You Have to be Pretty Old to Recall This

The year was 1953. Warner Brothers, the first of the major Hollywood studios to introduce 3-D motion pictures, chose this day to premiere The House of Wax at the Paramount Theatre in New York City. The stage show preceding the movie was headed by singer Eddie Fisher. The film’s stars, Vincent Price, Phyllis Kirk and Frank Lovejoy attended the premiere.

A precursor to Warner’s 3-D presentation occurred in 1922 when The Power of Love opened in Los Angeles. The feature-length movie was filmed in a stereoscopic process called Fairall.

The first official 3-D movie (viewed with special glasses), Bwana Devil, premiered in LA five months before the major studios got into the act. It starred Robert Stack and Barbara Britton. Although the critics panned the flick as “low-grade melodrama with Polaroid glasses,” the long lines at the box office convinced Warner and others to plan their own 3-D productions. In fact, 23 3-D films were released in 1953, The House of Wax being the first.