SMALL PRINT:WE THINK OF Hollywood as a liberal sort of place. After all, barely a day goes by without the newspapers running a photograph of Alec Baldwin chained to a dolphin-bottling factory (or something). Mention of George W Bush still sends the average star into an apoplexy of retrospective fury. Yet for the past few years Big Hollywood has been actively discriminating against disabled people. The Evil Funhouse has instituted changes to film-going practice that inconvenience and irritate some of our most vulnerable citizens.
I am referring to speckies. (If you missed the meeting, like the "gay" community in the postwar period, we have reclaimed the formerly offensive word for our own use. "Specky" is now the accepted PC term, and we regard "glasses-bound" as hugely offensive.) When, five years ago, 3D came back into vogue the studios made no provisions for our beleaguered cadre. To fully appreciate such delightful entertainments as My Bloody Valentine 3Dor Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience,the myopic viewer was forced to create an improvised mutant hybrid from his or her own glasses and the flimsy 3D specs provided by the exhibitor.
Do you tilt the cheap glasses forward so the arms rest above the ears? That doesn't feel right. Then again, if you attempt to place the arms in parallel they keep slipping apart. Hang on. (Every specky has had this thought.) Maybe you can put the 3D glasses underyour own. No, that doesn't work. By drawing the prescription glasses away from the eyes you have ensured that the image is improperly focused. You have created Drunkovision.
What do the studios expect us to do? Do we really have to spend hundreds on contact lenses (or thousands on laser eye surgery) just to view Clash of the Titansin all its wretched lumpiness? They just don't care. They're mindless, heartless, totalitarian conglomerates that believe the differently sighted can go to hell.
Hang on. What's this? It seems that Walt Disney is thinking about us. Last week the Mouse House sent me a prototype for a class of clip-on 3D spectacle. You know the sort of thing. Modelled on those sunglasses that nestle over prescription glasses, but fitted with lenses that accommodate digital 3D, the device promises to greatly reduce furious fidgeting among the specky community. Yesterday I welcomed this bright new dawn by proudly wearing them to a press screening of the comedy superhero flick The Green Hornet.
Golly, I was the centre of attention. One spectacled critic, well known on radio and in print, sublimated his envy by casting his eyes to heaven and wondering whether any such gimmick could work.
Ha! While he juggled and improvised I happily viewed the film – not bad, incidentally – in a state of glorious easy comfort. Okay, there are still a few niggles. The image was not perfectly rendered, but this is a prototype, remember. The design itself seems fairly well worked out. You can even flick them up for trips to the lavatory or hot-dog stand. To show off my new toy I elevated the lenses and, during a rare moment where Seth Rogen wasn’t blowing up armoured vehicles, made my way conspicuously to the facilities.
Oh dear. What was this vista I saw in the mirror? The glasses made me look like a pensioner vacationing in Florida. All that was missing were the Bermuda shorts and the peeling red legs. How humiliating. The Specky Liberation Front still has some way to go.
