Word: bwanas
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...Meanwhile, many movie-men were beginning to think that 3-D was less a shot in the arm than a bump on the head: box-office returns on the latest 3-D films are showing a steady decline from the top grosses of such early novelty hits as Bwana Devil and The House of Wax. Because many theater owners believe the profit on 3-D pictures is not yet enough to pay off the added cost of enlarged projection booths, extra machines and extra operators, only 2,100 of the nation's 21,500 theaters are equipped to show...
...this point, desperate enough to swallow the first kind word he heard, Gunzburg agreed to let a fantasy merchant named Arch Oboler (once known in the radio business as "the daytime Norman Corwin") make a movie called Bwana Devil in Natural Vision. "The truth is," says one moviemaker, "that the movie industry didn't have the sense to follow its own nose into 3-D. They had to be led by a dog." And Bwana Devil-which may prove to be the most important motion picture produced in Hollywood since The Jazz Singer introduced sound in 1927-was indeed...
Nevertheless, Bwana Devil had what it took. Three-D had arrived. The next morning a half-delirious theater manager was shouting at Gunzburg over the telephone: "It's the most fabulous thing we've ever seen! They're standing four abreast all the way down to the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood and all the way around the block downtown!" In its first week Bwana smashed house records at the box office, rang up $95,000 at the two theaters. Rushed into a Chicago theater, it broke some more records...
...known as Warner Phonic sound (multiple sound tracks and speakers) mostly for recording eerie musical effects and the screams of ingenues. The picture was photographed in Natural Vision 3-D (TIME, Dec. 15, 1952), and calls for Polaroid spectacles. Although the Natural Vision is an improvement on that in Bwana Devil, it still becomes blurry at times, and there is often little illusion of depth, particularly in closeups. The picture's writing and direction are also blurry, and the extra dimension is used primarily as a trick. All sorts of objects pop out at the audience from the screen...
...Kikuyu or at least never to let a Kikuyu enter the farmhouse after dark. I've been told this was drastic, brutal and unnecessary. But the Mau Mau oath has a terrible binding power. One Kikuyu who had worked on a farm for 25 years went to his bwana. 'I'm leaving,' he said. 'They made me take the Mau Mau oath. This means they may ask me to kill you and I won't want to be in a position where I could obey. So it's better...