"THIS MOVIE SMELLS"

"Wouldn't you like to smell Elizabeth Taylor's perfume?" asks a movie producer, speaking of one of Hollywood's most glamorous stars. "When Huck Finn travels down the Mississippi wouldn't you like to know what he smells as well as what he sees, hears and says?" "This movie smells" may at some time become a compliment. The movie of the future could not only be in color and three dimensional; it could be scented, too. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to make this happen. At least that has been the experience of the bold pioneers in the movie industry who have tried it. One movie, a tale of murder, was produced by Michael Todd, Jr. It was given the suitable title of The Scent of Mystery. The process used was called "Smell-o-vision."

For a travel movie on China, Behind the Great Wall, the odors of harbors, opium dens, and rivers in flood were blown through the air ducts of the theatre.

The movies, however, were not successful, and the whole idea is at present in eclipse. It may someday be revived. Some movie producers still believe that smells could add to your understanding of a movie. They like to imagine an audience made so hungry by the aroma of the food being eaten on the screen that it would rise as one man and dash for the popcorn machine in the lobby.

You may also someday smell the horse ridden by the television cowboy, and enjoy the scent of grass, earth and rock as he rides the range. Television with odors added might become commonplace in the world of tomorrow. Experiments have already been performed with closed circuit shows.

The likeliest use of odor is in the field of advertising. A process called "Scentovision" is based on an electronic device that releases smells in connection with both sound and pictures. This is particularly suitable for advertising display stands in supermarkets. The machine used is about the size of a television set, and is similar to it in a number of ways. A picture of a banana appears on a screen, and at the very same moment the smell of banana is wafted into the air. The picture changes to show coffee, and at once the scent of freshly roasted coffee tickles the nose. The mechanism is carefully timed so that the banana odor vanishes by the time the coffee smell is released.

Advertising that smells can appear on the printed page, too. This is done by the addition of chemical odors to the ink or to the paper. Your family may already have received direct-mail advertising brochures that were perfumed. A number of companies are using these today. In addition, magazines and newspapers are experimenting with scented advertisements.

"These must be handled with kid gloves," complains an advertising manager. "You can run only one perfumed advertisement in each issue. Can you imagine what would happen if there were an advertisement for rose perfume on one page and frozen orange juice on the next? The two smells would knock each other out."

Perfumed paper and ink run into the same problem that people do when they use perfume. It wears off in a few hours. A chemist who developed a pine smell for use in a newspaper advertisement spent the afternoon at the newsstand checking on his work. To his sorrow, he discovered that in two hours the odor was gone.

Research is being done into ways of making smells last longer, and some success has been reported. There are odors that will cling to paper for as long as thirty days. And this is only the beginning.

Members of the advertising industry are not easily discouraged. If they find that odor helps to sell products, they will invest in further research. You may yet live in a world in which billboards, posters, and magazine and newspaper advertisements will bring you both the picture and the smell of canned pineapple, goulash, Chanel Number Five or cigarettes.

(From The artificial world around us, by Lucy Kavaler)