A THANKSGIVING DAY TURKEY

“As a magician I too wear a mask. A mask of illusion or the ability to make illusions seem to be reality. But then what is reality, or super reality. What surprises await you in the 3rd Dimension…”       

Harry Blackwell Jr.

Mystic Magic (1982)

Twelve years after the release of The Mask, Julian Roffman revisited both the film and the 3-D process. This time the production was called Mystic Magic and featured the magician Harry Blackwell Jr. and his wife Gay. Mystic Magic is little more the original film converted to a 3D Video Process (simply a red/blue anaglyphic conversion to videotape) that added a set of four interstitial segments; each devoting as much time instructing viewers on the set up their colour televisions for an optimal 3-D viewing as it did to the comic quips and magic of Blackwell. The mysterious hooded figures from The Mask’s dream sequences are present, as is much of the dry ice fog, but unfortunately these newly shot sequences lack the dream logic of the films original sequences and are pretty standard television “variety show” fare for the early eighties.

A 3-D setup test for audiences at home.

3-D Magic?

Mystic Magic, an embarrassing example of Julian Roffman’s directorial abilities, was likely made more for the money than the love. With the directing assignment, Roffman also sold the rights for The Mask to a Los Angeles company 3D Video Corporation operated by Dan Symmes. 3D Video Corporation had developed a method of displaying 3D on television via a full colour anaglyph conversion. Most of the fondly remembered TV broadcasts of 3D in the 80’s had been done by 3D Video Corporation. Earlier 50’s 3-D films like Gorilla at Large and Hondo --seen in the fifties in full colour dual projection—received the anaglyph television treatment in the early eighties. The system worked, but just barely. To many variables came between the master tape and what the viewers saw at home, and the results were often poor. These television versions have contributed to the erroneous belief that retro 3-D films were screened with red and blue glasses and that the current standard of 3-D is an entirely new system of showing 3-D. (In fact, the only thing new is digital film-making the theory and practice for making 3-D images haven’t changed they‘ve just been adapted to this new technology.)

It is also highly likely that this conversion of The Mask, stripped of the Mystic Magic segments, is the source of all the video versions that have been available to this day.

But seeing is believing… so I present a sample.

3D Video Corporation quickly went bankrupt as the eighties wave of 3-D came to a close but the damage had been done. When film’s like Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1995) where released they chose to incorporate anaglyph 3-D. Now just to defend Dan Symmes (a very passionate 3-D professional and historian); while his company 3D Video Corporation’s television anaglyphs have hurt 3-D’s perception in the public’s mind, he has also done much to defend its reputation, including helping to create The 3-D Film Preservation Fund and presenting two 3-D World Expos (in 2005 and 2007) which screened just about every film made in the 50’s in glorious dual projection.

THE MAN BEHIND THE MASK

One of the most amazing things about researching for depthsploitation is discovering the filmmakers who are driven to make these 3-D exploitation films. Some of them become obsessed with the process and are forever changed by stereoscopic cinema (Comin' at Ya!'s producer and star Tony Anthony who has just premiered a re-imagined version of the film). While others merely utilize the 3-D effects to exploit the gimmick. However, The Mask's director Julian Roffman falls somewhere in between these two extremes. His inaugural 3-D effort The Mask was in part forced upon him by his producing partner Nat Taylor, but it’s unlikely that he was dissatisfied with the final result. Years later while working for Ivan Tors in Miami (directing uncredited television episodes of Flipper) Roffman had written a script entitled, Davey and the Man from Zar, with plans to shoot it in 3-D. Tors had himself had produced the 1954 3-D film GOG. He'd later get a chance to return to the third dimension when 3D Video Corporation packaged the film with a newly shot wrap 3-D interstitial footage featuring the magic of Harry Blackstone Jr. in 1983 for television and home video. Though far from a return to form for Roffman he again took the director reins of this 3-D material.

Julian Roffman is a Canadian film-maker that has never truly been given his due. In my many years both in the industry and as an armchair Canadian cinema historian Roffman never infiltrated my radar, that is until I got bitten by the 3-D bug. I won't be giving him his due here, there just isn't the space, but I would like to highlight some of the history of the man who is now best known by this quirky little 3-D / horror hybrid of a movie.

Although he was born and raised, for the better part of his youth, in Montreal, it was in New York that Julian Roffman first began his film career. Joining the Film and Photo League, Roffman began producing and directing while film was still a burgeoning art form. His first effort would be a theatrical documentary Getting Your Money's Worth, which exposed the over pricing of eggs and would become a series of films. That film series landed him a gig directing for The March of Time. By 1941 he was asked by John Grierson to return to Canada to join a new organization, The National Film Board of Canada. Once back in Canada, he joined the war effort directing a number of Canadian propaganda films.

Throughout the 50's Roffman directed for U.S. television. One of the programs was Inner Sanctum (a TV version of a highly popular radio series). But by 1958 Julian Roffman had his sights set on feature film and it was that year that TV's Columbo Peter Falk would get his start in the Roffman produced and directed juvenile delinquent film The Bloody Brood.

Roffman (centre) directs The Bloody Brood.

I'll let Julian Roffman fill in you in on some achievements with the following letter;

The Mask would be Roffman’s last feature as a director, but he would go on to produce a number of films and although he strived for art-house acceptance, many of these films continued to be in the exploitation genre.