You read it here first! Smellovision!

In some far off future, or hell, maybe three years from now, you will go into your local movie theater, and while being blasted by sounds which are a bit too loud - loud enough to shake the seats - you may notice that there is something new - smell. Imagine seeing a movie like Saving Private Ryan - which is gripping as hell, visually and audially, if you could also smell what was going on screen.
The result, I think, would be an experience so gripping that people would cry, vomit, shake uncontrollably, etc. For those of us old enough to remember, people had similar reactions after watch Linda Blair in The Exorcist. People fainted, cried, went into hysterics, shook, or came out of the theater with the stunned look of a deer in the headlights. I remember only thinking, when she vomited green liquid - Hey that's the same shade as Campbell's split pea soup, I wonder if that's what they used? - but that's me. Losing my sense of disbelief takes a lot, and the Exorcist, interesting as it was, didn't get me there.
Part of the technology for smell o vision already exists. Perfume companies already have small electronic boxes, which at the cost of about a million dollars each, have the ability to mimic any smell. Park one on the beach at Wakiki, and you can smell the beach at Wakiki three thousand miles away - or at least the electronic box's best estimate of the smell.
What probably hasn't been invented is the technology to make smells only linger for a few minutes - long enough to enrich a scene, but not so long that when the next show starts, you are still smelling things from the first.
Why smellovision - and I will also be the first to say that the name, well the name I'm using sucks. Really sucks. But sucks or not, it's a powerful idea. Smells go directly into the emotional part of our brain, whereas most of our senses have to do a bypass through a second part of our brain, then go into our emotions.
That's one of the reasons that smells are so evocative, and one of the reasons why I predict that some time in the future, the way we went from silent movies to talkie movies, we will go from technicolortalkiesoundieshakey movies - what we have now - to sniffies.
No one must, or ONE MUST tell the pencil lead brains in hollywood, who always think that if a little is good, a lot is better, that with smells, understatement is everthing.
As anyone who has ever sat in front of the old lady brigade at church knows, a little says a lot, and a lot makes you want to upchuck.
So, you might not be able to have smellovision in your home, but what the hell - it will be another reason to get us out of the house and down to the local cinema. Imagine seeing Gone with the wind, or Dr. Zhivago while smelling what is going on on screen, and you have the makings of an absolutely unforgettable experience. Plus, instead of only making new movies, you could enrich the coffers by putting smellovision on the older movies.
Wait and see.
And whoever does it, remember me. You can mail me a modest seven figure check yearly, and pretend you came up with it yourself. I won't say a word.