3-D Movie Pioneer Lothrop Worth

Without the benefit of a distributor, Bwana Devil opened at two Los Angeles theaters on Nov. 30, 1952, generating a surprising $154,000 in its first week. Audiences, wearing goofy-looking cardboard-framed Polaroid glasses to discern the "Natural Vision 3-Dimension" effects, lapped up the cinematic shenanigans. Suddenly, Hollywood studio execs, who'd previously derided the process, sustained whiplash latching onto it. United Artists dove in first, buying the rights to Bwana Devil from Oboler for $500,000 (with $1.25 million to follow), then launching the movie nationally in early 1953. It racked up virtually unprecedented grosses for the company. Warner Bros. followed quickly, hiring brothers Milton and Julian Gunzberg's Natural Vision Corp., which had underwritten the tech team that in 1951 developed the optical system used for Bwana Devil, to three-dimensionalize its House of Wax, the 1953 Vincent Price vehicle now considered something of a hokey horror classic, with its in-your-face can-can girl's butt and, most famously, paddled ball on a string.

Simultaneously, Paramount, Columbia, MGM, Universal and other studios cobbled together their own equipment to adapt the technology, rushing 3-D pictures into development. Over at Warner Bros., reports Andrew Dowdy in his breezy 1973 book The Films of the Fifties, "The Gunzberg camera was lugged from set to set in a padlocked trunk, carefully guarded from spies by armed studio police during lunch breaks." The Gunzbergs, smelling bonanza, secured a one-year deal with Polaroid to distribute its irritating, if essential, 3-D glasses, which the brothers hawked at a dime apiece to eager theater owners. The movie industry?briefly, hysterically?OD'd on 3-D, with Life magazine, in February 1953, labeling it "the most frenzied boom since the birth of sound." The delirium spread. By April, San Francisco's Colisseum Theater, with a 2000-patron capacity, began exhibiting only 3-D movies. Asked about 3-D's long-term prospects, producer Jerry Wald (Mildred Pierce, The Glass Menagerie) quipped, "We'll throw things at the public until they start throwing them back."

The connective tissue for this unbridled nuttiness was journeyman camera operator Lothrop Worth. He worked on Bwana Devil and House of Wax; and on Fort Ti (1953), Devil's Canyon (1953) and Gog (1954), three long-forgotten 3-D films. Most critically, Worth, along with Trent Baker, O.S. Bryhn and Joseph Biroc, formulated the Natural Vision process, a variation on a system popular in Britain at the time, although stereoscopic vision, 3-D's formal name, dates back to film's silent era of the 20s, and before that to the magic-disk moving pictures of the mid-19th century.

Reanimating 3-D reanimated Worth's flagging cameraman career?he was 49 when he shot Bwana Devil?but he realized later that he'd unwittingly tapped into Hollywood's creative dead zone. "All that directors wanted to do was the same old gag of throwing things at the camera," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. "These techniques should come as startling climaxes, but in those early 3-D films all you had was things flying at your head?axes, leaping lions, African spears, anything they could think of." Not forgetting the moment when audiences dodged a wad of spit headed their way in 1953's The Charge at Feather River. "I love 3-D," Worth continued, "and I still think there's a place for a theater running nothing but 3-D films."

Born July 11, 1903, in Melrose, MA, just outside Boston, Worth moved with his parents to L.A. when the family was wiped out financially in the Panic of 1907. They settled near the University of Southern California, where, as a teen, Worth spied actors bound for outdoor sets, many of them dressed as cowboys or Indians. He went on to study commerce and business administration at USC, but was forced to find work when his father died of a heart attack. His mother, a beautician, counted Constance DeMille, wife of moviemaking mogul Cecil B., among her clients, and in 1921 a camera job was arranged for young Worth: "It was some costume thing with a lot of swordplay." Two years later he filmed the title sequence for DeMille's first crack at The Ten Commandments (he memorably remade it in 1956). With the advent of talkies, Worth did a short stint as a sound technician, but soon reverted to manning a camera. His 3-D experience catapulted him from cameraman to cinematographer on a handful of pictures, notably 1957's wiggy I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and the final two movies made by notorious Hollywood schlockmeister William "One Shot" Beaudine: Billy the Kid vs. Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, both 1966. Worth crossed over to tv, where he served as director of photography on The Real McCoys and The Donna Reed Show, while devising the now-you-see-her/now-you-don't scenes for I Dream of Jeannie. He retired in 1969, and 20 years later, after the death of his wife Jean, sold their house for $700,000. He donated the money to the Motion Picture & Television Fund and moved into its retirement home in Woodland Hills, where he died March 16 at age 96.

The 3-D frenzy Worth helped ignite consumed itself in a mere seven months, and by mid-1953, the studios, responding to viewers' complaints about eyestrain and the cumbersome glasses, shrugged off the gimmick. "Bad imitators came along," Worth once recalled, "and people went home with a headache. Done right, it doesn't hurt your eyes." As a result, many movies shot in 3-D were ultimately shown in "flat" versions, including Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder. Hitchcock justly characterized 3-D as "a nine-day wonder," deadpanning, "and I came in on the ninth day."

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