Cinema: Strictly for the Marbles

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Television, it seemed, was the final blow. The weekly audience was down from 80 million to 46 million, with the bottom not in sight, and theaters were closing three a day. (Since 1946, some 5,000 of them have become ghost houses, or been converted to supermarkets.)

Strangely, even while TV boomed, the big movies, e.g., Quo Vadis and The Greatest Show on Earth, were doing a bigger business than ever. But the ones that cost only a million dollar or so were hardly paying their way. The "habit public" had deserted to television. Last year most of the major studios barely managed to show a profit, and their position was dangerous because they were stuck with tremendous plants which they no longer needed to make the few pictures that brought in the big green.

Big Screen. In the last three years, the studios have slashed their contract lists from 900 to just over 300 people. At Fox, where production was cut by two-thirds, there was sometimes not even a fourth for bridge in the steam room. At mighty Metro, where production was halved, a whole wing was closed in the Thalberg (executive) building. Beverly Hills began to look like an abandoned anthill. All through the stylish canyons, For Sale signs sprouted. Hedy Lamarr set a fashion in elegant liquidation when she turned over her whole house to the auctioneer in June 1951. Everything went, including a wedding band inscribed in German ("You are my only love") and an evening gown with built-in, foam-rubber falsies.

The biggest names in the business took off for Europe—Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck —through a loophole in the tax law that forgives all if a taxpayer is out of the U.S. for 17 months out of 18. Van Johnson, Betty Hutton and Dorothy Lamour went back into vaudeville; Roz Russell and Bette Davis tried a retread on the legitimate stage; television sopped up Lucille Ball, Ann Sothern, Eve Arden and George Raft. Mike Romanoff, the royal restaurateur, made it final: "The motion picture community can no longer support me."

The Sick Man was feeling pretty weak when all at once there appeared on the market two wonder drugs which seemed to cure precisely what ailed him. They were called Cinerama and 3-D.

Cinerama, photographed on three strips of film at once, is thrown by three projectors on a deep-curved screen so huge (64 ft. by 23 ft.) that it cannot possibly be built into the average movie house. Its effect on audiences at Manhattan's Broadway Theater was startling. It ran over the customers like a colossal vacuum cleaner, sucking them up into whatever it was doing. When the screen went for a roller-coaster ride, the whole theater seemed to heave and be dragged, screaming, after it.

Trick Glasses. Before the moviemakers could recover from the shock and decide how to make Cinerama practical, Fate and an ardent film-hobbyist named Milton Gunzburg were jimmying the back door to salvation. Gunzburg, a mild little man of 42 whom one Hollywoodian has dubbed "the least likely Messiah in the history of hope," saw some home movies he had shot in 3-D, and had a great idea. "Why," he asked himself, "shouldn't a big studio be using this wonderful mechanism?"