The starting point was Stanley Kramer's film "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963) — a three-hour race for a treasure "under the big W". Digging into that era led to a far stranger story: a real treasure hunt took place in 1959–1960, only the prize wasn't a chest, but a viewer who had to be pulled out of their house and away from the TV.
Back then, Hollywood was trying everything that couldn't be reproduced on a home screen: 3D, panoramic films, vibrating seats, fear. Smell was at the bottom of this list, because it was considered both the most complex and the cheapest at the same time — and that is exactly why it failed the loudest. In the archive of publications on the topic, there wasn't a single previously covered article: we haven't yet broken down "scented cinema". The only adjacent topic is William Castle's gimmicks, and there's nothing about the fear of smell there.
By the late fifties, TV had already taken the audience from movie theaters, and studios were looking for a way to respond. Huxley had foreseen this back in 1932: in "Brave New World", characters go to a "feelie", the poster for which advertises "synchronized scent-organ accompaniment", and the session itself opens with an overture of thyme, lavender, and rosemary. Oscar Wilde, planning "Salome" in 1892, asked for "incense burners instead of an orchestra" and a new scent for each emotion. The idea was over half a century old, it just lacked the technology.
The technology was brought by Hans Laube — a Swiss from Zurich, born in 1900, whom the press called a "world-renowned osmologist". He presented his system, then still called "Scentovision", at the 1939–40 New York World's Fair, and even shot a 35-minute short film for it, "Mein Traum", with thirty-two scents: roses, coconut, tar, hay, peaches. A newspaper wrote in 1943 that the system "produces scents just as quickly and easily as a soundtrack produces sound". Then Laube returned to Europe: no studio wanted to invest. He only received a US patent in November 1957, and in 1955, using funds from Stanley Warner, he built a working mockup at the Cinerama-Warner Theatre in New York and showed a ten-minute pilot.
A lot of money went into all this. Retrofitting a theater cost about $25–30 per seat — even though a movie ticket cost less than a dollar at the time. In Chicago, according to some sources, the installation cost 15 thousand, according to others — 30 thousand, and in some cases, the press mentioned a figure of up to a million. A sixtyfold discrepancy in sources from the same decade is no longer a rounding error, and I honestly don't know what to do with it: it seems different figures describe different sets of equipment (emitters, piping, compressors) and none of the authors specify what exactly they are counting.
The device that did all the work was called the "smell brain" and was described in the promotional program as follows: "made of stainless steel, specially treated rubber, and glass, it looks like something out of the atomic industry". It was manufactured by the Belock Instrument Corporation.
Inside was a carousel of eight-inch vials of concentrated essences, wound on a motorized relay, and a panel of concentration regulators. Unlike the manual console at the 1940 fair, an automatic script worked here: an additional track ran on the film, the marks on it sent an electronic pulse, a needle pierced the membrane of the required vial, and drew two centiliters of concentrate — this was enough to fill the auditorium. Then fans drove the air through a mile of pipes under the floor to the nozzles on the seatbacks: a black tube three-quarters of an inch in diameter behind each viewer.
They were delivered to each seat individually, not through the ventilation, and therefore could change quickly. This was exactly the main technical difference from the competitor that came out a month earlier.
The competitor was named Charles Weiss, and by profession he was a PR man. His AromaRama system injected scents directly into the air conditioning system, and it debuted on December 8–9, 1959, at the DeMille Theatre in New York — the retrofit cost $7,500, later reduced to $2,500, and consumables cost about $11 per session. The name was chosen as a rhyme to "Cinerama" and — according to one version — as a mockery of it.
The irony is that the film for this system wasn't shot for it. "Behind the Great Wall" was an Italian-produced documentary about China that had already won awards in Venice and Brussels; the scents were tacked onto the finished film. Press releases claimed their number reached seventy-two, while technical reports from the same time mention twenty-two — and I will leave this discrepancy open, because a verifiable list doesn't exist in any of the sources I've read.
The audience was divided. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called the process a "gimmick" with "zero artistic value" and specifically noted that between scents, the air in the auditorium was blown through a purifier that left a sticky, sweet odor; stepping outside, he "breathed in deeply with pleasure the lovely New York air laced with exhaust". But the New York Herald Tribune was delighted: the scents "simply appear in the nostrils, without any attempt to sniff", and each disappears exactly when the object leaves the screen. The box office wasn't a disaster either: in four weeks in New York, AromaRama grossed $126,200.
And then came January 1960, and "Scent of Mystery" was released.
On January 6, 1960, at the 1,100-seat Cinestage in Chicago, the world premiere of "Scent of Mystery" took place — a two-million-dollar comedic chase for a killer across Spain, shot on 70mm film with the first eight-channel sound in history. Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra were in the audience. Next came Los Angeles on January 25 and New York on February 18, and that was the end of it: in the US and Canada, the film grossed $300,000 in theatrical rentals.
According to Variety, what broke was this: the scents were released with a distracting hiss, and in the balcony, they arrived a few seconds later than the picture. In other parts of the auditorium, there were too few of them, and Crowther wrote that the audience "sits and sniffs like a pack of hounds". Comedian Henny Youngman delivered the punchline: "I didn't understand the movie — I had a cold".
But here is where it gets worth digging into. Versions of the causes diverge to the point of total incompatibility.
Director Jack Cardiff — a "Technicolor grand master", Oscar winner for "Black Narcissus" — blamed the inventor for everything. According to him, Laube was a "phony gentleman", a fake, and the samples he sent all smelled the same: "like very cheap toilet water".
Laube's daughter, Carmen, tells a completely different story. According to her version, the producers decided to save money: instead of elegant individual emitters in front of each seat with a mandatory neutralizer, they ran the scents through the air conditioner — "and to hell with the neutralizer". If this is true, the system that got buried wasn't the system the engineer had invented. Moreover, this sounds plausible precisely because it describes not the technology, but the accounting.
A third point of view: Cardiff's claim is simply incorrect. Charles Ziarco, who attended the premiere, remembered the scents as true to the design, and the delivery as perfectly functional. Scent historian Avery Gilbert, based on his archival digging, wrote that Smell-O-Vision was a genuine technological innovation, while AromaRama was a cynical hack job that gave the whole field a bad name.
There's another episode that struck me the most. Todd's press agent, Bill Doll, came up with a solution after the third premiere city already: reverse the pump and suck the air back, so the scent wouldn't hang in the air between lines. It worked perfectly. By then, the train had already left the station.
Biologist Luca Turin described the first wall: vision has three receptors from which everything else is mixed, but smell has no primary elements — there are over three hundred receptors that don't mix like that. "You can't create a huge palette of scents the way it's done with three primary colors," says Turin. Plus his remark about honesty: "You can't lie with a scent. If there's a fish market in Hong Kong in the movie, you'd better get the exact smell".
The second wall is attention. Psychologists describe "inattentive anosmia": when a visual task loads the brain, the background scent stops registering. A full auditorium watching a chase across Spain is in exactly that state. The third wall, which Charles Spence called the "fundamental attribution error": even if the scent enhanced the experience, the viewer will attribute the pleasure to what they saw — and won't pay extra for the scent.
And even the very number of distinguishable scents hasn't been properly counted. In 2014, a paper was published in Science promising that humans can distinguish more than a trillion olfactory stimuli; Markus Meister dismantled its framework that same year, showing that out of 260 pairs of comparisons, the data could just as well be described by a dozen distinguishable scents. In 2024, Science formally issued this story as an Erratum — almost eight years after the first correction, and, importantly, at the request of the authors themselves. So scented cinema has a problem not just with pipes and budgets: it doesn't even have a unit of measurement.
All this together explains why in a hundred years "real" scented cinema never paid off even once, while a scratch-and-sniff card for pennies did.
Cardiff himself said of his film: "the only one I would like to erase from my memory". After the flop, Todd didn't produce a movie for eighteen years. Laube moved to a lab on 84th Street and worked on the BestAir air freshener — according to his daughter, it was the first such product in the world, and it could well have become that big hit. It didn't. His last invention was a tiny removable warmer that could be attached to a can of soup. He died in 1976, sixteen years after the premiere, "penniless and broken".
What survived was what stopped pretending to be reality. In 1981, John Waters released "Polyester" with an Odorama card — ten numbered spots that had to be scratched at the signal in the corner of the screen, and the set included not only roses and pizza, but also stench, skunk, and socks. Waters's lawyers later forced Nickelodeon and Viacom to drop the word "Odorama" in a 2003 cartoon, and Robert Rodriguez in 2011 called the same thing "Aroma-Scope". In Disney parks, scent works where it's part of the attraction: strawberry, orange, the smell of pie. Since 2014, Regal has been running 4DX with seats, mist, and scents in eighteen theaters. In 1978, Les Blank toasted garlic in a toaster right at screenings of his film about garlic and called it "Smellaround".
And there's a separate, almost detective-like thread. In 1965, the BBC showed a "professor" in an April Fool's Day broadcast cutting onions and brewing coffee in front of a device called smellovision; viewers called in and confirmed they could smell the scents, and some had watery eyes. In 1977, psychologist Michael O'Mahony repeated the experiment in Bristol, announcing that scents would be transmitted over the air via "Ramen spectroscopy". Within 24 hours, 172 responses came in: the majority reported the smell of hay and grass, some of lavender and apple blossom, and two complained of a hay fever attack.
That is, in the most famous case of "scented television", there wasn't a single gram of scent. Which poses a rather harsh question for the whole story: perhaps smell in cinema was never required — it was enough to invite the audience to fill in the missing pieces themselves.
In 2015, "Scent of Mystery" was finally shown the way it was intended: in Bradford and Copenhagen, with David Strohmaier's restoration and a new set of scents from Saskia Wilson-Brown of the Institute for Art and Olfaction, with fans and spray bottles in the hands of the audience — there was no budget, the project was assembled through crowdfunding and volunteers. The reviews were good. The number of scents, however, was either 14 or 18 — in two texts by the same team, the figures don't match, and I leave it as is.
And in 2000, Time readers included Smell-O-Vision in the list of the hundred worst ideas of all time. The Cinestage in Chicago, where it all began, played adult films for ten years, then the city bought it from Elizabeth Taylor to demolish it for a new complex. By that time, the "smell brain" was still lying in the basement.