Cinerama Adventure (2002 - David Strohmaier)
Last night as part of Portland, Oregon's
Hollywood Theatre 80th birthday celebration this weekend, there was a special screening of
Cinerama Adventure (The Hollywood had been a Cinerama cinema during the '50s, the remnants of which are still visible inside). This is a good and thorough documentary recounting the history and worldwide phenomenon of Cinerama in the '50s and early '60s. The three-projector, curved & louvered screen and seven-channel stereophonic sound of Cinerama was a technical marvel and revolutionized the entire industry. It gave birth to Cinemascope, Todd-AO, 70mm and every other widescreen process up to and including today's IMAX (which for all its grandeur still doesn't replicate the feeling of Cinerama). There are only two functioning Cinerama screens left in America: the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles and the Seattle Cinerama. The L.A. theater tries to schedule at least one week's worth of Cinerama programming annually, but the Seattle operation hasn't had a screening in a few years (though they still have the equipment and capability). There may be fewer Cinerama screens left than Drive-Ins, but in its day Cinerama was extraordinarily popular.
This film starts with the pioneers who dreamed it up and put it into practice, which at its core hoped to replicate depth of vision by curving the screen and incorporating the peripheral. The main technical wizard was the amazing inventor Fred Waller, who was working on the idea for the mainstream in the '30s but got sidetracked by WWII. He and his multi-camera Viterama invention that premiered at the 1939 Worlds Fair were contracted by the military and an impressive five-camera system with a hemispherical screen was developed as an effective flight simulator for gunners. It was a genius system and the Army credits the training and scoring system with probably saving thousands of lives during the War. After the War it was declassified and Waller went back to bringing it to the public. Early tests were shown to the Studio heads who were all impressed by the effect, but deemed it too expensive to implement. Hazard Reeves was the genius on the sound side, and multi-track sound was incorporated. Lowell Thomas, who was the on-screen face and voice of Cinerama, was the man who really brought it all together and got the idea marketed and running. Legendary figures Mike Todd and Marion C. Cooper also were key to the early success of Cinerama. When it premiered in New York City in 1952 it was a bonafide phenomenon. When the Studios saw the reaction of the public coupled with their ever-declining receipts at the hand of television's exploding popularity, they immediately got to work on their own widescreen projects - though none of them used the complicated and unique multi-camera specialized screen that Cinerama boasted.
The original Cinerama productions, from
This Is Cinerama on through the rest of the 1950s, were travelogues. There was no plot, no special effects, but dazzling sequences filmed literally all over the world. The rugged and adventurous crews that took this unwieldy triple camera box to the ends of the earth were an interesting bunch, including legendary Hollywood pilot Paul Mantz. The aerial photography in particular was some of the most spectacular footage in the Cinerama travelogues. The story of deciding to fly inside the crater of an active volcano and almost not getting out alive is typical of the death-defying feats that lead to breathtaking images, and during a rafting sequence in India a crewmemebr was actually killed when the raft capsized in dangerous water.
Eventually the longstanding phenomenon lead to two narrative Studio productions being shot completely in the process:
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) and
How the West Was Won (1962) with an all-star cast. Despite the boxoffice success of
West in particular, it was clear that shooting in Cinerama was too unwieldy, expensive and even dangerous. The near-fatal accident that crippled stuntman Bob Morgan and the technical problems it caused for the directors and actors meant Cinerama was finished. The travelogues had been exhausted in the previous decade and no longer held the same kind of wonder, so the process just stopped being used. But the love of the widescreen continued, and though movies like
It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963),
Grand Prix (1966) and
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) were sold in roadshow productions as "Cinerama", they were really just 70mm from a single projector onto a curved (but shortened from the true ratio) screen. Beautiful, to be sure, but not the actual Cinerama experience.
For about a decade Cinerama was
the innovation in cinema, and the legacy as well as the fascinating group of geniuses and mavericks who brought it to life are all given their proper due and awe in
Cinerama Adventure. The documentarians also invented a process they call
"Smilebox" that comes the closest we'll ever get to replicating Cinerama onto a flat screen.
Cinerama Adventure's director/producer David Strohmaier and producer Randy Gitsch were on hand at the screening last night. Two very knowledgeable and passionate guys, they said they have finally inked a deal to bring
Cinerama Adventure to DVD in the next year or so. They also hope their invention of Smilebox and the support they've received from filmmakers and the industry will get the original Cinerama movies remastered using their process and also be readied for DVD. The ASC (American Society of Cinematographers) has been one of their biggest champions. Cinerama has special appeal to them because it was really a cameraman's medium, not the director's.
If you have a chance to see
Cinerama Adventure on a big screen, don't miss it.
GRADE: A-
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