3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema

Chapter 7: Single-Strip 3-D Systems

First 3-D Wide Release Single-strip 3-D film projection greatly simplified theatrical exhibition of stereoscopic motion pictures. It was this format that drove the first real wide release of 3-D movies that took place in North America in the 1980s. Friday the 13th Part III, from Paramount Pictures, was the first 3-D film to have a day-and-date wide release when it opened in over 700 theaters in North America on August 13, 1982. For this release, Paramount Pictures shipped a 3-D projection lens, aperture plates, instructions for the projectionist , and a 35mm 3-D test strip in a custom-made shipping box to each theater that, of course, had installed a silver screen. The single-strip stereoscopic filming of Friday the 13th Part III had been produced using the Depix system created by Alvin and Mortimer Marks and their company, the Marks Polarized Corporation of New York. The Depix camera system captured left and right eye images on a single 4-perf 35mm film frame in an over/under configuration using a modified Arriflex Arri III 35mm camera fitted with a Depix converter, a complex optical attachment that used prisms and polarizers. The Marks brothers also marketed Depix as a three-part system consisting of the 3-D camera device, the Polarator projection device, and the Polalite 3-D viewing glasses for use in the theater. The Marks brothers had patented this “3-Dimensional Camera” as a “reflex camera device” using only a single camera lens to capture “right and left images from an object space transmitted as first and second light ray bundles from two positions separated by an interocular distance onto a single frame of a single film strip.”1 The optics for devices of this kind are Single-Strip 3-D Systems 7 On August 13, 1982, more than 700 theaters had installed the custom-made Paramount single-strip projection lens for Friday the 13th Part III in 3-D that had been shipped to them with instructions for assembly. Single-Strip 3-D Systems 81 quite complex, and the Marks patent includes three separate sheets of drawings that illustrate the means to control convergence, focus, and interocular distance, as well as a reflex viewfinder that enables simultaneous viewing and photographing of the right and left images. With the success of Friday the 13th Part III in 3-D, Marks Polarized Corporation filled orders for large numbers of Polalite 3-D glasses. Success, of course, generated competition, and by February 10, 1983, Variety was reporting that the “Tempo Picks Up in 3-D Hardware Wars” and noted the wide variety of single-strip 3-D film camera technologies that were available. Single-Strip 3-D Precursors Proponents of 3-D movies had been working for years on single-strip camera and projection systems to make this kind of wide release possible. In Hungary, there was Felix Bodrossy, who in 1951 began work on a singlestrip 3-D system eventually called Plasztikus Film, which used over-andunder alternating frames, a beam splitter, and a mirror device that created wide-screen movies in an aspect ratio of 2.66 to 1. R. M. Hayes, in 3-D Movies, noted that Bodrossy’s first Plasztikus Film release opened on July 25, 1952, five months before Arch Oboler’s Bwana Devil premiered with dual-strip projection in America. Hayes thinks so much of Bodrossy’s contribution to stereoscopic cinema that he dedicated his 3-D Movies book to him and characterized him as the “father of the modern single strip overand -under widescreen 3-D.”2 However, the concept of using a single strip of film and a single camera with an optical attachment to produce stereoscopic pairs of images predated even Bodrossy’s efforts with Plasztikus Film. Adrian Cornwell-Clyne reports that as early as 1853, F. Bernard had designed a beam-splitting device for photographing stereo motion pictures.3 Otto Vierling in 1935 developed a beam-splitter prism for use with the Zeiss Ikon 35mm motion picture camera.4 Ultimately, Vierling developed three different frame configurations for single-strip 3-D on 35mm film, and one of them was used in 1937 to shoot the first color stereoscopic motion picture with sound, Close Enough to Touch (Zum Greifen nah). When Louis Lumière reshot L’Arrivée d’un Train in 3-D in 1935, he used a single-strip...