Cinerama

I had the rare pleasure recently of watching the classic film How The West Was Won in its original 3-strip Cinerama format at the Arclight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, one of only three theaters in the world equipped for this format. The film itself is a well-known western epic with a huge cast of many great film stars from the 1940s, '50s and '60s, including Jimmy Stewart, Debbie Reynolds, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, John Wayne, and on and on. What most impressed me, however, was the Cinerama film technique.

Cinerama debuted in 1953 as the first "wide screen" format. The process used a large camera with three small lenses, one in the middle facing straight ahead and two side lenses angled diagonally toward the center. The images captured by these lenses were exposed on three separate reels of film. To view the finished movie, the theater had to be equipped with three separate projectors, each precisely aimed at one third of the curved screen.



Because of the wide field of vision captured on film (146 degrees), plus the curved screen, the image has a mild 3-D effect. Objects on both extremes of the frame seem closer than objects in the center. The projection reveals frame lines from each strip of film which blend together on the movie screen. This was somewhat distracting at times, but the viewer gets used to it and accepts the three images as one large picture. It's all part of the novelty of the format.



Another challenge of working with this format was the fact that actors in a scene together couldn't always look at each other directly. In order to keep a realistic perspective for the viewer, actors often had to cheat their sight lines toward the camera.

It's amazing how much information was captured by the three-lensed camera, much like a human being's peripheral vision. Incidentally, this caused problems for legendary director John Ford (one of three directors on this film) who ruined more than one take by accidentally stepping into frame even though he was to the side of the camera.

Cinerama also incorporated true surround sound. The following detailed description is from the original Cinerama premiere book, which I found reprinted online here:

"When the shooting crew is out in the field, five microphones are placed to cover all the action that the camera's eyes will see. One to three others are placed well off to one side or behind the camera, to pick up the sound of people's voices, roaring engines, or whatever may be approaching or leaving the scene. Each mike makes an individual magnetic recording on a special six-track sound film. In the theater, five speakers--one for each of the mikes on the set--are arranged behind the screen. When the sound film is run off with the picture, each speaker reproduces the sounds picked up by the mike that was in a similar position on the set. Three other speakers, one on each side wall, and another in the rear of the theater reproduce the offstage noises that the extra mikes picked up. Hence, as a motor boat, for instance, roars across the set, the noise of its engine will be picked up by each of the mikes successively. And that's the way sound comes out in the theater--moving sound that travels across the screen and roars away in the actual direction it's traveling."

(Click image above for full size.)

The sound at the Cinerama Dome was indeed spectacular and the dramatic film score by Alfred Newman, incorporating many American folk tunes, was highlighted with the inclusion of the complete Overture, Intermission, and Exit Music.

Cinerama was used primarily for shooting travelogues. Typical scenes included riding in a gondola in the canals of Venice and flying through the Grand Canyon in a B-25 bomber. Only two feature films were completed using the Cinerama process and How The West Was Won was the second and last, and the only Cinerama film to be restored. It was an enormous blockbuster costing over $15 million to make, with three production crews shooting dramatic action sequences simultaneously in various parts of the country.

Although the format was enormously successful (HTWWW had its American premiere in February 1963 at the Warner Cinerama Theater in Hollywood and ran for 97 weeks at that theater!!), Cinerama's days were numbered due to the high costs of production and exhibition (5 projectionists and a stage hand were required for every performance) and eventually the industry switched to single-lens 70mm production.

At its peak in 1962, there were over 100 Cinerama theaters worldwide and I'm extremely proud to report that the very first theater built specifically for Cinerama was The Cooper theater in my hometown of Denver, Colorado! I saw many films there as a kid, including Return of the Jedi, Pink Floyd The Wall, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sadly the theater closed a number of years ago and was torn down and replaced with a strip mall.


(Click image for more info about The Cooper.)

So much for aethetics. If you ever get a chance to see a film in the Cinerama format, don't hesitate! It's a novelty now, but it's also a lot of fun.