Mike Ballew
Second Unit
Hi, everyone. I wrote up kind of an essay a few years ago recounting the time I first really discovered 3-D movies, in the summer of 1982. I hope you won't mind my posting it here. It's 2265 words long, give or take, so it may take a few minutes to read.
If you are moved to do so, I hope some of you will consider posting similar entries. I'd love to learn how you first encountered stereoscopic cinema. What was that first 3-D movie you saw? What was your first reaction? Were your companions in agreement, or did you feel forced to keep your feelings secret? Let's hear everything.
*************
When I was in third grade, about 1979 or so, I once saw some older kid running down the halls of our elementary school wearing a pair of funny-looking cardboard glasses. One lens was red, the other blue-green, and emblazoned along one side was the word "3-D." Even at that young age, I knew vaguely they had made some 3-D movies back in the 1950s; they mentioned these once or twice on Happy Days, and once, surprisingly, on Rhoda.
"Where on earth did he get those?" one of our teachers called out before the kid's running dust had even settled. "I haven’t seen those since I was a little girl!"
I was an early and avid reader, at least when it came to subjects I found interesting, and over the next few years I learned a little more about 3-D movies, mainly from reading the Blackhawk Films catalog. Blackhawk Films, for those who don’t know, were purveyors of 8 and 16 millimeter versions of old theatrical films for the home movie market, and their catalogs were so thoroughly descriptive that they practically functioned as a crash course in film history. Eventually I discovered that our county library, a huge and thoroughly modern wonderland of books, had a whole section devoted to film history and scholarship. The apparent consensus (when it was mentioned at all) was that 3-D was a ridiculous gimmick, a conspiracy by money men and head-in-the-clouds inventors to bilk the movie-going public. Not one decent film had ever been made in 3-D, or so I was told, and if ever 3-D movies resurfaced they were doomed to rejection by the public, who might give them a fleeting glance, sure, but were ultimately much too savvy to put up with such foolishness for very long.
Comes the late spring of 1982. We started seeing a lot of ballyhoo on WFBC-TV, our local NBC affiliate in upstate South Carolina, for a flick they were going to be showing in late July, on a Friday night in prime time. Channel 4 was very cagey in its commercials for the event. The early ads never showed one frame of footage from the film itself, depicting instead an ordinary suburban family parked in front of a wooden-consoled behemoth of a television, typical of that era. Parents and children alike were wearing cardboard 3-D glasses just like the ones I had seen on my schoolmate's face, and a pair of monstrous hands were reaching toward them from out of the TV screen.
By gosh, they were going to try and show a 3-D movie on television! It might be a conspiracy, but at least it was beginning to seem interesting.
Within a few weeks of those first commercials, we started seeing the 3-D glasses pop up at our local Fast Fare convenience stores. At the going rate of two pair for 99 cents, my kid brother Steve and I soon assembled quite a collection. It was fascinating to observe the way the ordinary world shimmered and flickered through the colored lenses. Mom was forever nagging us not to wear them too long, for fear they would ruin our eyesight.
“Momma!” I called out, waving my arms wildly in front of me. “Is that you? I can hear you. Momma?”
I laughed. She, not so much.
The one thing Channel 4 was emphatic about was that a color TV was absolutely essential to enjoy the 3-D effect. Those with black-and-white sets could watch the flick, but theirs would be an inferior, two-dimensional experience.
At last came the big night: July 23rd, 1982. The movie was Revenge of the Creature, a 1955 monster flick we kids were already familiar with from Saturday afternoon "Shock Theater" reruns on the ABC affiliate out of Asheville and the occasional mention in Famous Monsters magazine. Steve and I had been jonesing for this for weeks, and so had all our friends. I personally had eight or ten pairs of glasses in hand when we left our house to go catch the show with our grandparents at their home about ten miles distant. It was meant to be a kind of family party.
Along the way, we stopped in at the home of MaMa Cowart, my relentlessly cheerful great-grandmother, to pick up my Aunt Lori, who was without wheels. From there, Mom and Lori mysteriously disappeared without us in Mom’s car, telling no one their plans. And wouldn’t you know it? MaMa Cowart had been making do all these years with naught but a black-and-white TV, bless her heart. No 3-D for her, not that she seemed to mind. "You boys can watch whatever you care to," she told us, not realizing the thing was not in her power to grant.
The minutes ticked away. I was becoming an inward hysterical wreck. As the clock ran down to Zero Hour, there was no sign of Mom, no sign of Lori, no sign of hope. Even MaMa Cowart’s neighbors seemed part of a cosmic conspiracy. When asked if perchance they were going to be watching Revenge of the Creature, they told us, No, we’re watching Hardly Working with Jerry Lewis, and won’t you please join us, it’s hilarious.
I was quite sure it was. It had been playing in near-constant rotation on one of the big cable channels that month. Had these people no appreciation that this 3-D was a one-time thing?
When Mom and Lori finally put in an appearance at about 8:20 p.m., the first act of the flick was nearly over. Laughing and intoxicated with each other’s company, they informed us they had been to every Fast Fare store in a 10-mile radius hunting for 3-D glasses, and they were all sold out. I brandished my ten pairs in Mom’s uncomprehending face. “We’re missing it! We’re missing it!”
We hustled over to our grandparents' house, where PaPa Galloway, by now only half interested, languidly switched channels to four. In a recurring voice-over at commercial breaks, local personality Stowe Hoyle advised us to adjust our color and tint knobs while looking through the blue filter of our glasses until the provided test pattern made one uniform color. Let me tell you, we tweaked that TV as gently and as carefully as if we were handling a piece of NASA space equipment.
And voila. The movie looked like shite.
I have since seen Revenge of the Creature twice in its original two-strip polarized 3-D, the kind with the clear gray lenses, like Heaven intended. There are a few problem shots, sure, but on the whole it really is a superior example of 3-D craftsmanship. But you wouldn’t have known it that night, not by a long shot.
So I figured the nay-sayers must be right. Three-D movies were a waste of time, a perennial flash in the pan, destined to be consigned to the ash heap of cinematic history until every so often a new generation of dupes emerged to be suckered.
Smash cut to a day just three weeks later: August 13th, 1982.
For several weeks, we had been hearing tantalizing radio come-ons for the latest Friday the 13th film, Part Three this time. We had caught Part One at the drive-in several times and thought so highly of it that we made a point of seeing Part Two at the walk-in, as a family. (I was 9 and 10 years old when those films were released. Chew on that for a minute.) But Friday the 13th Part III had the added attraction of having been filmed using something called Super 3-D.*
Very interesting.
Since Mom’s birthday fell that week and since it sounded like fun, Dad took the initiative and made plans for us to catch an opening day matinee. The four of us plus Aunt Lori and her then-boyfriend trekked up to the Towers Four Cinemas in Greenville, only to learn that the first showing, at one p.m. or thereabouts, was already sold out!
The fact that the flick was so popular only encouraged us. Dad bought tickets for the three o'clock show, and we all hiked over to the adjacent shopping center to while away two hours. I remember being absorbed in a display for RCA SelectaVision discs when Dad came to me urgently.
“Mikey, where have you been?” he asked.
He should have guessed I’d been rooted in this exact spot since maybe one-thirty.
He hustled me toward the doors. “Everybody's on their way to the movies!”
We literally--literally--ran across the parking lot to the theater, where we were handed an oversize pair of what I later learned were Marks Polarized glasses. They had really large windows for the eyes, and the lenses were a kind of medium gray color that became practically transparent when you looked through them.**
We all pressed against the velvet ropes in the theater lobby waiting for the first show to clear out, held in check by a burly, sphinxlike assistant manager, dressed like a church deacon in a dark, pinstripe suit. The Towers Cinema was still a class establishment in the summer of ’82. It wouldn't survive the decade.
Within minutes we were joined by a restless, chattering throng. The three o'clock show was obviously on its way to selling out, too. There was a crackle of excitement in the air, like waiting for a rock concert or a really fierce roller coaster. I remember watching a man about my dad’s age explaining how the glasses worked to his son and his son’s young friend. He held the lens of one pair of glasses against the lens of another and rotated them in relation to each other, making the overlaid windows by turns transparent and opaque. I remember being mildly troubled that I did not already know about the phenomenon of polarized light going in. But I was glad to learn it now. I looked down at my own pair of 3-D glasses. Made of ordinary white cardboard, they seemed powerful and mysterious out of all proportion to their level of craftsmanship.
At last the prior show let out. The people were laughing and happy and obviously well pleased with the experience. The tension of anticipation that had been building steadily all afternoon was now at a fever pitch. Dad, Mom, and Lori pressed in on us kids, trying to ride the wake of our youthful enthusiasm to early seats in the auditorium.
Lori had seen a 3-D movie or two before now. From later conversations I know for a fact she saw Sea Dream at Marineland in Florida, and I think she may have caught Comin’ at Ya! or Parasite as well. So we listened to her when she advised us not to sit too close to the screen. Our family slid into the center seats on a row about three-quarters of the way back, then watched as every single seat in the house filled up around us.
There was a lot of nervous laughter and excited chatter, and throughout the auditorium you could watch people figuring out what to do with their 3-D glasses.
Now, this was a time when movie theaters still had thick, velvety drapes over the screen when movies were not in progress, so you can imagine the sharp thrill that ran up our backs when the piped-in music faded, the lights dimmed, and those curtains began to open, rolling like slow-motion waves on a maroon-colored sea.
Okay, here we go, I thought to myself. This whole 3-D movie business might be a sham and a joke, but no one can say I haven’t given it a fair chance. We shall see what we shall see.
Those of you who have only encountered Friday the 13th Part III on home video will not know that the original theatrical prints opened with a disclaimer, to wit: "The following scenes are not in 3-D. However, you will need your 3-D glasses to view them." At which point the scene fades up on the third act of Part Two, in progress, to set the scene. My brother Steve hadn’t yet put on his 3-D glasses and was making his trademark derisive chortle. What I would later learn to call vertical misalignment in the projected left and right images made the actress on-screen appear to have a flat nose like that of a pig, to Steve's profound amusement. Mom and Dad told him to pipe down before someone else did. He was still laughing about it years later.
A hush fell over the audience. The camera dollied in on the desiccated remains of the villain’s mother, arranged in a kind of morbid shrine. And suddenly, from out of her eyes, the main titles of the film came sailing out of the screen...
...and kept coming, and kept coming...
...until at last they seemed to hang in space 12 inches from my face!
And the thought that crossed my mind in that moment was, Wait a minute. They’ve known how to do this for 30 years or more, and this is the first time I’m seeing it?
Surely it goes without saying that I was hooked. I can honestly say that seeing that movie--or rather, seeing stereoscopic motion pictures for the first time--changed my life. The same passion some people rightly reserve for football, for Shakespeare, for jazz music or for Impressionist paintings, I have for 3-D movies. And that passion has endured unabated through good times and bad for the past 30-some-odd years. I like to say I was 3-D when 3-D wasn’t cool. And some of you can say the same.
* - In reality, the Marks 3-Depix Converter.
** - They also had a kind of dark gray film over the rear surface, apparently a proprietary scheme to cut down on glare.
If you are moved to do so, I hope some of you will consider posting similar entries. I'd love to learn how you first encountered stereoscopic cinema. What was that first 3-D movie you saw? What was your first reaction? Were your companions in agreement, or did you feel forced to keep your feelings secret? Let's hear everything.
*************
When I was in third grade, about 1979 or so, I once saw some older kid running down the halls of our elementary school wearing a pair of funny-looking cardboard glasses. One lens was red, the other blue-green, and emblazoned along one side was the word "3-D." Even at that young age, I knew vaguely they had made some 3-D movies back in the 1950s; they mentioned these once or twice on Happy Days, and once, surprisingly, on Rhoda.
"Where on earth did he get those?" one of our teachers called out before the kid's running dust had even settled. "I haven’t seen those since I was a little girl!"
I was an early and avid reader, at least when it came to subjects I found interesting, and over the next few years I learned a little more about 3-D movies, mainly from reading the Blackhawk Films catalog. Blackhawk Films, for those who don’t know, were purveyors of 8 and 16 millimeter versions of old theatrical films for the home movie market, and their catalogs were so thoroughly descriptive that they practically functioned as a crash course in film history. Eventually I discovered that our county library, a huge and thoroughly modern wonderland of books, had a whole section devoted to film history and scholarship. The apparent consensus (when it was mentioned at all) was that 3-D was a ridiculous gimmick, a conspiracy by money men and head-in-the-clouds inventors to bilk the movie-going public. Not one decent film had ever been made in 3-D, or so I was told, and if ever 3-D movies resurfaced they were doomed to rejection by the public, who might give them a fleeting glance, sure, but were ultimately much too savvy to put up with such foolishness for very long.
Comes the late spring of 1982. We started seeing a lot of ballyhoo on WFBC-TV, our local NBC affiliate in upstate South Carolina, for a flick they were going to be showing in late July, on a Friday night in prime time. Channel 4 was very cagey in its commercials for the event. The early ads never showed one frame of footage from the film itself, depicting instead an ordinary suburban family parked in front of a wooden-consoled behemoth of a television, typical of that era. Parents and children alike were wearing cardboard 3-D glasses just like the ones I had seen on my schoolmate's face, and a pair of monstrous hands were reaching toward them from out of the TV screen.
By gosh, they were going to try and show a 3-D movie on television! It might be a conspiracy, but at least it was beginning to seem interesting.
Within a few weeks of those first commercials, we started seeing the 3-D glasses pop up at our local Fast Fare convenience stores. At the going rate of two pair for 99 cents, my kid brother Steve and I soon assembled quite a collection. It was fascinating to observe the way the ordinary world shimmered and flickered through the colored lenses. Mom was forever nagging us not to wear them too long, for fear they would ruin our eyesight.
“Momma!” I called out, waving my arms wildly in front of me. “Is that you? I can hear you. Momma?”
I laughed. She, not so much.
The one thing Channel 4 was emphatic about was that a color TV was absolutely essential to enjoy the 3-D effect. Those with black-and-white sets could watch the flick, but theirs would be an inferior, two-dimensional experience.
At last came the big night: July 23rd, 1982. The movie was Revenge of the Creature, a 1955 monster flick we kids were already familiar with from Saturday afternoon "Shock Theater" reruns on the ABC affiliate out of Asheville and the occasional mention in Famous Monsters magazine. Steve and I had been jonesing for this for weeks, and so had all our friends. I personally had eight or ten pairs of glasses in hand when we left our house to go catch the show with our grandparents at their home about ten miles distant. It was meant to be a kind of family party.
Along the way, we stopped in at the home of MaMa Cowart, my relentlessly cheerful great-grandmother, to pick up my Aunt Lori, who was without wheels. From there, Mom and Lori mysteriously disappeared without us in Mom’s car, telling no one their plans. And wouldn’t you know it? MaMa Cowart had been making do all these years with naught but a black-and-white TV, bless her heart. No 3-D for her, not that she seemed to mind. "You boys can watch whatever you care to," she told us, not realizing the thing was not in her power to grant.
The minutes ticked away. I was becoming an inward hysterical wreck. As the clock ran down to Zero Hour, there was no sign of Mom, no sign of Lori, no sign of hope. Even MaMa Cowart’s neighbors seemed part of a cosmic conspiracy. When asked if perchance they were going to be watching Revenge of the Creature, they told us, No, we’re watching Hardly Working with Jerry Lewis, and won’t you please join us, it’s hilarious.
I was quite sure it was. It had been playing in near-constant rotation on one of the big cable channels that month. Had these people no appreciation that this 3-D was a one-time thing?
When Mom and Lori finally put in an appearance at about 8:20 p.m., the first act of the flick was nearly over. Laughing and intoxicated with each other’s company, they informed us they had been to every Fast Fare store in a 10-mile radius hunting for 3-D glasses, and they were all sold out. I brandished my ten pairs in Mom’s uncomprehending face. “We’re missing it! We’re missing it!”
We hustled over to our grandparents' house, where PaPa Galloway, by now only half interested, languidly switched channels to four. In a recurring voice-over at commercial breaks, local personality Stowe Hoyle advised us to adjust our color and tint knobs while looking through the blue filter of our glasses until the provided test pattern made one uniform color. Let me tell you, we tweaked that TV as gently and as carefully as if we were handling a piece of NASA space equipment.
And voila. The movie looked like shite.
I have since seen Revenge of the Creature twice in its original two-strip polarized 3-D, the kind with the clear gray lenses, like Heaven intended. There are a few problem shots, sure, but on the whole it really is a superior example of 3-D craftsmanship. But you wouldn’t have known it that night, not by a long shot.
So I figured the nay-sayers must be right. Three-D movies were a waste of time, a perennial flash in the pan, destined to be consigned to the ash heap of cinematic history until every so often a new generation of dupes emerged to be suckered.
Smash cut to a day just three weeks later: August 13th, 1982.
For several weeks, we had been hearing tantalizing radio come-ons for the latest Friday the 13th film, Part Three this time. We had caught Part One at the drive-in several times and thought so highly of it that we made a point of seeing Part Two at the walk-in, as a family. (I was 9 and 10 years old when those films were released. Chew on that for a minute.) But Friday the 13th Part III had the added attraction of having been filmed using something called Super 3-D.*
Very interesting.
Since Mom’s birthday fell that week and since it sounded like fun, Dad took the initiative and made plans for us to catch an opening day matinee. The four of us plus Aunt Lori and her then-boyfriend trekked up to the Towers Four Cinemas in Greenville, only to learn that the first showing, at one p.m. or thereabouts, was already sold out!
The fact that the flick was so popular only encouraged us. Dad bought tickets for the three o'clock show, and we all hiked over to the adjacent shopping center to while away two hours. I remember being absorbed in a display for RCA SelectaVision discs when Dad came to me urgently.
“Mikey, where have you been?” he asked.
He should have guessed I’d been rooted in this exact spot since maybe one-thirty.
He hustled me toward the doors. “Everybody's on their way to the movies!”
We literally--literally--ran across the parking lot to the theater, where we were handed an oversize pair of what I later learned were Marks Polarized glasses. They had really large windows for the eyes, and the lenses were a kind of medium gray color that became practically transparent when you looked through them.**
We all pressed against the velvet ropes in the theater lobby waiting for the first show to clear out, held in check by a burly, sphinxlike assistant manager, dressed like a church deacon in a dark, pinstripe suit. The Towers Cinema was still a class establishment in the summer of ’82. It wouldn't survive the decade.
Within minutes we were joined by a restless, chattering throng. The three o'clock show was obviously on its way to selling out, too. There was a crackle of excitement in the air, like waiting for a rock concert or a really fierce roller coaster. I remember watching a man about my dad’s age explaining how the glasses worked to his son and his son’s young friend. He held the lens of one pair of glasses against the lens of another and rotated them in relation to each other, making the overlaid windows by turns transparent and opaque. I remember being mildly troubled that I did not already know about the phenomenon of polarized light going in. But I was glad to learn it now. I looked down at my own pair of 3-D glasses. Made of ordinary white cardboard, they seemed powerful and mysterious out of all proportion to their level of craftsmanship.
At last the prior show let out. The people were laughing and happy and obviously well pleased with the experience. The tension of anticipation that had been building steadily all afternoon was now at a fever pitch. Dad, Mom, and Lori pressed in on us kids, trying to ride the wake of our youthful enthusiasm to early seats in the auditorium.
Lori had seen a 3-D movie or two before now. From later conversations I know for a fact she saw Sea Dream at Marineland in Florida, and I think she may have caught Comin’ at Ya! or Parasite as well. So we listened to her when she advised us not to sit too close to the screen. Our family slid into the center seats on a row about three-quarters of the way back, then watched as every single seat in the house filled up around us.
There was a lot of nervous laughter and excited chatter, and throughout the auditorium you could watch people figuring out what to do with their 3-D glasses.
Now, this was a time when movie theaters still had thick, velvety drapes over the screen when movies were not in progress, so you can imagine the sharp thrill that ran up our backs when the piped-in music faded, the lights dimmed, and those curtains began to open, rolling like slow-motion waves on a maroon-colored sea.
Okay, here we go, I thought to myself. This whole 3-D movie business might be a sham and a joke, but no one can say I haven’t given it a fair chance. We shall see what we shall see.
Those of you who have only encountered Friday the 13th Part III on home video will not know that the original theatrical prints opened with a disclaimer, to wit: "The following scenes are not in 3-D. However, you will need your 3-D glasses to view them." At which point the scene fades up on the third act of Part Two, in progress, to set the scene. My brother Steve hadn’t yet put on his 3-D glasses and was making his trademark derisive chortle. What I would later learn to call vertical misalignment in the projected left and right images made the actress on-screen appear to have a flat nose like that of a pig, to Steve's profound amusement. Mom and Dad told him to pipe down before someone else did. He was still laughing about it years later.
A hush fell over the audience. The camera dollied in on the desiccated remains of the villain’s mother, arranged in a kind of morbid shrine. And suddenly, from out of her eyes, the main titles of the film came sailing out of the screen...
...and kept coming, and kept coming...
...until at last they seemed to hang in space 12 inches from my face!
And the thought that crossed my mind in that moment was, Wait a minute. They’ve known how to do this for 30 years or more, and this is the first time I’m seeing it?
Surely it goes without saying that I was hooked. I can honestly say that seeing that movie--or rather, seeing stereoscopic motion pictures for the first time--changed my life. The same passion some people rightly reserve for football, for Shakespeare, for jazz music or for Impressionist paintings, I have for 3-D movies. And that passion has endured unabated through good times and bad for the past 30-some-odd years. I like to say I was 3-D when 3-D wasn’t cool. And some of you can say the same.
* - In reality, the Marks 3-Depix Converter.
** - They also had a kind of dark gray film over the rear surface, apparently a proprietary scheme to cut down on glare.
