The Movies

Color, in fact, had existed virtually since the beginning of movies. Some films, like the two great Griffith epics, had had some sequences laboriously hand-tinted, frame by frame. In Erich von Stroheim's 1924 masterpiece, "Greed," a character's pathological miserliness was expressed when Stroheim gold-tinted a scene in which she wallowed in a bed filled with gold coins. In 1915 Herbert T. Kalmus and Daniel F. Comstock formed the Technicolor Motion Picture Corp. In 1928, none other than DeMille used its two-color process in parts of "The Ten Commandments." In the early '30s, Technicolor created the first three-color process, but it was "Gone With the Wind" in 1939 that changed the palette of movies forever.

Cinema was moving closer and closer to the approximation of reality. First motion, then sound, then color--and then came the attempt to break free of two-dimensionality. Again, 3-D effects were as old as the movies, dating back to the "anaglyph" method, in which a camera photographed a scene with two lenses placed as far apart as human eyes. The resulting two images were merged (crudely) into a single stereoscopic image by special red and blue glasses worn by viewers. Refined 3-D methods were showcased in short films commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951. This led in the '50s to an outbreak of scare-'em 3-D movies like "Bwana Devil," with spears hurtling toward the audience, and "House of Wax," with Vincent Price turning corpses into wax exhibits.

It was Hollywood that was scared, as television began to eat into its monopoly on image entertainment. Enter wide-screen technologies like Cinerama and Cinema-Scope, in which Twentieth Century Fox took a French-developed technique (again, going back to the 1890s) and made the first wide-screen feature, the religious] epic "The Robe" (1953).

The culmination of the wide-screen technology is today's IMAX, developed by a group of Canadians. First shown at fairs and expos, IMAX used the largest film frame in movie history, 70 mm, shown on huge screens from four to eight stories high with multidirectional sound. Still pretty much a supergimmick; IMAX is shown at 154 theaters in 22 countries, 28 equipped with IMAX's own 3-D technology. But we still await the first use of this method to create a viable storytelling film.

As movie technology continues to go where no moviegoer has gone, what is the future of the popular art form of the expiring century? "I just want to say one word to you--holograph," as the guy in "The Graduate" didn't say to Dustin Hoffman. Holography, the evocation of fully dimensional, lifelike images, will almost surely lead to some movie-like form. The problem, as it was at the beginning with Edison's Kinetoscope, is how to show it not to one or two viewers at a time, but to a theaterful, a community of paying spectators. Alan Rhody, editor of the trade journal Holography Marketplace, predicts: "As laser technology progresses, optical barriers are crossed, and venture capitalists become actively involved in the hologram industry, theatrical holographic presentations will become a reality." Yes, and he might have added the prospect of computer-generated presentation replacing live performances.

Today, storytelling and character are both driven, many would say imperiled, by the explosive rise of special effects. Even this goes back to the early days of film, when the marvelous Frenchman Georges Melies made movies like the 1902 "A Trip to the Moon," in which he mixed real action and animation to create legendary sequences like the space travelers' rocket hitting the man in the moon right in the eye. "King Kong" was a big breakthrough in 1933, when the masterly Willis O'Brien created, with models and stop-motion, his super-ape and an island full of prehistoric monsters. The revolutionary move in f/x came in 1968 with Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." Helped by the twentysomething Douglas Trumbull, Kubrick won an Oscar for the tremendous special effects that even today remain the model for films about space and technology. George Lucas's "Star Wars" series is a kind of "Son of 2001"; the brainy Lucas formed Industrial Light + Magic, which became the Microsoft of special effects. The ambiguous triumph of today's special effects; is that anything--even reality--can be instantly "morphed" to anything else through the ubiquitous, omnipotent technology of the computer.