FILMS OF FUTURE

Greymouth Evening Star, 25 March 1922, Page 7

FILMS OF FUTURE

Here is an optician’s idea of tiio future picture tneatre. -there each patron will be able to select any one of four or live pictures, and see it from beginning to end witliout having to wait through other pictures that he does not care about. Within the range of pictures showing he will be at liberty to arrange iiis own programme as he pleases, regardless of the other two or three thousand spectators, eacii of whom will be similarly regardless of him. When yon enter , the auditorium (says ‘Everyday Science”) you see upon the screen what appears to be a hopeless, wild jumble of figures, scenes, and colours - —the whole an indistinguishable blur. At the side is an illuminated programme, on which the items are numbered. Ignoring the screen you select an item, note its number, and then on tlie ledge in front of your seat you find a little lever to the number you have selected. A catch is released, and a box appears from the slot. This contains a pain of coloured spectacles; you don them, and behold, the blurred medley of shapes and colours on the screen resolves itself into one ordinai’y film, the film whose title you chose from the programme. The secret is simple. Four or five films are projected simultaneously on to the safe screen, but each film is coloured in a single colour, distinct from the others, and by wearing glasses that admit only the rays of that colour, all the other pictures in thq other colours become invisible Io you, while your particular picture appears to you in the blacks and greys of the ordinary film of to-day. Each goes on over and over again. As soon as you have seen one, all you have to do is to choose again, move the lever, and don another pair of coloured spectacles, so that if your tastes arc for comedy and melodrama, you don’t have to sit and wait through the sob-story and the travel pictures. Further, the little lever does something else for you. By it hangs a telephone headpiece. If you put that on as well as the coloured glasses, you will find yourself listening to music appropriate to your film, will hear the chapter headings, the letters and the printed explanations now thrown on to the screen, spoken to you as the story proceeds. Each projecting instrument has a phonograph synchronised with it, and the. lever switches your telephone headpiece on to the phonograph as well as picking out for you the appropriate coloured spectacles that enable you to see one picture, and one only, out of four or five mingled on the screen.