The odours ranged from sickly sweet (flowers) to nauseatingly foul (smelly feet and farts), and added a new dimension to bad taste. The audience for John Waters's calculated trashy Polyester were given cards with 10 numbered pink discs to scratch when the appropriate number flashed on the screen. The skittish Odorama, a one-off joke starring the 20-stone transvestite Divine, came 25 years later. But it was technically complicated the auditorium had to be hermetically sealed, smells lingered, and people with colds were just bored by a lousy film.įew people saw it, and even fewer saw the documentary Behind the Great Wall, made in China and shown in Aromarama. Mike Todd Jr's thriller Scent of Mystery (1960) was a serious shot, using the Smell-O-Vision process (nicknamed 'Todd-BO') to pump out rapidly dispersing odours into the auditorium (for example, a smell of cigar-smoke to announce the approach of the villain). You could easily advertise a film about smells ('More Pungent than Bronowski's A Scent of Man', 'More Fragrant than Mary Archer'), but how could you make one? There have been a couple of attempts. Since its publication in 1985, the Bavarian novelist Patrick Suskind's bestselling Das Parfum has been considered unfilmable by both its author (who refused for a decade to sell the screen rights) as well as various screenwriters and directors who've contemplated adapting it.
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