On this episode, we discuss the history of 3-D movies, and take a look at the ones that were made and released during the 1980s.
----more----
The titles discussed during this episode include:
Amityville 3 (1983, Richard Fleischer)
Bwana Devil (1952, Arch Oboler)
Chain Gang (1984, Worth Keeter)
Comin' At Ya! (1981, Fernandino Baldi)
Dial M for Murder (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)
Friday the 13th Part III (1982, Steve Miner)
Hit the Road Running (1987, Worth Keeter)
Hot Heir (1984, Worth Keeter)
House of Wax (1953, Andre DeToth)
Hyperspace [AKA Gremloids] (1984, Todd Durham)
Jaws 3 (1983, Joe Alves)
The Man from M.A.R.S. (1922, Roy William Neill)
The Man Who Wasn't There (1983, Bruce Malmuth)
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983, Charles Band)
Parasite (1982, Charles Band)
The Power of Love (1922, Harry K. Fairall)
Rottweiler [AKA The Dogs of Hell] (1983, Worth Keeter)
Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983, Lamont Johnson)
Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985, Steven Hahn)
Tales from the Third Dimension (1984, Todd Durham, Worth Keeter, Thom McIntyre, Earl Owensby)
The Treasure of the Four Crowns (1983, Fernandino Baldi)
If you like what you hear and you haven’t done so already, please make sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcatching source. While a good review and rating won’t increase our chances of being found or being a featured podcast on a podcatcher like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it will potentially help increase the odds of someone who does find the show for the first time thinking that clicking play will be a good time investment for them. And it’s something you can even do while you’re listening to this episode.
On this episode, we’re going to discuss the mercifully short-lived return of the 3D movie craze. And, as always, before we can get to the 1980s, we have to go back in time. I could go back to before there were even motion pictures. In fact, I could go all the way back to 1832, seven years before the first public introduction of photography, to discuss stroboscopic discs, a crude form of animation, but that part alone would probably take longer than I wish the whole episode to be. So we’ll fast forward to September 27th, 1922. We’re in the Ambassador Hotel, a few miles west of Downtown Los Angeles, and producer/director Harry K. Fairall are presenting the first-ever 3D movie.
The movie, called The Power of Love, was shot on two strips of black and white film through a special camera with two lenses, and the images would be combined into a single strip of color film during the printing phase, which would combine the two images and, using different color filters on the film images and by wearing a special pair of glasses, would trick the brain into thinking it is viewing an image in three dimensions.
The Power of Love told the story about a young woman who falls in love with the rival of a man her father has promised her hand in marriage to, and this screening was set up to demonstrate the potential of 3D as the next step in the evolution of the motion picture experience. In fact, the movie would be the first with multiple endings on the same print, as one could see either a happy or tragic ending to the story by closing one eye and watching the film through either only the red lens or the green lens on their special glasses.
The film would be well received, but the 3D process? Not so much. Fairall would set up a second screening of the movie for theatre owners in New York City a few weeks later, but not a single theatre operator wanted to take a chance on this new movie fad.
In July 1923, future Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick would acquire the film for theatrical release. In 2D. With a new title: Forbidden Lover.
It would never be seen in 3D again, and, in time, both the 2D and 3D versions would become lost films.
There would be other attempts at 3D movies during the 1920s, but none of them would take hold. A few months after Fairall failed to interest anyone in his 3D system, inventor Laurens Hammond would get the owner of the Selwyn Theatre in New York City to give his Teleview 3D system a chance. Along with a group of short films and a live demonstration of 3D shadows, Hammond’s movie The Man from M.A.R.S. would play for several weeks during December 1922 and January 1923 at the Selwyn, and contemporary reports from the entertainment trade publication Variety suggested New Yorkers found the novelty of a 3D movie interesting enough, but reviews for The Man from M.A.R.S. were uniformly awful, and no other theatre would play the movie in 3D ever again. And like The Power of Love, The Man from M.A.R.S. would be distributed in 2D a few months later, and with a new title: Radio-Mania and the 3D version of the film would become a lost film. However, the 2D version of The Man from M.A.R.S. still exists today. The BFI National Archive about 40 miles northwest of London has what is believed to be the sole surviving print of the film. After the failure of his Teleview system, Laurens Hammond would invent his namesake organ in 1934.
It wouldn’t be until Edwin Land’s invention of the polarizing sheet in 1932 that 3D movies as a viable process would come to place. Land had originally invented his polarizing sheet to help reduce glare from car headlights, but he also understood how his Polaroid filters could be used in 3D photography. He would host a demonstration of his new 3D photography process at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City in January 1936, and would soon help filmmakers understand how the process could be applied to movies. Many of the standards we understand about 3D movies would be set by Land, including using a movie screen coated with a special kind of reflective silver paint in order to correctly reflect the images back to the audience.
The first commercial 3D film using Land’s new system would premiere in the Chrysler Motors Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. Tune in Tomorrow was a black and white short that showed the construction of the then-new Chrysler Building, set to music. The film would prove to be so popular that Chrysler would remake the movie, in color, in 1940. But, for the most part, 3-D movies would remain a curio throughout the Forties, rarely seen outside of specially-built theatres at attractions like a World's Fair.
But something would happen that would threaten the very existence of motion pictures, or, at least, that’s what the studios thought.
Although television had been around in various forms for a number of years, five major networks, ABC, CBS, DuMont, NBC, and Paramount, had all started coast to coast broadcasting by 1949, and the number of American homes having purchased at least one television for their home has grown from less than half a million television sets sold in 1948, to two million in 1949, four million in 1950, and over ten million by 1951. Meanwhile, weekly movie theatre attendance had dropped from ninety million in 1948 to forty-six million by 1951.
The movies needed something new to keep people coming back.
Some studios, like Twentieth Century-Fox, leaned hard into what was being called the widescreen presentation. When television was created, it adopted the same aspect ratio for its screens, 1.33 times wider than it was tall, as had been the motion picture standard for decades. This 1.33:1 aspect ratio had been dubbed Academy Standard. And ironically, considering they owned one of the five major national broadcast networks, Paramount would also lean hard into preserving the cinema experience. Fox’s widescreen process, called CinemaScope, would involve using a special anamorphic spherical lens to squeeze a 2.40:1 aspect ratio onto a 1.33:1 Academy Ratio image space on a film and then unsqueeze the image when projected at the theatre. The first CinemaScope movie, The Robe, would premiere at the Roxy Theatre in New York City on September 16th, 1953.
Paramount's widescreen system, called VistaVision, would change how films were shot. Instead of the film running through a camera vertically using a frame the size of four sprocket holes in height for each image captured, VistaVision would run the film through a camera horizontally using a frame the size of eight sprocket holes in length for each image captured. VistaVision would make its premiere with the Bing Crosby/Danny Kaye classic White Christmas, which opened in theatres on October 14th, 1954.
And then there was Cinerama, which was a whole completely different film process that required three cameras side by side by side filming together at the same time, and three projectors at the theatre perfectly kept in sync in order to show the three strips of film whose images were joined together on screen to make a massive image that literally felt like you were in the movie itself. But each of these processes would require a massive upgrade to an existing theatre, or would require an entirely new theatre to be built, as was the case with the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood in 1963. Cinerama would make its public debut at the Broadway Theatre in New York City on September 30th, 1952.
But there was one far less expensive proposition to consider, one that wasn’t tied to a specific studio: making movies in 3-D.
While the filmmakers would need to shoot their movie with two strips of film in separate cameras mounted in a way that the final image captured could mimic how our eyes see the world. For theatre owners, the costs would be mostly limited to buying a new lens to put on the projector and replacing a flat white matte screen with one that was coated with a reflective silvery substance, so that a 3D could be properly shown.
The first theatrically released 3-D movie of the 1950s was a cheapie adventure movie from United Artists called Bwana Devil. With a story based on the Tsavo man-eaters, a pair of mountain lions who, in 1898, were responsible for the deaths of 135 construction workers who were trying to build a railroad bridge across the Tsavo River in Kenya.
Future Untouchables star Robert Stack, and Nigel Bruce, the Watson to Basil Rathborne’s Sherlock Holmes in a series of movies about the famed detective and his trusty sidekick, play the men in charge of building the railroad and trying to rid the scourges that are plaguing the mission. And if the story sounds familiar, as it is reminding you of the Michael Douglas/Val Kilmer movie The Ghost and the Darkness, you’d be correct. That movie is also based on the same real-life incident, although told from the point of view of the hunters.
The $323k movie, shot mostly in the San Fernando Valley, would make its premiere at the Paramount Theatre in Hollywood, and the Paramount Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles, on Wednesday, November 26th, 1952. Critics hated the film, in part because it’s really not a good movie, but the public loved it. Lured in by promises on the poster of “A Lion in Your Lap,” and “A Lover in Your Arms,” Bwana Devil would gross more than $5m. But because this is Hollywood, United Artists would somehow end up claiming it lost about $200k releasing the film.
Spurred by the success of Bwana Devil, studios would rush any movie they could into production that they thought could be made quickly and easily and in 3-D. Warner Brothers would claim on their posters for their Vincent Price thriller House of Wax that it was the first 3-D movie released by a major studio when it opened on April 10th, 1953, and its possible that might have been true when Warners planned the release and created the advertising for the film, but Columbia Pictures would slip their Edmund O’Brien noir thriller Man in the Dark, which had been shot in just eleven days, into theatres two days earlier. Man in the Dark is pretty much forgotten today, but House of Wax is actually a really entertaining movie and is still a fan favorite nearly seventy years later. Ironically, the director of House of Wax, Andre DeToth, was blind in his left eye, wore an eye patch over it, and couldn’t experience the movie he’s most famous for the way he made it.
But most of the 3-D movies made during that time didn’t focus on story, only on trying to titillate its audience with 3-D tomfoolery. Outside of House of Wax, there’s only one other movie released in 3-D that would remain beloved over the years, Universal’s Creature from the Black Lagoon, part of its Universal Monsters series. The film was so successful when it was released in 1954 that it would spawn the only 3-D sequel made during this timeframe, 1955’s Revenge of the Creature, which was also a hit at the box office. But for the most part, 3-D fell out of favor by the end of 1954 because the process required constant upkeep.
There was one more famous movie shot in 3-D during this first Golden Era of 3-D movies, Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, with Grace Kelly, Ray Milland, and Robert Cummings, but the studio would make the film available to theatres in either 2-D or 3-D upon its release in May 1954, only one theatre in the entire nation would elect to screen it in 3-D, a theatre in Philadelphia which, after one preview show on May 18th and four regular shows on May 19th, petitioned the studio to send a 2-D print over immediately. The film would not be seen again in 3-D until a revival of the film was booked by the York Theatre in San Francisco in February of 1980.
I had the chance to see the 3-D version of Dial M for Murder when I happened to be in Cleveland for three days in June 2017 visiting my mother, and the Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland Heights in was featuring it as part of its 3-D Classic Film Series. It’s one of the best 3-D movies ever made, simply because Hitchcock was a master of cinema, and made a movie that used 3-D naturally and not just as a gimmick.
But the success of the 3-D shows of Dial M for Murder in San Francisco in 1980 would spur a new interest in the format.
But before we get there, it’s important to note that 3-D did have a minor resurgence in the early 1970s, when several filmmakers employed in the porn industry shot their movies in 3-D to help differentiate them from other porn films of the day. That 3-D renaissance didn't last very long, as one can imagine, since porn films are usually shot on the cheap, and shooting in 3-D would require more time and technical expertise behind the camera than quickie pornmakers were willing to give it.
Okay, back to our main story.
It’s 1980 again, and Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder has a few successful playdates in 3-D that would get noticed, but for all the wrong reasons.
Clear on the other side of the country from San Francisco, Gene Quintano and Marshall Lupo had been friends and coworkers for years. They would meet while working for Xerox in Washington DC, before starting their own office supply company. But what they really wanted to do was make movies. They knew Tony Anthony, a veteran in the film industry who was best known as The Stranger in a series of Italian-made spaghetti westerns in the late 1960s that MGM would buy and release in America to compete with the Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns being released by United Artists.
The three men had been trying to figure out what they could do for a low-budget production that would help them stand out. Anthony’s stock in trade was Westerns, but outside of Eastwood, nobody was making Westerns anymore, and even Clint would go four or five years between westerns. But when Quintano heard about the sold-out screenings of Dial M for Murder in San Francisco, he mentioned it to his partners. An entire generation of filmgoers had never experienced a 3-D movie before, and they thought this could be something that would get people off their couches and back into theatres.
With some more research, Anthony discovered a newer 3-D film process called Optimax III, which would, instead of needing two cameras filming side by side, would shoot on a single strip of film, utilizing a special lens that would split the image into two slightly off-centered images stacked on top of each other within a traditional four-perf frame of film. This way, the camera could move more fluidly around the action being filmed, and when projected onto a movie screen through a mirror box, which through a pair of prisms and mirrors, would converge the two stacked images, and cross-polarize them so they could be seen properly by the audience wearing a special pair of polarized glasses. Within a few months, the trio had started their own production company, The Lupo-Anthony-Quintana Company, written a script, and raised the $3.5m budget they expected to need to make the film, through a series of cocktail parties in and around DC for potential investors. By September 1980, they were in Italy, making Comin’ At Ya! with veteran Italian filmmaker Ferdinando Baldi, whose movies included the 1968 spaghetti western Django, Prepare a Coffin starring Terence Hill.
Anthony would star as H.H. Hart, a bank robber whose bride-to-be is kidnapped on their wedding day, and she is traded to the story’s bad guy Pike Thompson, played by Quintano. Spanish actress Victoria Abril, who would become world-famous years later as the star of four of Pedro Almodovar’s late 80s and early 90s movies, would play the damsel in distress.
The film shoot would last thirteen weeks, and Tony Anthony would spend two months in Rome for post-production. Three days after they locked the film, Quintana and Lupo were in Los Angeles, anxiously awaiting Anthony’s arrival at the airport, completing the film in hand, where the first of eleven screenings at the first American Film Market was scheduled to start a few hours after the plane touched down. In fact, Quintana and Lupo would be seeing the final film for the first time along with the potential buyers at the screening. They would sit in the back of the screening room, as they watched not only the movie but the 45 or so potential buyers sit in silent judgment on their first movie. And, if this didn’t work, possibly they're last.
Within a few hours of the end of that first screening, offers started to pour into the offices of the sales company the men had hired to sell the movie to distributors around the world. Amongst the buyers was Filmways Pictures, a production and distribution company we briefly discussed back in 2020 on the first episode of our Orion Pictures miniseries. Filmways had been on somewhat of a roll of late, having seen some success with films like the comedy How to Beat the High Cost of Living, the first post-SNL movie for Jane Curtin, the Brian DePalma thriller Dressed to Kill, and The First Deadly Sin, starring Frank Sinatra and Faye Dunaway.
Filmways would schedule the film for release in the heart of summer, July 24th, 1981, but it would not be their only release that day, or even their biggest release that day.
Continuing their partnership with Brian DePalma, Filmways would schedule a national release for his latest thriller, Blow Out, starring John Travolta and Nancy Allen, but only schedule Comin’ At Ya! for a single screen released Phoenix. Blow Out would gross around $3m from 300 screens nationwide, or about $10k per screen, Comin’ At Ya! would gross $25k from this one theatre in Phoenix. In its second week, Blow Out would fall to about a $9k per-screen average, while Comin’ At Ya! would gross $20k from that single screen.
After three weeks, as Blow Out’s theatrical play drew to a close, Filmways would add a second single-screen engagement for Comin’ At Ya! In Kansas City on August 14th, the per-screen average would rocket back up to $21k. This was enough to convince Filmways that maybe they were backing the wrong film. On August 21st, the company would open the film in 28 theatres in the New York City metropolitan area, and it would gross $750k. For comparison’s sake, John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London also opened in New York City on August 21st, it also grossed $750k, but in 43 theatres. In Chicago, Comin’ At Ya! would gross $290k in fourteen theatres, while Werewolf would gross $220k from nineteen theatres. In St. Louis, $57k from four theatres. Seattle, $22k from one screen. From 105 theatres in total nationwide, the film would gross $1m.
The following week, Comin’ At Ya! Would open in Los Angeles, in twenty-five theatres, and gross $281k. It would also add another 50 screens in other markets, and gross another $1m. And in week seven, it would add another $1m from 202 theatres.
After Labor Day weekend, the film would be mostly played out. Week 8 would see the movie lose 10% of its theatres, from 202 to 180, but would see its ticket sales drop 64% to $439k. Week 9 would see the theatre count drop from 180 to 99, and the gross fall to $238k. And by the end of September, Comin’ At Ya! was pretty much gone from theatres. Filmways had spent $2m buying the rights to the movie, and another $2m to promote it, and would be rewarded with a $12m box office gross, which would give it a nice little profit of around $2m. But Filmways would soon be out of business, and sold to Orion Pictures, because of movies like Blow Out, which had also grossed $12m at the box office but had cost $18m to produce and another $4m to promote.
The success of Comin’ At Ya! would, like Bwana Devil had nearly thirty years earlier, kick off a rush of movies that would be rushed into production and could find ways to utilize the 3-D process. In fact, within three months of the release of Comin’ At Ya!, no less than twenty movies were announced to begin production soon as 3-D productions, although many of them, including several concert movies and a suspense thriller from Chicago stage director Robert Sickinger, called The Louisiana Swamp Murders and an Airplane-like horror spoof called Scary Movie, would never happen.
Sadly, this list of unrealized 3-D movies announced during this era includes a 3-D version of the off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors, which would have been produced by David Geffen and Steven Spielberg, and directed by Martin Scorsese. Geffen would produce a non-3-D version of the film in 1986, directed by Frank Oz, which is still quite a good film, but one can only imagine how much different it would have been in 3-D under the guidance of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.
The first 3-D film out of the gate after Comin’ At Ya! would be Parasite, early production of future Empire Pictures head Charles Band. We did a three-part series on Charles Band and Empire Pictures in early 2021.
Band has spent years trying to find a picture he could get made, after his previous film, 1976’s Crash!, bombed at the box office. Shortly after the premiere of Comin’ At Ya!, Band was at a Hollywood party, where he would meet a trio of writers, Alan Adler, Frank Levering, and Michael Shoob, who had been bouncing around an idea about a scientist who is trying to cure himself of a new strain of parasite in a post-apocalyptic America. Band loved the idea, and while the three writers got to work on completing their screenplay, Band was able to get Irwin Yablans, the producer of the original Halloween movie, to agree to finance the $800k movie, allow it to be shot in 3-D, and distribute it through his company, Compass International.
How quickly would the film come together? Remember, Comin’ At Ya! only opened in theatres in late July, and didn’t go into a wider release until late August, but Band would have the film written, cast, and in production by early September 1981, with the hopes of getting the film into theatres by January 1982. The cast is filled with a weird mix of nobodies and slightly somebodies, including former Runaways lead singer Cherie Currie, who had been trying to make it as an actress after the band broke up.
Co-star Luca Bercovici would go on to co-write and direct Ghoules for Charles Band in 1984, but the only person you’ll actually likely recognize from the cast is Demi Moore, for whom this was only her second-ever acting role. Filmed around Los Angeles, Parasite would need only 21 days to be completed.
Within three weeks of finishing production, while Band was still deep into editing his first cut of the film, Yablans would sell the worldwide theatrical distribution rights to the movie to Embassy Pictures, and the home video rights to Media Home Entertainment, where he would make a decent profit on his investment before the film was even in any kind of viewable shape. Embassy Pictures decided that rushing Parasite into theatres just after New Year wasn’t probably the best idea, so they opted to wait until March 1982, hoping that no one would rush their 3-D movies past them.
No one did, and Embassy would first open Parasite in 68 theatres in New York City on March 12th, where it would gross an okay $601k. By the time the film worked its way around the country before opening in Los Angeles on May 21st, the movie would gross more than $5.5m, and the filmmakers were already planning to make a sequel. That Los Angeles opening would add another $378k in the coffers from 43 theatres. When the film was all played out, it would sell nearly $7.5m worth of tickets, nearly 10x its production cost. Not bad, but not good enough for a sequel to ever materialize.
The next film would be the first established title to incorporate 3-D, and its success would set off an unfortunate sub-wave of Part 3 movies to become Part 3’s in 3-D.
Although it was not as successful as the first film, 1981’s Friday the 13th Part 2 was successful enough for Paramount Pictures to greenlight a third episode. To prove just how lazy production had already become, the producers decided to literally rip off Halloween 2 when they started to develop Friday the 13th Part 3. Ginny, the Laurie Strode of Halloween, survives her attack by her masked assailant, and she is sent to a hospital to recover from her trauma. While in the hospital, she starts to believe her attacker is still alive, which no one believes until the body count in the hospital starts to rise.
But when Amy Steel, the actress who portrayed Ginny, decided not to make the film, the storyline would be thrown out, and a new one written that would feature a new set of characters who were completely uninvolved with the storylines from the first two movies, outside of Jason and some achieve footage of Mrs. Voorhees from Part 1, and Ginny and another character from Part 2. And then when Comin’ At Ya! became a success, the screenplay would be further altered to make Jason’s kills more visually resplendent in 3-D.
One thing that became clear to the actors while making the movie was that their performances didn’t really matter, as long as they were acting or reacting in deference to the 3-D effects. If the planned effect shot worked the first time out, that was the shot, and the production would move to the next setup, even if the actors’ performances were sub-par. And the final product proves this to be the case. Without the 3-D effects, it’s a really stupid movie. With the 3-D effects, it’s still not a great movie, but at least some of the kills are memorable, and that’s really the only reason to go see a movie like this.
Ironically, the most lasting legacy of Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3-D was the introduction of Jason Voorhees’ signature hockey mask.
When the movie was released into 1079 theatres on Friday, August 13, 1982, Paramount had a hit. Audiences devoured the movie and its cheesy 3-D effects.
It would gross $9.4m in its first weekend and would become only the second movie after The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas to keep E.T. from claiming the top spot at the box office since it opened ten weeks earlier. E.T. would become the #1 film again the following week, but Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3-D would lose only 43% of its opening weekend audience, a smaller than average drop for a second-week horror film.
Horror movies regularly lose more than 50% of their audiences from week to week, but that wouldn’t happen for Part 3 until its fifth week of release. It would continue to play in theatres into early 1983, finishing its 24-week run with an impressive $36.7m box office gross, which, unadjusted, is the second highest-grossing movie in the original series, only behind the first Friday the 13th from 1980.
Buoyed by the success of Comin’ At Ya!, Gene Quintana, Marshall Lupo, and Tony Anthony were able to get their next 3-D production funded and in production much quicker. Many of the investors in Comin’ At Ya! signed on to help fund the then-titled Seein’ is Believin’, allowing their returns from the first film to be rolled into the second film. Director Fernandino Baldi would return to make this film, and he would work with the camera and lens producer Arriflex to fabricate new lenses to make this production run smoother.
In an ironic twist, while so many other producers were chasing the 3-D wave set off by the success of Comin’ At Ya!, Quintana, Lupo, and Anthony were chasing the action-adventure wave set off by the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was made after their movie but released two months before theirs. Tony Anthony once again plays the lead, this time as J.T. Striker, a soldier of fortune who has been hired to track down a series of mystical crowns which, if brought together, are said to bring their holder immeasurable power.
The movie would be shot in Italy during the summer of 1982, its $2m budget covered by Filmways, the distributor of Comin’ At Ya! But shortly after the film went into production, Filmways would go out of business and would sell itself to Orion Pictures, who mainly wanted Filmways for its already established distribution pipeline. Orion wasn’t really interested in 3-D movies, so they put the movie up for the sale. Cannon Films, who was in desperate need of films to fill their distribution pipeline, would make a negative pickup deal, essentially reimbursing Orion for the development and production costs of a movie they didn’t even make. Orion would also get a small cut of the ticket sales as part of the deal.
Cannon Films would rename Seein’ in Believin’ to the more action-sounding The Treasure of the Four Crowns, and set a January 21st, 1983 release date, five months after the release of Friday the 13th Part 3. Would the public appetite for 3-D still exist?
Well, yes. And no.
The movie would open on 113 screens in New York City and Los Angeles, and after its first three days, it would gross $1m. Not quite $10k per screen, but it would be a higher average than Gandhi, which went into wide release the same weekend. Granted, one could fit two shows of Treasure of the Four Crowns into the running time of one showing of Gandhi, but it was still a decent showing. In its second week, the gross for Treasure of the Four Crowns would drop only 37%, and its ten-day gross had already topped $2m. The movie would open in 275 theatres in Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Detroit, Jacksonville, Louisville, Portland OR, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle on February 11th, and gross another $1m. And in early March, Cannon would stop reporting grosses, just shy of $6m after seven weeks, or roughly half what Comin’ At Ya! had made in theatres.
Interestingly enough, in early March 1983, while Treasure of the Four Crowns was becoming a minor success for Cannon, Orion Pictures announced during that month’s American Film Market that they had purchased the American distribution rights to Return of the Living Dead, a new 3-D offering loosely based on George A. Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead. By the time the film came out in the summer of 1985, the idea of making it in 3-D had long since passed.
The next big 3-D test was Columbia Pictures’ Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. Produced by Ivan Reitman, Spacehunter was originally planned as a one-story sequel to his 1981 animated anthology movie Heavy Metal with the title Adventures from the Creep Zone, and Reitman considered making it in 3-D, which at the time would have been a novelty, an animated 3-D movie.
But when it came time to produce the film, Reitman decided it would be better to produce it as a live-action film than an animated film. It would be less expensive and, more important, less time-consuming. And if the animation was gone, the 3-D aspect would be gone too.
Jeff Bridges has supposedly been cast as Wolff, the space cowboy at the center of the story, alongside Molly Ringwald, who was still a year away from becoming John Hughes’ first muse, Ernie Hudson, Andrea Marcovicci, and Michael Ironside, but either he left the movie or he was never officially cast in the role, because when production began on the film in October 1982, it was Peter Strauss who would be playing Wolff.
Hudson would, in fact, get cast in Ghostbusters in large part because Reitman liked what he was seeing in the dailies. But that’s about the only thing Reitman liked about the early dailies from the set. The studio didn’t like what they were seeing either. After two weeks of shooting, director Jean LaFleur was let go, and the production stopped while they looked for a new director.
While they interviewed several new directors, Reitman and Columbia decided to go ahead and toss out all the original footage shot for the film, and restart from Day One shooting the film in 3-D.
They would increase the budget from $6m to $12, and they would add another three and a half weeks to the shooting schedule. Veteran filmmaker Lamont Johnson, whose 25-year career included such movies as the Jeff Bridges racing film The Last American Hero and the Margaux Hemingway rape and revenge thriller Lipstick, would be hired to take over, and the film would resume production in November for another ten weeks of shooting.
This time, the executives and the producer really liked what they saw. Columbia would invest another $2m in specialty 3-D spherical lenses so theatres playing the film could show it properly. They would also commit to creating a number of 70mm prints, which would hopefully indicate to discernible filmgoers that this was a major production like Return the Jedi and Blue Thunder.
And one could say it worked, at least at first. Columbia would open Spacehunter on May 20th, 1982, and originally planned for it to play in eight to nine hundred theatres. When opening day did come around, they were able to get the film into 1338 theatres, with more than two-thirds of them playing the film in 3-D. You must remember, drive-in theatres were still a fairly sizable part of the exhibition market back then, and you just can’t play a 3-D movie at a drive-in, for a wide variety of reasons.
Spacehunter would open to the first place that weekend, with a gross of more than $7m. And despite the fact that Return of the Jedi would open just five days later, and would set a then-record opening week gross of $41m in its first six days of release, Spacehunter would drop a lower than expected 35% in its second week of release. But in its third week, the film would lose 65% of its second-week audience, and by weekend number four, it wouldn’t even gross half a million dollars. That would be the last weekend Columbia would report grosses for the film, with its final total pegged at $16.5m.
If there was a film that was expected to be the big 3-D movie of the summer, it would have been Jaws 3. It was the second sequel to the film that for a couple of years was the highest-grossing film of all time, and demand for another Jaws film was strong from international exhibitors.
The road to Jaws 3 was a long and arduous one. In April 1979, less than a year after Jaws 2 had been released to strong box office numbers, Universal Pictures announced a third film in the series. Not that much of a surprise. The surprising part of the announcement was with whom they were going to make the film. After finding an unexpected success with National Lampoon’s Animal House in 1978, Universal planned on making the third Jaws movie as a joint production with National Lampoon.
Lampoon president Matty Simmons had pitched the studio a comedy for the third Jaws movie, with the title Jaws 3, People 0. The movie would have centered around a fictional studio called Universal Studios, headed by a fictional version of Universal Studios Chief Operating Officer Sid Sheinberg, to be played by real Universal Studios COO Sid Sheinberg, as they attempted to make a second sequel to Jaws, with often deadly comedic results. Lampoon writers Todd Carroll and John Hughes wrote six drafts of the script over the course of six months, with a planned shooting date set for October 7th, 1979, but eventually, Universal got cold feet and decided this wasn’t the way they wanted to go.
Now, remember, had this version of Jaws 3 gone into production in October 1979, it would have been ready for release in the summer of 1980, around the same time as another parody of a certain type of movie was being released to theatres, Airplane!
Instead, it would take Universal another three years to finally feel comfortable with an idea for Jaws 3. Now, we would follow Mike Brody, Chief Brody's older son, as he investigates a series of shark attacks inside a water amusement park in Florida. Roy Schieder, Chief Brody in the first two films, would not appear in this movie, nor would Lorraine Grey, the real-life wife of Universal Studios COO Sid Sheinberg, who played Mrs. Brody.
Steven Spielberg did not have any involvement in the making of Jaws 3, just as he had nothing to do with Jaws 2, nor did David Brown and Richard Zanuck, the producers of the first two films in the series. In fact, the only person involved in the production of Jaws 3 who had any involvement in the first two films was director Joe Alves, who was the production designer on the first two films and the second unit director on the second film. Carl Gottlieb, who co-wrote the screenplay for the original film with Jaws novelist Peter Benchley, is credited as a co-writer on Jaws 3, but he insists very little if anything from his drafts made it into the final film.
Dennis Quaid stars as Mike Brody, and Bess Armstrong, who had just made a splash in her first lead role opposite Tom Selleck in High Road to China, stars as the senior marine biologist at the aqua park that’s having a shark problem. Jaws 3 would be the first film Louis Gossett, Jr. would make after An Officer and a Gentleman, but his star would not rise with his Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor for Officer until after he was done shooting Jaws 3. And future Back to the Future star Lea Thompson would make her movie debut as one of the water skier entertainers at the park. She would get the job by lying to the producers that she had been in several movies and that she knew how to water ski.
Like with Jaws 2, a plethora of merchandising tie-ins were created for Jaws 3.
My personal favorites are the Jaws 3-D trading cards from Topps. Each pack would contain six cards and a stick of bubble gum, which was fairly standard for a pack of trading cards for the day. Most movie trading cards would have a glossy color photo from the movie on one side, and a description of the scene on the back. What made these cards unique and fun was that on the back, instead of the scene write-up, was a red/blue anaglyph 3-D image from the film, which could be used to see the scene in 3-D with the enclosed pair of 3-D glasses. Head over to this episode’s page on my website, FilmJerk.com, to see pictures of the Jaws 3-D cards from my personal collection.
Jaws 3 would open in 1300 theatres on July 22nd, 1983, and, as expected, was big right out of the gate. Its $13.4m opening weekend was the second biggest of all movies so far that summer. The novelty of a Jaws movie in 3-D certainly brought in the crowds. But the reality was that while the 3-D effects were just fine during daytime scenes or inside well-lit indoor spaces, the difficulty of lighting underwater scenes well enough to properly make the 3-D effects work forced the production to shoot special effects plates for scenes with the shark where the underwater backgrounds are in 2-D and the shark is green-screened into the scene in 3-D. Those scenes, the ones audiences were coming out for, were painful to watch. Word of mouth got out very quickly about how bad the 3-D effects were for the film, and the audiences would drop from 45 to 60% each week until Universal stopped tracking it after seven weeks and $42m.
For more than twenty years, Jaws 3-D would be the highest-grossing 3-D movie ever released.
One movie that would not threaten Jaws 3-D for that record was The Man Who Wasn’t There. No, not the black and white Coen Brothers movie with Billy Bob Thornton, but this mirthless comedy starring Steve Guttenberg as a government bureaucrat who accidentally takes possession of a top-secret invisibility potion, and general wackiness ensues when he takes the formula to get away from some generic Russian baddies who want to take possession of it.
I’m not picking on Steve Guttenberg, but outside of Diner, he had a horrible record of picking material during this time, and this was no different. One tell-tale sign of how to tell if a movie is going to be really bad is how long did it take to make. The less time it takes to produce a film, the lower the quality usually is. The Man Who Wasn’t There would start shooting in Los Angeles on March 7th, 1983, finishing shooting eight weeks later, and would be released into theatres barely three months after that, on August 12th. That’s not a good sign.
The reviews for the film were not good.
In the New York Times, Lawrence Van Gelder started his review by comparing watching the film to having one's eyes sucked out of their head like pimentos from a pair of olives, while Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times would pointed out that Guttenberg’s career, which began with the Village People movie monstrosity Can’t Stop the Music and now continues with this film, was akin to being struck by lightning twice and living to tell about it.
Opening in 1200 theatres, The Man Who Wasn’t There could also be an apt description of its audience, grossing $1.4m. Paramount would stop reporting grosses after its second weekend, after ten days, and only $2.3m in ticket sales.
Instead of making that planned sequel to Parasite, Charles Band would jump at the chance to make the science fiction western Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. Well, maybe “jumped” is too strong a word. His father Albert, a filmmaker himself, would himself raise the $3.5m he and Charles budgeted to make the film. Albert would take an executive producer credit, Charles would co-produce with Alan Adler, who had written the screenplay, and they would begin production on the film in Simi Valley, about a half-hour north of Los Angeles, and in Palm Springs, in February 1983. The cast would include cult fan favorite Jeffrey Byron, Michael Preston from The Road Warrior, Richard Moll, who would about to become semi-famous as Bull on the NBC sitcom Night Court, and Kelly Preston in one of her first movie roles.
But for Empire Pictures fans, this film would signify the first time Charles Band would work with comedian Tim Thomerson. After Metalstorm, Band and Thomerson would work together several more times, most notably on the Trancers movie series, five of which would get produced between 1984 and 1994.
In the film, Byron plays Dogen, a space ranger searching the galaxy for Jared-Syn, an intergalactic criminal with supernatural powers. There’s something about crystals, skyboxes, and cyclops, but it’s all rather silly. But Universal Pictures saw something in the footage they viewed when the Bands took a product reel to the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. Studio president Robert Rehme would pick the film up for US distribution and would schedule the film for an August 19th release, as long as the Bands delivered the final film on time. The studio would make sure to have a 3-D trailer for the film in front of all 1 3-D prints of Jaws 3-D, one of the few times a 3-D trailer would be commissioned for a 3-D movie.
But when it came time to open Metalstorm in theatres, Universal took a cautious path, only opening the film into 549 theatres, where it would cross an okay $2.02m. In week two, they would expand the film from 549 theatres to 784, but the weekend gross would fall to $1.27m. After its third weekend, where it would lose 471 theatres and see its gross drop to less than half a million, Universal would stop tracking the film.
The first look deal Universal had signed with the Bands when they acquired the movie was terminated, and Albert and Charles Band would go about building their own production and distribution company, Empire Pictures. And ever the student of the Roger Corman school of low-budget filmmaking, Band would take unused footage from Metalstorm and recycle it into one of his first Empire movies, The Dungeonmaster.
Rottweiler would be the first of six 3-D movies to be produced and released by Earl Owensby, a North Carolina-based actor, filmmaker, and independent distributor who is affectionately called the Redneck Roger Corman by his fans. Superfans of James Cameron’s The Abyss knew Owensby as the man who helped build the underwater sets for the film at an abandoned nuclear power plant Owensby had recently purchased in South Carolina, with an eye on turning it into a movie studio. The story has it that Owensby had seen Comin’ at Ya! While it was making its way through the South in early 1982, and, sensing 3-D was going to be around awhile, purchased a number of the 3-D Stereovision lenses made by Chris Condon. Other stories, such as one told by the film’s director, Worth Keeler, Rottweiler started production in the summer of 1981, around the time Comin’ At Ya! was released into that lone theatre in Phoenix, a good two thousand miles away from where they were shooting at Owensby’s mini-studio in Shelby, NC.
Owensby here would neither write nor direct Rottweiler but instead would star as a local sheriff who is called on to protect his small and peaceful mountain resort town when it is overrun by a pack of Rottweilers who have been bred and trained by the U.S. military to kill humans.
Also known as Dogs of Hell, Rottweiler would see a Southern regional release in September 1983, but based on my research, it appears that all of his 3-D movies only ever had one theatrical playdate, at the Roger’s Theatre in Shelby, NC, about six miles from the Owensby Studios.
As I mentioned before, Owensby would make five other 3-D movies besides Rottweiler over the remainder of the decade. Like Rottweiler, they would all be filmed in and around the Carolinas for budgets never exceeding a million dollars, and would pretty much only be released in the Southern United States, and then mostly as the B-title at drive-ins supporting a bigger studio movie. The bulk of Owensby’s money would come from sales to countries like Germany that would gobble up American movies like there was no tomorrow. So we’re going to take a short detour and talk about the other Earl Owensby Studios 3-D productions really quick, to get them out of the way.
Hot Heir, also known as The Great Balloon Chase, was a more family-friendly film, which finds a thirtysomething man needing to get involved in a hot air balloon race after the death of his uncle in order to gain his part of an inheritance, would be shot in the summer of 1982, but not open in theatres in the South until February 1984.
Tales from the Third Dimension was a horror anthology composed of three short horror stories, with wraparound segments written and directed by Owensby. The host of the movie was Igor, a sarcastic little skeletal ghoul inspired by the Crypt Keeper from the EC horror comics of the 1950s, a few years before HBO would start to produce Tales from the Crypt, which was hosted by the Crypt Keeper from the EC horror comics of the 1950s. Tales from the Third Dimension was shot during the summer of 1983 and would see a Southern regional release in April 1984.
Chain Gang, which is probably best described as Cool Hand Luke meets The Shawshank Redemption, finds Owensby framed for murder and needing to escape from prison and ends up working at the massive estate of the guy who framed him. Chain Gang would shoot for twelve weeks during the Fall of 1983 and would see a Southern regional release in June 1984.
Hyperspace, also known as Gremlords, is the outlier in the Earl Owensby Studios oeuvre, a sci-fi comedy featuring actors you’ve actually heard of outside of the South. A spoof of Star Wars, Hyperspace, also known as Gremlords, would find the helmeted Lord Buckethead accidentally landing on Earth instead of in a galaxy far, far away. His Jawa-like minions try to inform Lord Buckethead of his mistake, but every attempt to do so seems to end with execution for their insolence.
Owensby wasn’t particularly fond of casting name actors in his movies, but he would make an exception on this one. Comedienne Paula Poundstone plays an employee at a local car repair shop who Lord Buckethead mistakes for the Princess he’s looking for, and Chris Elliot plays another citizen of the small town Lord Buckethead has landed in.
Hyperspace, also known as Gremloids, was produced during the spring of 1984 and would see a Southern regional release in September 1984. It was originally going to be distributed to theatres by MGM/UA, but they would decide against it after seeing the final product. The movie would also be released in the United Kingdom, and, in a strange twist of fate, Lord Buckethead would become a minor figure in British politics. Mike Lee, the owner of the video company that released Hyperspace, also known as Gremloids, on video in Britain would adopt the visage of Lord Buckethead and run against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on a campaign to completely demolish the town of Birmingham to make room for a spaceport. Lord Buckethead would actually receive 131 votes from the constituents in the one district he ran in, the same district Thatcher was from, in North London. Lee, as Lord Buckethead, would also run against then Prime Minister John Major in 1992 and would receive 107 votes.
Twenty-five years later, British comedian Jonathan Harvey, a fan of the movie Hyperspace, also known as Gremloids, would dress up as Lord Buckethead and run against then Prime Minister Theresa May, and receive 249 votes. Lord Buckethead would also appear on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and at the Glastonbury Music Festival to introduce Sleaford Mods.
After this, the film’s writer and director, Todd Durham, would assert his ownership of the character and would allow future potential candidates to apply to become Lord Buckethead. In 2019, another British comedian, David Hughes, would run against then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but this time Lord Buckethead would only get 125 votes.
There’s one more Earl Owensby 3-D movie to talk about, but we’ll get to it soon.
Before we get there, there are two more forgettable 3-D movies to talk about really quickly.
The first is, like Friday the 13th and Jaws, a horror film of sorts that relies on its being the third in a series as an excuse to be shot in 3-D. We spent some time talking about Amityville 3 on the second episode of our five-part Orion miniseries back in 2020. It’s not a direct sequel to the previous two movies, as there was a legal disagreement between the Lutz family and film producer Dino DeLaurentiis, but it does take the series in a new direction by making the Amityville house the “star” of the show. The 3-D effects are fairly decent, as the film’s director, Richard Fleischer, had directed the 3-D western Arena back in 1953. Today, the film is barely a footnote in film history as being the first major movie role for both Lori Laughlin and Meg Ryan.
The film would open in 1254 theatres on November 18th, 1983, and would take first place, albeit with an anemic $2.37m gross. And like many of the other 3-D movies, it would see an immediate drop in grosses after the initial group of movie fans were ready to gobble up any 3-D movie. Orion would stop tracking it after seventeen days and only $6.32m in ticket sales.
It would be another twenty-five months before the next 3-D movie would be released into theatres.
Not that anyone expected much from the animated movie Starchaser: The Legend of Orin.
It was only the second animated film ever to be made in 3-D, the first being a 1983 Australian movie called Abra Cadabra, a re-telling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin story featuring the voices of John Farnham and Jacki Weaver, of which there is so little information about that I can only include a mention of it here, as it seemingly was never released outside of Australia that even the Australian Centre for the Moving Image describes it as “rarely seen.”
Made in South Korea, Starchaser is a sci-fi adventure about a young boy named Orin who works as a slave in a subterranean mine and discovers a powerful sword embedded in the ore. After escaping the mine, he teams up with a cynical space pilot and a beautiful princess to defeat the evil Lord Zygon, and you don’t really need me to tell you what the rest of it’s about because you already know exactly where it’s going to go.
The $15m movies would be released into 1020 theatres on November 22, 1985, from a little independent distributor called Atlantic Releasing, whose biggest movies after a number of years in the operation included Valley Girl, Night of the Comet, and Teen Wolf, but audiences weren’t all that interested in it. It would open in sixth place with $1.6m, behind the Indiana Jones wannabe King Solomon’s Mines from Cannon Films and even Back to the Future, which was still going strong after twenty-one weeks of release. And like many of the movies we’ve discussed in this episode, the distributor would stop tracking it after three weeks of release, with just a little more than $6m in ticket sales.
The sixth and final 3-D production from Earl Owensby Studios to get a theatrical release would also hold the ignoble title of the final 3-D movie to be released in the 1980s. Hit the Road Running was literally a mash-up of The Dukes of Hazzard TV series and the Smokey and the Bandit movies, with Owensby playing the Bandit Luke Duke… I mean, Beau Jim Donner, a guy who comes back to his small hometown and becomes the Smokey… I mean, a deputy sheriff, in order to stop a local unscrupulous tycoon from buying up the entire town.
Hit the Road Running was actually filmed in the spring of 1983, before Tales of the Third Dimension or Chain Gang or Hyperspace, also known as Gremloids, and would see a Southern regional release in March 1987, with, again, only one 3-D playdate to speak of, in Owensby’s home town.
And with that, we say goodbye to the 3-D craze of the 1980s, where the damn thing should have been kept. I lament the return of 3-D in the mid-2000s, nearly a full decade before it was due to pop up again, pun only somewhat intended.
But the truth of the matter is, the 3-D movies of the current era were easier to watch, thanks to the widespread acceptance and installation of digital projection systems, which could better exhibit separate left and right eyes images and thereby reducing the eye strain that made watching older 3-D movies nearly unbearable.
I don’t hate 3-D, as long as they’re well done and done well. The 2009 concert movie U2 3D and the 3-D version of Martin Scorsese’s masterful 2011 film Hugo are two of the very few movies that benefitted from being shot or converted into 3-D for theatrical release. But, just like in the 1950s and the 1980s, the 3-D craze of the mid-2000s has finally died off for the most part, because, once again, most of the productions using 3-D did not really benefit from being in 3-D, and were often made in the modern era as an extra cash grab for the studios.
Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again in two weeks when Episode 75 is released.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, FilmJerk.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered in this episode.
The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated, and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again. Good night.