Winning the ‘West’ in Cinerama format

The Oscar-winning western “How the West Was Won” hasn’t been shown to the general public here in its original three-strip Cinerama projection in 38 years. So the fact that the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood is offering cineastes a chance to see the 1963 epic in its original format is a rare treat. The Dome kicks off its two-week engagement of the newly restored Cinerama version Friday. “How the West Was Won” starred a who’s who of Hollywood at the time, including Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Robert Preston, Debbie Reynolds, Carroll Baker, George Peppard and Karl Malden. It was directed by John Ford, George Marshall and Henry Hathaway.

The Cinerama Dome is one of the handful of theaters left in the world that can screen a Cinerama picture, which requires three separate 35-millimeter projectors that create a multi-paneled image on the 86-by-31-foot screen. What makes Cinerama a unique wide-screen format is the curved screen, which allows audiences to have a peripheral view of the action.

Restoration of “How the West Was Won” took about a year, says Dick May, vice president of film preservation at Warner Bros. Technical Operations. Crest Labs, which previously had restored the travelogue “This Is Cinerama,” started by printing one reel of “West” to check its condition. “Very happily, the negative was in virtually perfect condition,” says May, because it had been properly preserved in cold storage. But the restoration was still a major undertaking because the three negatives had to be rearranged for modern lab techniques, he notes.

Chace Productions in Burbank then made a new soundtrack from the original separate magnetic 35-millimeter rolls.

Last December, the completed “West” was unveiled at the Dome at the annual holiday screening of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Hollywood section. “We had around 500 people on a Saturday morning and that was the first time we really saw it in a theater with first-class sound,” May says. “We were really, really pleased.”

-- Susan King