1 3-D Movies
The gimmick: When Monsters vs. Aliens hits theaters on March 27, it will be the surest sign yet that 3-D movies are in the midst of one of their periodic revivals. The animated film will join recent releases like My Bloody Valentine 3-D, Jonas Brothers: 3-D Concert Experience, and Coraline in busting off the silver screen (with the aid of a goofy set of glasses, of course.)
This isn't the first time pundits have heralded 3-D technology as the future of cinema. As early as 1922, a New York theater was showing a rudimentary series of 3-D films dubbed Movies of the Future. The format gained widespread acceptance in the 1950s with schlocky films such as Vincent Price's House of Wax. Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (above) was possibly the pinnacle of the movement, and while the format gradually died down, there have been spurts of (unfortunate) interest ever since — Jaws 3-D, anyone?
The result: Box office returns from the recent 3-D slate have been mixed, but this latest revival may have legs. By the end of the year, more than a dozen films will be released in 3-D. Maybe the future is finally here to stay.
2 Smell-o-Vision
The gimmick: The final frontier of cinema is...smell? So thought producer Mike Todd, Jr. who created 1960's Scent of Mystery to highlight his Smell-o-Vision technology. He equipped three theaters with conveyor belts, designed to deploy one of 30 different scents sequenced to specific triggers in the film reel.
The result: One and done. Audiences complained that the smells were hard to detect and by the time they blew through the theater, the action on screen no longer matched up. It's probably for the best — did anyone really want to experience the pungency of, say, Rocky post-fight? We'll pass.
3 The Tingler
The gimmick: Mid-century director William Castle never met a gimmick he didn't love. But his crowning achievement might be the one he employed for the 1959 horror flick, The Tingler. The film's premise is that spine-tingling fear is actually the result of a creature growing at the base of spine — the eponymous Tingler — and it can only be killed by screaming. In the movie, a Tingler escapes from a scientist and heads into a movie theater full of people. To heighten the realism, Castle installed vibrating devices in the seats of unwitting film goers, triggering them at random during this scene.
The result: We wouldn't want to be one of the hapless audience members at this one. The fun didn't stop at the Tingler, though. Castle also paid people to scream and faint, only to be carried out on stretchers. He quickly earned a reputation for his gimmicks, and eventually had problems getting theaters to show his films because to put them on was "just too damn complicated."
4 Sensurround
The gimmick: Sensurround is just a fancy term for making the sound loud. Really, really loud. Used during the 1974 movie Earthquake, large speakers emitted high-decibel rumblings every time the earth shook on screen.
The result: Earthquake actually won an Academy Award for its sound, but the technology was short-lived. Sensurround made things so loud that in several cases, cracks opened in the ceiling of a theater or plaster fell on filmgoers. In the end, theater owners decided the effect wasn't worth it, though it was used in three more films after Earthquake.
5 Illusion-O
The gimmick: Another William Castle production, though this one quite a bit less tingling. For his 1960 film 13 Ghosts, Castle issued ticket holders a pair of glasses, the only way to see the ghosts on screen.
The result: This was one of the few Castle gimmicks that can still be replicated today. Modern DVDs of the film still include the special glasses, though the effect is said to be underwhelming.
6 Split Screen
The gimmick: In our digital era, split screen scenes (displaying two or more scenes simultaneously on a partitioned screen) don't seem like that big of a deal. But the technique was revolutionary when it first came out and was much more difficult to achieve. Filmmakers had to run dual projectors — sometimes even more — synced perfectly for the film to work.
The result: The 1968 flick The Thomas Crown Affair popularized the technique to show multiple parts of the movie's heist simultaneously. The technique works especially well for the caper movie and modern counterparts like Ocean's 11 owe a debt of gratitude to Thomas Crown.
7 Multiple Endings
The gimmick: Translating a board game to the big screen? Not an easy task. So in an effort to liven things up, the makers of 1985's Clue made the movie with three different endings providing three different solutions to the murder mystery. Viewers saw an ending based on what theater they were in.
The result: Not even multiple endings could save this pic, as Clue was a box office flop. But the true loser was the avid board game fan: Don't expect that Monopoly adaptation to hit the big screen anytime soon. Oh wait, it is.
8 Viral Marketing
The gimmick: A modern take on the movie gimmick is the viral marketing campaign. No movie used it better than the 2008 monster movie Cloverfield. As early as six months in advance, filmmakers were creating Web sites with no overt ties to the film, which Web users eagerly discovered and speculated about online. That and a cryptic film trailer were the perfect combination to generate buzz...
The result: ...Which the film did not sustain. Cloverfield suffered from the fact that the viral marketing campaign was ultimately more interesting than the movie itself.
9 IMAX
The gimmick: IMAX used to be the sole domain of class field trips to the natural history museum. But mainstream filmmakers started to co-opt the technology in the early part of this decade. Movies were blown up to fit IMAX screens, which are more than 70 feet wide and 50 feet tall.
The result: The IMAX craze has been a boon for studios, who have used the technology to both re-release classics (like Apollo 13) and screen normally filmed flicks. But the technology works best when filmmakers use IMAX cameras to film a movie in the native format. IMAX cameras have a much higher resolution than the typical movie camera, creating detail that shines on the massive screen. Last summer's The Dark Knight included scenes filmed with the special (and expensive) cameras, offering moviegoers something more than just a bigger picture.
10 Cinerama
The gimmick: Sometimes wider is better than bigger. That was the thought at least, behind the Cinerama projection technique, which used three projectors to play a film on a specially created wide and curved screen, spanning 146°. The 1962 western film How the West Was Won was the most noteworthy film in the format.
The result: Moviemakers had a hard time converting the format to show in the vast majority of theaters that weren't equipped with a Cinerama screen. But it lives on through the efforts of a few fans, who operate small theaters showing the movies on Cinerama screens. Devotees include Microsoft's Paul Allen, who owns a Seattle Cinerama theater.
