Whiffs of cinerama

I had a pretty amazing experience the other night; got to see some virtual Cinerama in my living room. We recently got a Blu Ray player, and while researching which titles would be a good way to test things out, I saw that the 1962 film How the West Was Won had been released. I saw it in Cinerama during its first run, at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. It was a huge deal at the time; a three hour epic western, starring everybody from John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, down to Walter Brennan. It took three directors to pull it off.

But that's not the most impressive part: it was a Cinerama production! If you're not familiar with this remarkable process...

During World War II, movie attendance was at an all time high, for various reasons; families would go to the show 3 or 4 times a week. But after the war, attendance started dropping to a low, sending shock waves through the studios. There were a lot of things happening; stars like Bette Davis defied the studio system with their seven year contracts and few rights for actors, the Supreme Court broke of the vertical integration of the studios and their theatre chains, but what scared them most was the advent of television. Folks started staying home. The movie industry tried to do things that folks couldn't get at home. Some were failures, like Smell-O-Vision and the first 3D craze. But what really caught the public's fancy were the various wide screen formats, starting with Cinemascope. A really wide screen, with a 2.35:1 aspect ration, was an immersive experience, and worth paying for.

But there were other systems, and Cinerama was probably the most fascinating. It was a very complex, Rube Goldberg-like system, that imposed many limits on the cinematographer. But when everything came together, it was breathtaking.

Fred Waller had developed a special system for one of the pavilions at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair that used 11 projectors to fill special room with images. He later made a 5 projector system for the military during the War. He refined it to a 3 projector system by 1953, that used a curved 146 degree screen that literally wrapped around the audience. With its 3:1 aspect ration, it was beyond immersion, since even peripheral vision was used.

It also had the first seven channel magnetic sound track, with high fidelity sound.

It required five projectionists and technicians, and was extremely complicated to operate. One of the biggest issues was the synchronization of all three projectors. And if the film on one of them broke and had to be spliced, a blank frame or two would have to be inserted to make up for any missing film, lest the projectors would not be showing the same frames.

For that reason, they eventually switched to a single lens anamorphic system; but they had the same curved screen. Quite amazing; I think 2001 was the last film I saw this way in a theatre.

What drove the audience batty, though, was the fact it used three projectors. Unless everything was set up correctly, the lamps were all of the same temperature, and the lenses were just so, you'd see two faint but noticeable vertical lines, where the images overlapped. The single lens system took care of this, but my movie was made when they still had three projectors. And I can still remember the annoying line; how would they fix this?

Here's how: they used the Smilebox process. It's as if you're looking at a curved screen, and if your TV were wide enough, it would be pretty close as you'd get at home. They used advanced computer algorithms to pull this off, and while they were at it, they removed those darned vertical dividing lines. This is by far the best digital remastering I've ever seen. The also throw in a standard, non-curved version too.

It's quite an achievement, and I recommend it to anyone with Blu Ray. The film is a little dated, and the music is a bit excessive, but the production was filmmaking at its best, with a dream cast.

And this is the closest most of us will get to the Cinerama experience, unfortunately. There are two operational Cinerama theatres in this country; the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles (which is a modern venue, retrofitted to the old technology), and the Seattle Cinerama (lovingly restored by Paul Allen). Both are worth a trip, if you'd like to experience a very unique part of filmmaking history. Check their schedules first; they show mostly regular films.

More reading:

Wikipedia article

Widescreen Museum