(cont from About Theatre)

The 1952 debut of Cinerama made headlines and dazzled audiences, who had never seen movies so big. Ten years later the unwieldy process was on its way to the scrap heap. Now a dedicated band of fanatics is fighting long odds to preserve the last remnants of the panoramic screen format - with the help of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen.
By Bruce Handy

It is one thing to fall in love with movies. Everyone falls in love with movies. Sinking boat plus Leonardo DiCaprio equals tens of millions of rapt and tearful teenage girls who for the rest of their lives will have an unlikely soft spot for James Cameron. Falling in love: that's what movies - still the most seductive medium ever invented - are here for. It's another thing, a far more rarefied and perhaps a nobler thing, certainly an odder thing, to fall in love with a movie process. And if that movie process is both magnificent and malformed, if it is both the Cadillac and the Trabant of movie processes - if it is, in fact, Cinerama - the infatuation can be heartbreaking. Marriages have been imperiled, homes literally broken, small and large fortunes squandered, all in the belief that Cinerama must not perish from this earth. You don't remember Cinerama? Its unveiling in 1952 was so newsworthy that for what must have been the first (and last) time, The New York Times put a film review on its front page. Beneath the paper's best stab at a Variety-esque headline - NEW MOVIE PROJECTION SHOWN HERE; GIANT WIDE ANGLE SCREEN UTILIZED - the movie critic Bosley Crowther wrote: "The new motion-picture projection system known as Cinerama was put on public display for the first time last night before an invited audience at the Broadway Theatre. And, with due account for the novelty of the system, it was evident that the distinguished gathering was as excited and thrilled by the spectacle presented as if it were seeing motion pictues for the first time." This was not an audience of rubes: in it were such presumably tough customers as William Paley, the founder of CBS; David Sarnoff, the longtime head of RCA and NBC; Louis B. Mayer, the former head of MGM; Richard Rodgers, the composer of Oklahoma! and South Pacific; and Tom Dewey, the governor of New York and former presidential candidate. Also present was Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, who in one telling had been so awed by Cinerama that he bolted from his seat and dashed to the paper's nearby offices, where he alerted his editors to the filmic marvel in their midst. Ed Sullivan, so flummoxed by Cinrama's stupendousness that he was reduced to using a then current cliché, wrote in his Daily News column that it was the biggest thing to hit New York since penicillin.

To appreciate Cinerama's impact, you have to remember that from their infancy, with very few exceptions, movies had been shot and shown in a virtually square format; even the bosom-heaving Technicolor spectacle that was Gone with the Wind had been corseted within a frame whose rigid proportions dated back to Thomas Edison's laboratories. But dreamers and malcontents had long wondered: Why can't a movie be wide? That was the void filled by Cinerama, which was so wide it had to be shot by three yoked-together cameras and shown by three synchronized projectors, their images blended to fill a vast, deeply curved, panoramic screeen that was nearly three times as wide as it was tall. The soundtrack was wide, too, recorded in seven-channel stereo, something almost literally unheard of in a monophonic era. (Two-channel stereo recordings wouldn't become common for another five years.) But to speak of Cinerama in terms of mere wideness is reductive: if movies had always been larger-than-life, Cinerama was larger than larger-than-life, in its day the closest thing to what the critic André Bazin famously called the "myth of total cinema," the impossible goal of a perfect simulacrum at once as literal and as dreamlike as real life itself. Not that Cinerama's marketing people needed that highfalutin Cahiers du Cinééma stuff. "The biggest thing that ever stunned a theatre audience!" read the ad for its public premiere, making Cinerama sound like a cross between King Kong and a punch in the nose.

The process was invented by Fred Waller, a special-effects technician for Paramount in the 1920s and 30s who should arguably be better known for having also invented water skis. If Cinerama sounds cumbersome, consider that it grew out of Vitarama, an aborted 11-camera system Waller had designed for the 1939 New York World's Fair. But despite being backed in the 1940s by the likes of Laurence Rockefeller and Henry Luce, Cinerama didn't get of the ground until it was taken up in 1950 by Lowell Thomas, a well-known adventurer and radio newscaster, and Mike Todd, the legendary Broadway showman (and, later, Elizabeth Taylor's third husband). Along with Merian C. Cooper, the writer, director, and producer of King Kong, Thomas and Todd produced the first Cinerama feature. In another early triumph of marketing over poetry, it was entitled This Is Cinerama - the picture that so enthralled that audience of New York swells.

Next Page