IMAX BRINGS YOU LARGER THAN LARGER THAN LIFE

Years ago, Lew Wasserman of Universal, speculating on the future of the motion picture industry, said that nothing was really certain except change--new delivery systems, new shapes, new sounds. Maybe, he said fancifully, there’s a better way than sitting and looking at the screen; we just don’t know what it is yet.

So far as I’m aware, looking at the screen is still standard. It’s the screen that isn’t, the screen and the film that carries the images. The screen went wide in the ‘50s, trying to lure the home folks away from television. Now the screen has gone fantastically high, wide and handsome to enrich the movie-watching experience--and, as before, to lure us out of the house.

Douglas Trumbull’s new Show Scan process, projecting 60 different frames per second instead of 24 frames each seen twice, creates a remarkable leap in fidelity and feelings of depth, and Trumbull has recently concluded an agreement with Plitt Theaters to develop Show Scan cinemas.

Viewers who have not yet been exposed to the vast IMAX screen can hardly imagine quite how different the visceral response is from the customary commercial movie-house experience. It is a quantum leap beyond even the startling dimensions of early Cinerama.

The Museum of Science and Industry in Exposition Park, which has the only IMAX theater in Los Angeles, is launching Friday a 17-day festival that will offer nine films in the giant format, starting daily at 10:15 in the morning.

The screen in the Mitsubishi IMAX Theater is five stories high and roughly six stories wide, faced by 420 seats in steeply raked tiers. The George Lucas sound system rattles your corpuscles, as when dragsters blast off in the Greg MacGillivray-Jim Freeman film “Speed.”

The theater opened last summer at Olympic time but, although duly noted in the press, it was overshadowed (like everything else in town) by the Games themselves, and the series is a sort of re-premiere.

The IMAX film images are about 10 times the size of a 35-millimeter negative and capable of dazzlingly fine detail. The idea is to create in two dimensions an impression of three dimensions, and indeed the 3-D impression as you watch an IMAX film is often astonishing. So is an engulfing sense of participation.

One of the films in the series is Kieth Merrill’s “Grand Canyon--The Hidden Secrets,” which is to previous travelogues what a picture post card is to a mural. From the canyon floor, the undistorted gaze up the billions of rock years to the distant sky is stunning, humbling and somehow mystical.

Merrill, whose documentary “The Great American Cowboy” won an Oscar for 1973, has taken a dramatized historical view of the canyon, from ancient Indians through Spanish explorers to rubber-rafting tourists. But the pounding heart of the film is a re-creation of the one-armed Maj. John Wesley Powell’s heroic descent of the Colorado in 1869.

Some things can’t be faked, and the wooden boats, bucking and ducking beneath the furious white water, and capsizing in the raging river, are a gut-tightening spectacle. It’s some of the most thrilling live-action footage I’ve seen, and it demonstrates what the IMAX dimensions can do at their best.

The huge screen envelops you, overwhelms you, edges out any other reality. It can quickly induce motion sickness (or uneasiness) as you whip along a winding road, for example, in the MacGillivray-Freeman “Speed.” MacGillivray and his partner, the late Jim Freeman, got their start doing surfing films (there is an homage to the firm’s beginnings in “Speed,” a rousing surfing sequence). They made the first notable IMAX film, “To Fly,” which premiered at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in 1976 and is still playing. It will also be in the local museum series.

“Speed,” made for the Autoworld theme park in Flint, Mich., documents our ever-accelerating species, from primitive man outrunning the beasts to future man approaching the speed of light (an incandescent concluding light show that represents some pioneering experimental effects that a MacGillivray team worked out in a downtown Los Angeles warehouse).

“The Magic Egg,” produced and directed by Eddie Garrick of Los Angeles, is an IMAX film whose every image and every sound were computer-generated, the graphics done by nearly 100 computer graphics whizzes representing more than a dozen institutions and corporations. It is abstract film making on a grand scale, a kaleidoscope with dreams of grandeur. The images are witty, ingenious and often astonishingly beautiful--even beyond a layman’s astonishment that they exist at all.

The other films in the series include “Dance of Life,” a MacGillivray-Freeman film on Indonesian life, done for the government.

IMAX and a related concept, Omnimax--the same format except that its vast screen is domed, to enhance the viewer’s sense of being within the picture--may not be the whole wave of film’s future, although there are now 40 venues where the giant images are regularly shown. But they do suggest that film is far from its ultimate destination.

An increasing number of films designed to be shown in either format are now in production. It’s tricky film making because the Omnimax screen introduces distortion at the edges, so you’d best not have significant visual information out there.

“It’s different from ordinary film making,” MacGillivray said with some understatement the other day. “You can’t make any mistakes.”

The camera and the viewer have to keep a safe distance, to avoid foreground distortion. Close-ups work in Show Scan but not in IMAX, a limitation to balance against the breathtaking grandeur of those IMAX vistas--vistas that give to film what one viewer rightly called a sense of the divine.

IMAX information: 744-2014.