Cinema: Strictly for the Marbles

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Thereupon Milton and his optician brother Julian found a veteran camera technician named Friend Baker, who jiffy-built a stereo-camera by lashing together two standard 35-mm. Mitchell cameras geared to shoot "in sync." Early in 1951 Natural Vision, as the Gunzburgs called their company, began to peddle its process to the big studios. Fox, Columbia and Paramount said no; Metro took an option and let it drop.

At this point, desperate enough to swallow the first kind word he heard, Gunzburg agreed to let a fantasy merchant named Arch Oboler (once known in the radio business as "the daytime Norman Corwin") make a movie called Bwana Devil in Natural Vision. "The truth is," says one moviemaker, "that the movie industry didn't have the sense to follow its own nose into 3-D. They had to be led by a dog." And Bwana Devil—which may prove to be the most important motion picture produced in Hollywood since The Jazz Singer introduced sound in 1927—was indeed a dog. The script, a sort of veldt opera about how two lions interfered with the building of a railroad in Africa, was so bad that at the Los Angeles première last November, nobody noticed that the stereography was worse.

Nevertheless, Bwana Devil had what it took. Three-D had arrived. The next morning a half-delirious theater manager was shouting at Gunzburg over the telephone: "It's the most fabulous thing we've ever seen! They're standing four abreast all the way down to the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood and all the way around the block downtown!" In its first week Bwana smashed house records at the box office, rang up $95,000 at the two theaters. Rushed into a Chicago theater, it broke some more records.

That did it. The old lions of the movie industry—Nick and Joe Schenck, the Skourases, the Warners, the Cohns, Freeman and Zukor—came roaring out of their dens, heads up, alertly sniffing the trade winds.

At Paramount, for the benefit of 80-year-old Adolph Zukor, an antique stereo-camera was hauled up from the basement. Out the window went twelve days of production on Sangaree, a costume epic starring Fernando Lamas, and the whole thing was shot again in 3-D, with Technicolor. "Whaddya mean they won't wear glasses?" demanded Producer Bill Thomas. "They'll wear toilet seats around their necks if you give 'em what they want to see!"

The Gimmick. At Universal, Bossman Bill Goetz put his shops to work 20 hours a day on a 3-D camera, then sped into production on a work he felt was suited to the new medium: It Came from Outer Space. Fox announced three pictures to be made in 3-D, and Metro declared for two.