I feel quite stupid; I'd completely forgotten the recent spate of 3-D feature films. I seldom go the the movies any more, so I don't pay enough attention to what's going on there. I've seen ads for 3-D Imax films. My stomach drops just to think of it. The Imax screen is so enormous that it often overwhelms me, especially in narrative films (as opposed to "magnificent nature" features), where I must process close-ups of heads two stories tall.
I shamefacedly admit that the first 3-D film I ever saw was a porn feature. In early 1970s America it was briefly considered chic to go to a porno movie. Some tastemaker somewhere determined that Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones were hip...even Johnny Carson joked about them. The nearby San Francisco porno theaters were the epicenter of hip porn, but other theaters hopped on the bandwagon in hopes of snaring some collegiate twenty-something guys and their girlfriends.
My chums and I decided to see what the fuss was about--remember, at the time pornography was mostly limited to underground comics and in many places was illegal. Being geeks we'd also always wanted to see a 3-D movie. We weren't ready to brave Skid Row where the hardcore theaters were, so we ended up at a third-rate house in one of the Will-Somebody-Please-Gentrify-This-Dump neighborhoods watching a 3-D softcore feature. The Stewardesses was in color and 3-D and boasted a budget of twelve dollars and seventy-five cents. The expression "piece of crap" was invented to describe this film. It was so embarrassingly bad that it ended any notion I had of "porno chic." The 3-D was limited to a couple of legs thrust toward the screen. Being a softcore film, there were none of the interesting effects one might imagine would be in 3-D porn.
Years later a revival theater (how I miss revival theaters!) showed a 3-D print of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The film mostly demonstrated that 3-D was just another gimmick. But one scene sticks in my mind. The hero and his friends have tossed chunks of poison into the lagoon to stun the Gill Man. The poison was really blocks of dry ice. There's an underwater shot, looking up toward the surface as a row of these blocks splash in, then sink, boiling and tumbling, while rays of sunlight filter through the sediment. That 3-D image is, in a word, breathtaking. If they'd done something like that in The Stewardesses I might have gone back to the theater.
Incidentally, one of my braver friends took his girlfriend to the sleaze district to see Deep Throat. While they waited in the long ticket line a hooker hit on my friend and asked him if he wouldn't rather see the real thing. Very chic.
