Cinerama Returns to Its Own Home Dome

The best place to sit for full immersion in “This Is Cinerama,” which opens today at the ArcLight Cinema’s Cinerama Dome, is in the middle of the auditorium. But be warned: It’s best not to munch too much popcorn or Milk Duds during the screening of the wide-screen film because you may get a bit queasy.

The wide-screen process makes you feel like you’re being pulled into the picture--whether you’re riding on a roller coaster or a Ferris wheel or riding the rapids in a rubber raft or flying through the majestic canyons in Utah.

“This Is Cinerama” changed the face of how movies could be presented when it premiered in 1952. For its 50th anniversary, “This Is Cinerama” has been completely restored. It marks the first time a Cinerama film has been shown in its true format on the Cinerama Dome’s curved screen, despite the fact that the theater was constructed in 1963 for that specific purpose.

What makes Cinerama different from such wide-screen formats as Imax, says John Sittig, director of Cinerama Inc., is “not what you see in front of you but what you see on the sides.”

“Imax, although it is razor-sharp and is really realistic, is basically a square picture. It looks like you are just watching a very big, brilliant, sharp movie. Whereas with Cinerama, you actually get the feeling of riding the roller coaster or running the rapids.”

Cinerama uses a three-strip format that is screened on three 35- millimeter projectors. The middle projector screens the center frame; the right projector supplies the image on screen left; and the left projector screens the image on screen right.

Fred Waller, a special effects technician who worked at Paramount Studios in Astoria, N.Y., created Cinerama.

“During World War II,” says Sittig, “he invented something called the Waller Gunnery Trainer. They had a Cinerama-type screen, a big curved screen, and he ran five pieces of 35-millimeter film projected on the screen. They brought in soldiers to practice shooting down enemy planes. They actually installed 70 of these around the country.”

After the war, movies began to take a hit at the box office: A little something called television was keeping people at home. Something new and innovative had to bring audiences back to the movies. So Waller adapted his gunnery trainer for features.

“Cinerama was the first modern-day wide-screen process. It opened a full year ahead of ‘The Robe,’ which was the first CinemaScope picture,” says Sittig.

“This Is Cinerama,” hosted by journalist and Timex spokesman Lowell Thomas, was an instant hit when it opened at one theater in New York in September 1952. In Los Angeles, it played 122 weeks at the Warner Cinerama Theater at Hollywood and Cahuenga boulevards.

As effective as Cinerama is, the one thing you’ll notice is the lines on the screen demarcating the three projectors.

When two narrative features, “How the West Was Won” and “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” were made in the early 1960s, directors of cinematography would try to camouflage the lines by having trees and other objects situated where the lines were.

Besides “This Is Cinerama” and the two narrative features, four Cinerama travelogue features were made before the process was abandoned.

13 Miles of Film

“At its height, Cinerama only had 290 theaters worldwide that could show the picture,” says Sittig. The process of taking the three- strip negative and turning it into a single 35-millimeter for general release was expensive, and the quality wasn’t as sharp as a regular 35-millimeter film,” says Sittig.

“A release print of Cinerama is about 13 miles of film, whereas a release print on a two-hour 35-millimeter feature is about two miles, so you can imagine the cost of filming something,” says Sittig.

“You could not do close-ups in Cinerama because you didn’t want to have somebody’s face in more than one of the three images. And it was extremely difficult to do any kind of process shots for special effects.”

Pacific Theatres, which owns ArcLight Cinemas, bought Cinerama Inc. in 1962. Sittig has been trying to get Pacific to restore “This Is Cinerama” for several years.

When Pacific launched the Arc- Light Cinema company a few years ago, Sittig approached it again.

“One of the mission statements of ArcLight was to give the public the transformative powers of movies, and Cinerama certainly is the definition of the transformative powers of the movies.”

Three vintage Cinerama projectors were found in storage backstage at a Cinerama theater in Hawaii. Sittig sent them off to Dayton, Ohio, to John Harvey, a former Cinerama projectionist who over the years has collected Cinerama items and even has built an in-house Cinerama screen. “He reworked the projectors and brought them back to standards,” Sittig says.

It was a bit more difficult to bring the film up to standards. The negative was in very bad shape. “Because they had made so few prints, every print of ‘This Is Cin- erama’ was made off the original negative, so there was a lot of wear and tear,” he says.

Crest National Labs ran hundreds of color tests on the negative, adding color and taking it away. Crest also had to correct shrinkage of the negative.

Chase Productions restored the audio tracks. The original tracks were unplayable, the restored soundtrack contains 15 of the 20 tracks from the release prints.

“This Is Cinerama” is scheduled to play one week at the Cinerama Dome. Sometime in the future, the theater plans to screen the newly restored “How the West Was Won” and then hold a Cinerama weekend each month featuring the two films.

Sittig would love to restore the four Cinerama travelogues, especially the 1955 hit, “Cinerama Holiday.”

“We are a business, and that decision probably is not going to be made until we see what the response is to ‘This Is Cinerama.’ If we recoup, then there is no reason we can’t do another one.”