SIZE MATTERS

Before the impact of IMAX there was Cinerama. But widescreen, as we acknowledge it, had been in a progressive experimental stage as far back as 1914, with something called Panoramico Alberini used for an Italian movie entitled II Sacco di Roma. In 1916 Abel Gance used three cameras for Barberousse and then in 1926 did the ambitious Napoleon with triple screens and three projectors. In 1927 Henri Chrétien introduced the Hypergonar process, forerunner to CinemaScope. One of the first movies to employ large format within a feature as single projection was 1930’s Happy Days using Fox Grandeur, which was later used for Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail. There were many early processes, a few preceding the above, though, as with Grandeur, they never garnered sustained excitement to warrant monetary investment. Their commonality was sharing the same origin: Raoul Grimoin-Sanson’s Cinéorama, having débuted at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and updated with 180 to 360 degree projections as mandatory attraction for various future World’s Fairs. This influential gimmick heralding technology would eventually come under the purview of Frederick Waller, who understood its applicatory potential and narrowed it down to a more manageable three-strip projection system to be called Cinerama. (For more on Waller and related minutiae see David Strohmeier’s enjoyable documentary Cinerama Adventure or visit cineramaadventure.com.) When This is Cinerama premiered in 1952, movie audiences were child-like with their oohs and aahs, even if what they were seeing amounted to clearly exploitive setups to aggrandize a format that at the start was expensive to show, and would become prohibitively more expensive, with relatively few theatres refitted or built to accommodate what were second-rate panoramic travelogues. The fun was being initially overwhelmed by the sense of being involved in the nonsense. Like 3-D, Smell-o-Vision and Sensurround, few took This is Cinerama, Cinerama Holiday, Seven Wonders of the World, South Seas Adventures and Search for Paradise as anything more than demonstration. What moviemakers, theatre owners and movie lovers understood immediately was the size of movies and the screens showing them were about to undergo a dramatic hugeness. Historians always note Cinerama and the poor man’s follow up CinemaScope were devices to bring back audiences who abandoned their regular movie habits to the comfort of the small box in their living rooms. There was another less-articulated reason for audiences keeping away from movies—nothing much was coming from them after color and air conditioning. Sure, adult-theme movies like Duel in the Sun and A Streetcar Named Desire prompted the Legion of Decency and local censors to action, causing lots of notoriety and a rush to urban box office, yet movie innovation felt stagnated and cramped. Filling the vacuum, without Hollywood money, This is Cinerama was thrilling not only because it wasn’t television, it sure as hell wasn’t like the run-of-the-mill movies, either. With those three projectors and two seams, it was imperfectly spectacular to watch on the enormous screen, as well as exciting to hear the stereophonic blasts, and audiences responded with their pocketbooks to make it the period’s top box office attraction. One of the chief impresarios behind commercial Cinerama, Mike Todd cheerfully called it “the greatest thing since penicillin” and took pride in his son Michael Jr.—along with Harry Squires—having photographed the screamer roller coaster ride opening This is Cinerama. If Dad could he might slightly alter his quip: “Michael shot the most famous sequence in [and changed the course of] motion picture history for less than it costs me to get a haircut.” (A widescreen “ride” such as this wasn’t a first: back in 1925, in a 63.5mm process called Natural Vision, George K. Spoor and P. John Berggren photographed a rollercoaster as their followup to capturing the Niagara Falls.) With “rama” fever sweeping not just audiences but the international movie industry, even the Russians got into the act with their 1957 ripoff Kinopanorama. In 1958, a competitor called Cinemiracle was unveiled with Windjammer, not quite duplicating the three camera technique of Cinerama. Applying mirrors to the left and right cameras to reflect images to reduce the irritating seams due to the three simultaneous projections, some cineastes believed Cinemiracle was less annoying to watch. With only one movie made in the process, Cinerama bought the rights and effectively snuffed it.

Aside from the initial installation and the ever-rising cost of maintenance and multiple projectionists, Cinerama had two additional problems. The first, of course, was its limited viewing capacity, with only 312 theatres world-wide equipped to show 3 panel projection. One solution was fairly popular if inadequate and susceptible to inclement weather—a Cinerama caravan would travel to non-urban areas in Europe and set up a portable tent theatre with screen, seats, projectors and speakers. (Click “On the Road” at left for more.) National Theatres, who briefly held American rights to Cinemiracle, reportedly went mobile with Windjammer in smaller U.S. cities. The inaugural 3 projection-specific Cinerama theatre as the next remedy was designed by architect Richard L. Crowther, who created a modified “dome” concept for the Cooper Cinerama chain, opening in Denver in 1961, then Minneapolis and Omaha. A more grandiose fix was proposed a year later: Cinerama and Geometrics, Inc. announced plans to build 300 (later exaggerated to 600) theatres, the first of which was Hollywood’s Pacific Cinerama Dome, developed by R. Buckminster Fuller and French architect Pierre Cabrol, who barely gave a glancing nod to Crowther, premiering in 1963 with It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The ballyhoo centered not around 3 strip Cinerama, as it had already been abandoned for single projection blowup of Ultra Panavision, Super Panavision and Super Technirama, but for its relatively cheap cost: the new dome could be built for $750,000 in just a matter of weeks. (The harsh reality—it came in at $2.2 million and only a few domes were constructed.) The second difficulty was Cinerama’s inherent bane in the cumbersome process of filming a dramatic narrative: as Mike Todd predicted, one day lovers would need to kiss and there’d be those two damned seams; during the ten years it took to bring The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How the West Was Won to the screen, Cinerama didn’t invest much in technological advances to eliminate them.

To bring widescreen to the masses without requiring extensive retrofit or new theatres or trucking-in, there would be a spat of big screen processes. While the best of them—TODD AO, Super Technirama, Camera 65-Ultra Panavision and Super Panavision—remained the preferrred choices for moviemakers and metropolitan showcasing, CinemaScope (its first release The Robe) and VistaVision (débuting with White Christmas) could be much less expensively adapted for many existing non-metro theatres without grievous loss of the big screen “Wow!” factor. Then, beginning as a series of lenses designed to rectify distortion issues that would evolve into its own widescreen processes, Panavision became CinemaScope’s successor as 35mm standard. A major setback occurred in the 1970s when the single movie house gave way to multiplexes and out went the larger screens in favor of pint-sizers to provide more product and ticket sales. Movies got “small” again. Took a decade before chains wised up and started to offer bigger screens in the plexes, show 70mm properly and in time install IMAX, the real replacement for Cinerama, re-confirming technology dictates matters of size. And inevitably dictating this: thanks to aficionado David Strohmeier and his equally addicted foofs, armed with the virtues in Blu-ray and SmileBox and myriad of corrective software, backed by generous benefactors, dross-laden Cinerama and its copycats have been restored to a glory they didn’t achieve in orginial form, maybe don’t deserve, and now enjoyed on the very venue their creators fought against—our home TV screens.

(At Chicago’s The Palace: This is Cinerama, running 98 weeks; Cinerama Holiay, 78; Seven Wonders of the World, 70; Search for Paradise, 22; South Seas Adventure, 59. Windjammer opened at the Opera House, running 14 weeks, moving over to the McVickers for 22. At the McVickers: The Best of Cinerama, 9.)

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FOR PART II, CINERAMA’s “INDICT AND CONVICT” YEARS, CLICK NEXT

ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com  

Text COPYRIGHT © 2003 RALPH BENNER (Revised 11/2018) All Rights Reserved.