A film producer, Pink was a pioneer of 3-D movies. His Bwana Devil (1952) was the first 3-D feature-length movie. It used two cameras to get the effect, which required the audience to wear special glasses. “A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!” the film’s promos promised. Star Robert Stack remembers the experience well. “There was a line 6 feet from both cameras which you were not supposed to cross,” Stack said. “Otherwise, you’d wind up with that portion of your anatomy projected over the first 10 rows of the audience.”
While the film itself was no great feat of story-telling, it brought a big audience into theaters to see something quite different than was available on 1950s TV. But no one really knew how it would go over with a real audience. “All of us poor innocents were involved in something that we didn’t even know worked or not,” Stack said. “It was a very expensive process, and it took a lot of guts to even do it.” Pink produced more than 50 films, but the 3-D craze faded away fairly quickly. He died at age 86 on October 12 at home in Florida.