Cinerama Hollywood

BradE41 on November 9, 2010 at 5:00 pm

The Bullitt screening should be great. It is one of my favorite McQueen films. The Chinese is pretty much dead now. But they are getting Skyline now, which was supposed to be at Arclight. Guess they did a trade off; Due Date was supposed to be at the Chinese but ended up at Arclight because of AFI.

Arclight has some terrific films coming in Nov and Dec.

JoelWeide on October 20, 2010 at 9:12 pm

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NothingDiesWithBlueSkies on October 13, 2010 at 5:59 pm

Here’s a night time photo I took in 2009:
Cinerama Dome at night- Nothing Dies With Blue Skies.com

RussM on September 14, 2010 at 11:26 am

For those who did not attend the showing of Windjammer on Sept. 5th, some very interesting tidbits of news were revealed by Mr. Sittig. 1) There are tentative plans to have some special events in 2012 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Cinerama. 2) One of the Cinerama cameras is currently being refurbished by a camera expert, and there is the possibility that there may be some fresh footage to show in 2012.

Coate on September 11, 2010 at 9:23 pm

Rick Mitchell’s reply:

Film Effects of Hollywood was Linwood Dunn’s company. Prints of the 70mm version still exist but are faded. However, the 65mm internegative is the source of a digital version of THIS IS CINERAMA that David Strohmaier is currently working on. Like WINDJAMMER, it will ultimately be released on DVD in Dave’s patented “Smilebox” format, which simulates the effect of seeing these films on a deep curved screen.

Coate on September 8, 2010 at 12:48 pm

Film historian Rick Mitchell sent me and some of his friends this write-up about the Dome’s recent screening of WINDJAMMER. Rick has given me permission to post it here for you to read.

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WINDJAMMER: THE VOYAGE OF THE CHRISTIAN RADICH sailed across the screen of the Cinerama Dome Sunday morning, Sept. 5, 52 years and some months after it first sailed across the screen of the reasonably close by Chinese Theater, then from three synchronized panels of 35mm film, this time digitally from a 35mm anamorphic print combining all three panels. It had been filmed in CineMiracle, a rival process to Cinerama developed by National Theaters, the only film in the process, which was later bought out by Cinerama. The only real difference between the two processes was that the side CineMiracle cameras were aimed at mirrors, which minimized some of the problems with Cinerama. Projection was also done via mirrors and the projectors could be installed in one booth, as opposed to the three needed for Cinerama. (I won’t go further into technical details, which can best be found at widescreenmuseum.com.) Because of the similarities in the processes, most screenings of WINDJAMMER were held in Cinerama theaters.

WINDJAMMER was produced by Louis De Rochemont whom had been a producer for THE MARCH OF TIMES newsreels of the Thirties, which occasionally dramatized events or aspects of events that had not been recorded by motion picture cameras. In the mid-Forties he transformed this approach into a series of what came to be known as semi-documentaries, dramatizations of real life, usually crime stories, such as THE HOUSE ON 92ND STREET (1945), 13 RUE MADELEINE (1946), and WALK EAST ON BEACON (1951). This mixture of documentary and dramatization was apparently a key aspect of his approach to the second Cinerama film CINERAMA HOLIDAY (1955), which contrasted the adventures of an American couple in Europe and an English couple in the United States, and WINDJAMMER, dealing with a round trip voyage of a ship full of Norwegian cadets to the Caribbean and back, is clearly an expansion of that idea.

The film is in many ways a relic of its time and an interesting reminder of a peaceful calmer period, despite an interlude with the United States Navy, which does include a POV of a submarine diving and surfacing, which David Lean reportedly called the greatest shot he’d ever seen. THIS IS CINERAMA had of course set the pattern for these films and given the unavailability of others, it’s difficult to really put WINDJAMMER in perspective. TIC was essentially an experiment, to a large extent cobbled together. WINDJAMMER is more structured and many of the events depicted in the film are obviously preplanned, some clearly scripted, albeit likely the night before. The obviousness of these may be a problem for those who’ve grown up with the supposedly realistic “cinema verite” documentaries introduced in the Sixties, or worse, today’s reality tv. As in TIC, there are “human interest” bits that often seem a bit hokey today, such as when the ship’s mascot goes ashore on its own and has to be tracked down. And the cadet who is also a piano student who hopes to get a letter of commendation from Arthur Fiedler and ends up playing with him.

What really excites is the photography of the ship and the onboard activities of the cadets. Given the size and weight of the camera, it’s amazing the shots the crew, which included Gordon Willis, obtained, including shots from up in the rigging. And although they built sets for a few shots, it’s amazing the shots they did get not only inside the Christian Radich, but also inside the US submarine and a battleship. Interestingly, unlike with Cinerama as late as its last two films, composition and staging was not based around hiding the dividing lines but on the best composition for the shot. Like Cinerama, the exclusive use of 27mm lenses sometimes leads to awkward results when subjects get too close to the camera. But at other times, the images on a big wide screen have an impact almost never seen in contemporary films with their overuse of tight long lens closeups. And as the film is not sliced and diced, one is allowed time to really soak in the images. This is particularly noticeable in several songs, with the singers spread across the screen, all played out in a single shot and you don’t miss not having a cut within it. The only exception to this approach was a sequence celebrating New York City done by a famous cameraman of the time, Weegee. These were quick cuts done with an image in each panel as in a triptych in the manner that would become briefly popular after a version of the technique was later used in the World’s Fair film A PLACE TO STAND (1967).

WINDJAMMER may actually have been the most popular of the films shot in three panel processes, getting international bookings as late as 1968. And, aside from the dramatic Cinerama films, it was the one most likely to have a life beyond roadshow engagements. In response to requests for it, Pacific Theaters, which got the rights to the film when it bought Cinerama, Inc., considered a trial revival in the early Seventies, it might have been the first three panel film to play the Cinerama Dome, but there were technical complications. Instead, they booked a run using only the center panel at the Dome and the audience nearly rioted. However, there was interest in a 35mm anamorphic release in Europe and so Linwood Dunn, ASC generated an internegative for this by rear projecting a CineMiracle print using three Cinerama projectors. (Dunn had done the 65mm internegative of THIS IS CINERAMA; there is some debate about the chronology of this vs. WINDJAMMER, also the method he used. He told me personally that he had he had used rear projection for the TIC conversation but other sources claim he did that on an optical printer. However, prints were used in that instance as well.) A badly faded print from this internegative in the archives of the Swedish Film Institute became the source of this “reconstruction” supervised by David “Cinerama” Strohmaier.

The print was telecined and color corrected and cleaned up as much as possible by Dave and Greg Kimble. The seven track stereo master had been preserved in the late Nineties and had to be slowed down and pitch corrected to properly sync with the picture, which had been shot at Cinerama’s 26 fps but had been transferred at 24 fps. (This has been done for the tracks used for contemporary screenings of TIC.) They were able to get the 35mm prologue, which the Swedish Institute print didn’t have, from a collector, and the venerable Martin Hart of widescreenmuseum.com reconstructed credits that were missing. (This is a simplified condensation of a process that took an amazing six months!) The goal at this point is to ultimately release the film on Blu-Ray DVD in Dave and Greg’s patented “Smilebox” format, which recreates the effect of seeing these films on a deep curved screen, with a 5.1 stereo track, but…

The Dome presentation used an HD version which has also been successfully shown in Oslo and Copenhagen. A 2K projector was used, and given the source material, looked extremely good on the Dome’s huge screen. Jeanne and George Roper Performing Arts Center attended, including many from out-of-town and out-of-the US, quite a turnout for a screening advertised entirely by word-of-mouth! A digital cinema version is being made available for revival houses and other interested venues, meaning, after 52 years WINDJAMMER may finally sail across a screen in my hometown of Lexington, KY!

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JSittig1 on August 24, 2010 at 12:49 pm

We will be showing the newt remastered high definition digital presentation of WINDJAMMER at the Dome on Sunday September 5, at 11:30am. The majority of the content came from a rare 35mm anamorphic
print found at the Swedish Film Institute. Dave Strohmaier and I will also do a short audio-visual presentation on the remastering process, and possibly newsreel footage from the World Premiere at the Chinese Theatre in 1958. Tickets will be on sale at arclight website in the next few days.

RussM on July 29, 2010 at 6:20 am

About this time last year, John Sittig gave us advanced notice of the Cinerama showings that were planned for early September. Is anything in the works for this year ? Any chance that they will show the new digital restoration of the Cinemiracle film, “Windjammer” ?

Chris Utley on July 19, 2010 at 2:38 pm

Word has it that the AC in The Dome malfunctioned at the Friday 7/16 8:15 show of “Inception”…with director Christopher Nolan present! They had to cancel the screening.

Can anyone confirm this?

delta on July 15, 2010 at 10:15 am

This is not the original Cinerama logo, there being a subtle difference. The original logo began with the C in CINERAMA sloping downward toward the I, the point being at the top left. The Final A sloped upward, the point being at the top right.

In the opening titles of HTWWW, the original logo is used, but THE END title has the alternative version as used on the Dome marquee. In my research I note that most theatres used the original logo and only a few had the style of the Dome. Interestingly very few people noticed the difference and often, the advertising publicity contained both versions!

CSWalczak on June 17, 2010 at 1:23 pm

That is what we were told during the introduction to HTWWW during the showings during the Cinerama revival in the 1990s in Dayton. If memory serves, we were told that there were basically four noticeable 70mm sequences so we could look for them and note the difference in color intensity and graininess: 1) the whitewater sequence when the Prescott raft takes the wrong fork in the river; 2) two short segments during the Civil War section (which were outtakes from “Raintree County” which was filmed in 70mm), and 3) a brief segment from “The Alamo” during one of Spencer Tracy’s narrative sequences. There may have been a few others, but the film is clearly over 95% three-lens, and although the print that was shown was that owned by John Harvey, pieced carefully together from several other prints, there’s no question that it was a Techinicolor IB print.

The Harvey print of “This is Cinerama,” also pieced together from other prints, did seem to have some Eastman-printed stock in it, notably a brief center-panel portion with German subtitling that was pinkish, though the vast majority was clearly a Technicolor IB print. It would not surprise me if the first print runs of “This is Cinerama” were IB prints, and that later print runs and subtitled prints used Eastman stock.

GFeret on June 17, 2010 at 9:46 am

ok, but i’m a little surprised re. HTWWW in IB 3-strip, since so much of it was lensed 70mm and then optically divided

as for this’s cinerama i’d seen a faded eastman panel in the past but that film had re-releases back then