Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterThe Cinerama Drama
Oct 1, 2001 12:00 PM, By Jon Truckenmiller
Typically, film restoration involves the research, inspection, and repair of all existing archival elements, the creation of new laboratory material, and the screening of a new answer print. But what happens when the film format has not been used for 30 years? What legacy equipment exists worldwide to handle such material? What happens when no local projection screening facility is capable of even displaying that format?
These were some of the challenges facing Hollywood-based restoration facility Crest National when the Pacific Theater chain approached the company last year to order new print material for the upcoming re-release, This is Cinerama. The film will debut at Pacific's newly renovated Cinerama Dome Theater in Hollywood next year to mark the 50th anniversary of the Cinerama format. With the renovation, Pacific decided to revive a form of large-format exhibition that, for a brief time decades ago, seemed to revolutionize the motion-picture industry. Jon Truckenmiller, Crest's senior VP of engineering, offers Millimeter readers an in-depth history lesson about the Cinerama format, and an exclusive, first-person look at his company's decision to engineer and build a new Cinerama screening room to meet the needs of the Pacific job and future Cinerama releases.
Birth of a Format
 An in-your-face roller-coaster ride at Rockaways Playland opens the restored version of This is Cinerama, which will debut at the renovated Cinerama Dome Theater in Hollywood on the upcoming 50th anniversary of Cinerama. |
In 1937, Fred Waller, an entrepreneurial inventor, engineer, and former Paramount special effects cameraman, was approached by leading New York architect Ralph Walker to create a film system for the 1939 New York World's Fair Theme Pavilion. The exhibit, the giant Parisphere, was considered an ideal concave spherical screen surface for film projection. Waller proposed using 11 multiple cameras and 11 projectors to cover the vast surface. The complexity of the system was immense; imagine using an 11-eyed camera and then editing 11 films simultaneously, not to mention operating 11 projectors with carbon arc lamps and synchronizing the whole system.
World War II intervened, however, and the project was shelved while Waller's attention shifted. Later, though, he simplified the plan and founded the Vitarama Company with one goal in mind.
Vitarama started as a system that used five interlocked cameras and projectors. It first debuted as a top-secret gun-training platform for the military. From 1941-44, in the U.S. and the U.K., more than 75 domed, 40-foot Waller Flexible Gunnery Training Simulators were built. These facilities, operating day and night, helped train thousands of Allied soldiers. Aerial film footage of target aircraft was projected using the system, while soldiers used four electronic turret guns to practice combat scenarios. Military historians credit the system with saving thousands of lives and millions of dollars in planes, fuel, and ammunition. Veterans who trained on it compare Vitarama to “actually being there,” similar to today's virtual-reality experiences.
At the end of the war, TV began to challenge the motion picture industry. Studios and exhibitors (often the same entity in those days) felt the challenge of the magic box sweeping the nation. Indeed, by 1952, box office numbers were down considerably from a few years earlier. The film industry searched for a method to lure audiences back into theaters.
 A model design of the Crest Cinerama screening room. |
Waller felt his military system's ability to display superior image quality — almost pulling audiences directly into the picture — could solve the problem. He proposed a system based on the spherical shape of the human eye, with a field of view of 146 degrees by 55 degrees. To cover this wide view, his multiple-camera coverage required three 35mm cameras and a film frame taller than the conventional four-perforation format. He therefore enlarged the height of the frame to six perforations, and to smooth the flicker from such a large display, he changed to a film speed of 26fps. The image area would now be more than 150% larger than any film audiences of that era had ever seen.
 The facility's new projection booth, configured for a smaller room than a traditional Cinerama theater. |
The system's camera was certainly a monster, though, weighing more than 200 pounds. It contained three independent camera movements with magazines, attached to a common motor and mount, shooting through a matched set of Kodak 27mm f/2.6 lens set at 48-degree angles to each other. A large common shutter was incorporated, spinning in front of the lens assembly.
The first production and projection facilities were constructed on a large indoor tennis court at Oyster Bay, Long Island. The custom projectors were modified with six-perforation apertures and intermittents. The cog-drive pulleys were enlarged to accommodate the higher film speed. A selsyn motor drive system was built to interlock the system, and the 146-degree deeply curved screen was created.
Thus, Cinerama was born.
Audio, of course, needed to fit the quality of the image, so audio pioneer Hazard Reeves was enlisted to join the fledgling organization, giving birth to CineramaSound. To match the scope of the image, Reeves' team decided to surround viewers with five discrete channels of full fidelity magnetic audio from behind the screen and an additional two dedicated tracks on the sides. An additional rear speaker was made available at show time, which could be mixed into the action for special effects. In other words, CineramaSound offered 7.1 channels way back in 1950!
On Sept. 30, 1952, This is Cinerama premiered at the Broadway Theater in New York. That day, filmgoers saw and heard Cinerama partner Lowell Thomas, projected via a conventional, black and white, 1.37:1 image, uttering his now famous line, “Ladies and gentleman, this is Cinerama.” After Thomas spoke, the audience was suddenly propelled from a black screen down a wild roller coaster at Rockaways Playland.
The reaction affirmed Waller's suspicions: Film audiences wanted to experience the illusion of reality, both in terms of picture and sound. This is Cinerama went on to become a box-office champion that year, and the format earned an Academy Award in 1954.
Screening 50 Years Later
 An example of the Waller Flexible Gunnery Training Simulator gun-training platform, utilizing the large-format projection technology that would later serve as Cinerama's foundation. |
Planning for Crest National's Cinerama Screening Facility began when I met Gunther Jung, a longtime employee of the original Cinerama Corporation and a consultant to Pacific Theaters, the current owner of the Cinerama trademark. Gunther was excited about bringing This is Cinerama back for a premiere at the Cinerama Dome Theater in 2002 to mark the format's 50th anniversary. He introduced me to historian Dave Strohmaier, who has been studying and documenting the format for decades. Gunther and Dave were instrumental in providing us with background and reference material as we set about designing Crest's Cinerama room — the first built in several decades.
A Cinerama theater, in principle, is designed as a circle. Ours could be no larger than 24 feet in diameter, with a height of 13 feet, due to space constraints in the warehouse available for the project. We laid out a circle on the floor, and built 146 degrees' worth of screen for the front of the room.
 Crest's Cinerama screen under construction. |
Original Cinerama screens were made from 1,100 long, perforated, vertical reflective slats hung from a curved track, Venetian-blind style. The louver construction of those screens eliminated cross-light reflections from one side to another on the overly large, 75×26-foot, highly reflective surface. For simplicity, however, we built ours out of quarter-inch, bendable gypsum board on studs. We carefully sanded the surface smooth, and after researching the correct formula, we mixed up a batch of C01 screen paint (a neutral, reflective paint) and coated the screen surface with it.
 Jon Truckenmiller tests the lens for one of Crest's Cinerama projectors. |
Cinerama theaters also had three separate projection booths, always nicknamed Abel, Baker, and Charlie. All documented references I could find to the film elements and camera or projection equipment used this naming convention. Baker booth housed the audio playback and was the master control point for projection and audio engineering operations. Because of the size of the system at Crest, a common booth was marked off with centerlines for each projector intersecting the 24-foot circle and center panels.
Pacific then sent us three original Cinerama projectors, originally used at the Hollywood Warner Theater. We carefully placed them into the booths. Because the equipment had not been used for years, we next had to clean and repair the projectors thoroughly.
The only available documentation for the system control, however, consisted of some simple, hand-sketched pencil drawings. When our projectors were initially removed from service, though, all wiring had been clipped off, so we found a jumble of purple, yellow, pink, black, and white wires hanging there because no one had thought that they would ever need to be reinstalled.
One look into the side-mounted projector control box, with its large power contactors and 100W power resistors to dampen starting torque, convinced me to apply modern electronics to the projection drive system. Therefore, our system is built around an industry standard variable frequency drive (VFD), allowing for easily programmed speed changes among 24-, 25-, and 26fps. It also permits gentle film-flow control through the projector. This control system was incorporated to let us run single panels or multiple panels for color-timing purposes.
After inspecting the lamp houses we were given, it became clear that they would be unsatisfactory for our purposes; 4,000W blackened bulbs, with each reflector a different color, just would not work. Color timing in our mini Cinerama theater would require carefully matched reflectors, and for our screen size, 1,000W lamps for even, calibrated, and balanced screen illumination.
That need posed the serious challenge of finding three matched lenses in the collection of projection equipment available from Pacific Theaters. A lengthy search eventually located three vintage lenses that could do the job because manufacturing new ones was cost prohibitive.
Audio also presented challenges. Our team had to slowly restore or rebuild, among other things, the original seven-channel Brusch head assembly, the combination of unmatched audio preamplifiers, the frozen Stencil Hoffman deck transport bearings, broken dash pot wow and flutter dampers, and the 34-inch take-up and supply reel plates, plus the one-sixth horsepower selsyn drive motor.
On the laboratory side, changes were also required. Modern 35mm film printers use frame count cueing that is derived from bi-phase tachometers, all based on the 3-, 4-, or 8-perf formats found in today's productions. We therefore had to incorporate new counting modifications. Film handling issues were addressed in gang synchronizers for the three image elements and one magnetic track, again dictated by the six-perforation issue.
Finally, we discovered a little-known fact — the film's original Lowell Thomas introductory footage, shot on black and white in the conventional 4-perf format, was actually projected from a fourth projector located in the Baker booth. For convenience in future screenings, we decided to include this footage in the Baker print itself. In other words, we have taken an original Cinerama, 6-perf camera body and modified it to fit an Acme optical printer for the conversion of 4-perf film to 6-perf.
First Light
At last, I recently got to sit in our finished theater and recall amazing childhood memories of having living Cinerama images surround me. The picture illuminates the screen from floor to ceiling, and wraps around into my peripheral vision… just like the old days. The seams where the panels join are hardly noticeable.
Crest is proud to have been a part of history, helping to take film restoration a step further through Cinerama's rebirth. Now, this unique film process that helped change the face of motion pictures is available to new generations so that they can discover firsthand how Waller's format gave birth to the phenomenon known as wide-screen cinematography.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
