutes from its 126-minute running time, maybe cut down even more.  The next time I came in contact with the film was when it was shown on TV – the only TV showing it ever had.  They did it in conjunction with 7-Eleven, who gave out scratch-and-sniff cards.  Of course I watched it.  The quality was awful – it looked like someone aimed a video camera at the center of the screen, and there was all kinds of stupid narration added (I later found out it was added to the Holiday in Spain version because all the cuts they made rendered the film incomprehensible) and the TV version ran something like sixty-eight minutes.  It was horrifying.

Next, thanks to my friend Dave Strohmaier, who’d been working with the Cinerama films, he found a 70mm print of the cut version and we went to the Dome and watched it.  It was completely faded and it had the awful narration, plus they’d moved the intermission earlier (Scent of Mystery had the best lead up to an intermission ever) and I just hated it.  Ultimately, Dave found the negative and some trims from the longer version and he began work on it.  I saw it a year and a half ago and it was pretty good, but it was never going to be Scent of Mystery, which, sadly, is seemingly lost forever.  So, I’ve given Dave some memorabilia I have – they never did proper advertising materials for Scent of Mystery – the only poster that exists is the size of a Broadway window card and I do have that, plus some stills, the paperback movie-tie in, and a great newspaper ad for the film here in LA.  So, I’ll do the commentary and I think it will be a lot of fun.  I’ll be with someone who actually worked on the film, so that will be fun, too.  It should be out in November.

Yesterday was kind of an uneventful day and those are certainly nice to have every now and then.  I think I got about seven hours of sleep, but stayed in bed an extra hour.  Then I did my morning stuff, after which I moseyed on over to a restaurant, where I had lunch with our very own Outside the Box editor, Marshall Harvey, and some film music folks.  I had a BLT-A – not enough food but it was decent-tasting.  After that, I went to the mail place where there wasn’t any mail or packages, then I came home.  I answered e-mails, had some telephonic calls and then did a mile-and-a-half jog.  Then I sat on my couch like so much fish.

I watched a bit of a documentary on Netflix entitled Codebreaker.  It’s one of these hybrid things – a documentary that also contains “recreations” with actors, which I don’t think works at all.  But the subject is interesting – it’s about a genius named Alan Turing, who basically came up with what became the basis for computers, long before there were any.  He was also Britain’s greatest codebreaker during the war.  In 1952 he was prosecuted for homosexuality, which at that time was a criminal offense.  Rather than go to prison, he accepted estrogen injections (chemical castration).  He died two years later when he took a cyanide capsule.  He was forty-one.  In 2009, the Prime Minister made an official public apology on behalf of the government for the “appalling way he was treated” and later the Queen granted him a posthumous pardon.  Appalling indeed – treating someone who played a major part in helping decode German secrets and who played a huge part in the creation of computer science.

After that, I made my first try at a show order, and I think it’s probably close, save for moving around a couple of things – it’s a tricky show, but hopefully I’m on the right track.  And I chose our final two songs, so that’s good.  We also got word that we were already over eighty in reservations – and we were still a week away from announcing, so I did the Facebook announcement immediately and I’m sure we’re already sold out by now – the most they can squeeze in the room is about 108.  Last year, we were able to add a second show, but this year it doesn’t look like that’s possible.  Anyway, it’s nice to be sold out this far in advance.

Today, I will have my early meeting with Dave Strohmaier, then I go right to a lunch meeting about a potential project for next year.  Hopefully I’ll pick up some packages and then I’ll get some relaxation in.

Tomorrow we have a run-through of Juliana’s act.  Not sure what’s happening the rest of the day or on Saturday, and Sunday I’m going to The Federal to see Dan Callaway’s solo show.

Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, have a morning meeting, a lunch meeting, hopefully pick up packages, jog and relax.  Today’s topic of discussion: When was the very first time you became aware of homosexuality in literature, film, theatre and TV, and what are your favorites from those arts that dealt with homosexuality?  Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland after which I shall discuss smelly films.

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