Where Retro and Future Meet

Only to a hard-core baby boomer could wallpaper that is grape purple and olive green inspire feelings of sweet nostalgia. The suspended bubble-globe spaceship lights in the lobby: There’s a sight most decorators have mercifully swept away. The carpet, big purple-and-blue polka dots: Somebody put it in on purpose, no kidding.

Welcome to Friday night at the movies, 1963. That’s the sense Seattle billionaire Paul Allen had in mind for his sweeping renovation of the old downtown Cinerama Theater, a complete 1960s retro experience that is a monument to the days when ultrawide-vision cinema and Jetsons-like decor combined to give moviegoers the sense that the future was at America’s door. So it’s only appropriate that the Cinerama opens to the public on a Friday night--tonight, in fact.

It is billed at once as the most technologically advanced cinema in the world and a return to the glory days of film viewing, when 800 moviegoers sat in the thrall of a screen so big that when the ponderous velvet curtains parted they had to clutch the arms of their seats to keep from being swept inside.

“It’s a true museum of motion picture arts, in the sense that this is the way movies ought to be seen. Even when the floors got sticky with Coke, when the theater got dark and the credits started rolling, you got that sense of excitement that you don’t get in a multiplex,” said Seattle film publicist Janet Wainwright, who helped spearhead the grass-roots campaign to save the Cinerama.

There remain a few of the big old movie houses--Hollywood’s Egyptian and Mann’s Chinese among them--but Allen’s alone will feature full 56-speaker surround sound, acoustics to rival a symphony hall, the first-ever active digital movie posters and full capability for Electronic Cinema, a still-under-development technology that will enable the use of fully digitized image and sound: cinema without film.

And in homage to the back-to-the-future 1960s ambience that is at the heart of the multimillion-dollar renovation, the theater will resurrect the original, three-projector, curved-screen Cinerama technology and become one of only three theaters in the world capable of showing wide-screen Cinerama-format classics like “How the West Was Won.”

“It may sound like shameless hype, but there’s no other way to say this: The survival and restoration of Seattle’s Cinerama Theater in the late 1990s is simply one of the greatest success stories in the whole checkered history of movie theater preservation in America,” local film critic William Arnold wrote.

Tonight’s grand reopening, which was preceded by a special gala opening celebration Thursday night, features a full 70-millimeter version of “Lawrence of Arabia,” a majestic visual panorama of thundering camels and wind-swept sands hampered with analog sound. The full capabilities of the theater won’t come to light until May 16, when the Seattle Cinerama joins 11 North American theaters in special benefit preview showings of--what else?--”Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace.”

Allen, said project manager Jeff Graves, had a simple mandate: Make it like the days when he was a kid and got wowed by big-screen wonders like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Grand Prix.” Do it with next-century technology. Make it completely accessible to the handicapped, with good seating for wheelchairs and closed-caption viewers available at every seat. And if you can, make it a going business.

Allen, co-founder of the Microsoft Corp., already had a leg into the entertainment industry with his substantial investment in DreamWorks SKG and the 140,000-square-foot Jimi Hendrix Experience Project interactive music museum he’s building in Seattle. Allen is also owner of the Portland Trailblazers and is shepherding the construction of a new football/soccer stadium and exhibition center for the Seattle Seahawks, which he acquired in 1997.

Petition Brought Allen to the Cause

The old Cinerama, located on a shabby street corner in a slowly gentrifying downtown district, had trouble filling its 827 seats in the era of the multiplex and was scheduled to close in 1998 when Allen, browsing at a local video store, was presented with a petition for saving it.

As Graves tells it, Allen signed the petition, went home and thought about it for two weeks, and announced he was buying it.

Allen figured you could get people packed into an 800-plus-seat theater if you made the experience thrilling enough. Plus, a marketing arrangement through operator General Cinema Theaters Corp. allows blockbusters that bust to move quickly onto smaller General Cinema screens downtown, avoiding the pitfalls of a five-week screening contract and hundreds of empty seats.

Crucial to Allen was maintaining true Cinerama capability. The late-1950s technology, which features a wide-eyed image thrown by three simultaneous projectors, debuted at New York’s Broadway Theater in 1952 with the hurtling, stomach-churning image of a roller coaster ride--from the front seat--in “This Is Cinerama.”

Only seven true Cinerama full-length features were ever made, including “Seven Wonders of the World,” “South Seas Adventure” and “Search for Paradise,” before huge production and screening costs--it takes 12 projectionists to operate the three projectors and seven-channel sound system--led to the technology’s demise.

Los Angeles, embroiled last year in a controversy of its own over plans to close the aging Cinerama Dome before Pacific Theaters announced it would preserve it, never had a true Cinerama screening. The giant curved screen there showed the single-projector, 70-millimeter films that succeeded true Cinerama, films like “2001” and “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”

Planning a Once-a-Year Festival

Only two theaters in the world are presently capable of presenting the original, three-panel Cinerama films, one in Dayton, Ohio, the other a museum in Bradford, England. Allen’s designers fashioned a one-of-a-kind double-screen format, in which the 68-foot-wide, 6-foot-deep curved screen used for first-run films can be rolled back to reveal the classic 90-foot-long, 18-foot-deep curve of a Cinerama screen. The Cinerama screen, fashioned out of 2,000 independently angled louvered strips to minimize reflection, comes with an independent sound system. Allen plans to acquire some aging Cinerama projectors from Lima, Peru, and begin showing original Cinerama films at once-a-year festivals.

For first-run films, Allen called in British acoustical consultant Neil Grant, who designed an auditorium with the acoustics of a symphony hall, featuring computer-designed sound baffles, a revolutionary sound-wave-shaped ceiling and air diffusers.

The original seats were refurbished in red mohair, and the lobby was designed to look like the state-of-the-art movie theater of 1963. Portland-based BOORA Architects Inc. found wallpaper from a 1960s-era wallpaper book, combined it with blue-and-turquoise mosaic wall tile and added a line of silver light fixtures shaped like miniature spaceships. Popcorn and cold drinks will be served in containers straight from the ‘60s.