Arch Oboler, one of radio's early top scripters, has passed away at the age of 78. He was primarily known for his invention of such radio suspense show asLights Out in which listeners were held breathlessly caught in a web of tension and eerie expectation by his taut narratives.
Oboler was also a novelist who produced several works in a science fiction and mystery vein. But I remember him most of all for his production of Bwana Devil, the first feature-length film in three dimensions. When Bwana Devil opened in 1952, it unleashed a flood of 3-D films of all types. Subsequent to Bwana Devil, Oboler never abandoned his love of the 3-D medium. He released The Bubble in 3-D in the early sixties as well as a travelogue of Japan titled Domo Arigato. He worked with both twin-strip and over/under film formats.
I was fortunate enough to visit with Oboler in 1983 just as a cycle of stereo films was breaking in theaters. Susan Pinsky and David Starkman accompanied me on the visit, and it was a thrill for all of us to visit with this short and insightful man who was a true avatar of the stereo medium.
He was very skeptical of the motion picture industry. On the opening day of Bwana Devil, there were lines for blocks, he stated. When the film began I noticed there was no 3-D whatsoever. I went straight down the aisle up to the screen and put my hand on it. It was wet! They had simply wetted the screen down. Despite Oboler's negative experiences with exhibitors and studios, he never considered abandoning 3-D.
During our visit he pointed to a script on the coffee table. Right here is a script for the ultimate 3-D film. he said. It's called The Borgia Emerald. Oboler hoped to use Robert Bernier's Spacevision process to shoot the film.
The future of three dimension, he predicted, is in the look of the laser. Holography will wipe out op tical 3-D as we know it today. In our living rooms we'll have a pinpoint of light coming through the ceiling that will send in dramas, musicals and lectures. We will have a little control by our side to adjust the images and make them Lilliputian or fantastically huge. We will walk around and within them. If the world stays together, it will happen within twenty years.
Arch Oboler was a man of stereo vision, a total genius in the mass media who achieved great heights and yet never abandoned that excitement he felt when he first looked through a stereoscope.
During the conversation, Mr. Oboler talked at length about his experiences an an independent producer, trying to influence the motion picture industry to look at 3-D more seriousl--both from the standpoint of film aesthetics and camera systems. He regarded his early work with the dual camera Natural Vision concept as only a preliminary to his involvement with Bernier's single-strip over/under Spacevision format.
Holding the 3-D history comic book Battle For A Three Dimensional World, Arch Oboler ponders a question during a 1983 interview. Stereo by Susan Pinsky.
On 3-D Camera Systems:
A very fine camera technician by the name of Friend Baker had done a fine job of putting it (the Natural Vision rig) together on an aluminum block. He tried to interest a man named Gunzberg who had a brother, who was an ophthalmologist, but who wouldn't put a nickle into the system. So finally, Gunzberg came to me and I broke up the kiddie's piggy bank and got the money together to put it to practical use.
The Gunzbergs tried to make it very mystic with their Natural Vision, and covered the cameras with canvas so no one could look inside to the mystery they had wrought. As time went by, Friend Baker was shoved in the background and the people who he had originally talked to suddenly became the inventors.
I knew at once that it had to be done better. What I did was, I took $50,000 of the loot that I'd gotten out of Bwana Devi--$50,000 would be like spending half a million now--and I went all over the world. I investigated all the inventors, I got to know them all, and they were all con men!-except ten. Out of a hundred, I'd say 90 were absolute confidence men.
Out of the ten who I felt were legitimate, Bernier really had the only system worth considering. It took about 15 years from the time he first talked to me. It started out, as with all inventions, the inventor says, Oh it'll cost a dollar and a half to get the lens made. and so on. It ended up costing me personally $600,000--which is an awful lot of money for a writer, as you know. You have to write an awful lot of words to earn that much money. The system that Bernier came up with, Spacevision, to my mind is still the best system. It still makes the most sense.
A 1953 Realist ad in a magazine featured a testimonial from Arch Oboler, shown standing in front of a Realist display in the lobby of the Hollywood Paramount theater. Stereo slides taken during the filming of Bwana Devil could be seen in the Realist viewers included in the display.
On Horror and Gore in Recent 3-D Films:
If I wrote a horror story (and you're talking to the guy on radio who was known for his horror stories) I could out-gore them! I'll play you records that will cause you to stop eating for a week--if I did that for motion pictures I could get any money I want. Unfortunately, I don't want to do that to 3-D. I think it goes way beyond that, and my own maturity is beyond that.
In terms of 3-D, until there is some artistic level of choice of stories in the studios, we may have the same reaction to the present 3-D excitement that we had back in the Bwana Devil days. The audience will become surfeited with gore, with bad stories. The only hope for 3-D is that someone will come along with taste and understanding and do a good story without regard for the extremes of 3-D--using it in terms of the story itself . . . It's so easy to get so seduced by the wonders of going into space that you forget about the story. And again, how shall I put it nicely, there are so few good movies in two dimensions that maybe I'm reaching for the impossible when I say let's have one in three-dimensions.
A good friend of mine, Frank Lloyd Wright, had all the trouble in his life architecturally that the world of 3-D has. But he always stuck to the precept that you had to start not with the concept of doing something madly, offbeat--but doing some thing that was right for the purpose for which you were doing it; a house, a museum. We talked about 3-D, because I was just starting with it shortly before he died, and I talked to him about the need for story, story, story.
It didn't come off the first go around. I doubt that it will come off on the second go-round. But I sure wish it will come off on the third! I hope the viewing audience will have patience enough--from what I've seen up to this point it's kind of terrifying.
