Cinerama Hollywood
6360 Sunset Boulevard,
Los Angeles,
CA
90028
6360 Sunset Boulevard,
Los Angeles,
CA
90028
142 people
favorited this theater
Showing 551 - 575 of 1,416 comments
Saw Prometheus under the dome at the midnight show. Amazing presentation. Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting Alien score playing before the movie inside the cavernous auditorium really set the mood. A+
Thanks, Zubi… great insight!
Your memory is not distorted 2001, My Fair Lady, West Side Story etc. were spectacular in the roadshow versions. Film still is the superior image especially on large screens and wide gauge. The cost of film especially for release prints is the problem.
and … and ?? how did ‘Ben Hur’ look on the Dome screen?
Monday evening Ben Hur added in the Dome for all those that couldn’t get away on Mother’s Day.
You are referring to the old Warner Pacific on Hollywood blvd. At one time this theater was used to run reserve seat Cinerama films but the Cinerama screen was replaced with a smaller flatter screen (not sure when). In the 70’s I attended a 70mm festival in New York at the Strand Theater http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/2975. This was also at one time a Cinerama Theater. I marveled at the huge (90+ feet) screen and talked at length to the projectionist. His comment was' “you should have seen the screen before we cut it down in size.” So most of the deep dish screens that were used for Cinerama and Todd-AO were replaced with more conventional sized and shaped screens in the late 60’s early 70’s.
bigjoe59: See the Pacific’s entry here on CT here. It has been used as a church and for some industry events, but it needs serious repair and renovations.
Hello-
i haven’t been out to L.A. since the spring of 2004 at which time the Pacific up on Hollywood Blvd. was still boarded up and unused. now the last time i was out when it was still a first run venue abet a tri-plexed? one didn’t the downstairs main auditorium have a deeply curved screen? if i am not mistaken the Pacific along with the Cinerama Dome was used for reserved seat runs of Cinerama films both 3-strip and single lens 70mm ones. or is it possible they removed the curved screen when the Pacific was decommissioned as a movie theater.
I agree, EdSolero; add to that the fact that recitification, in the view of many, did not help all that much, which may be why it was not used on 70mm Cinerama films shot in Super Panavision 70 or Technirama 70. I remember seeing “Mad World” at the Palace in Cleveland on its deeply curved Cinerama screen and there was still some splaying at the extreme edges. ‘Bulge" looked better at the Great Northern, but the screen had a shallower curve.
I can’t recall where I read it years ago, but Stanley Kramer was not totally happy with the way the initial presentations of “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” looked at some of the roadshow venues as screen sizes, throw, and other factors caused varying amounts of distortion even with the rectified print.
as a matter of archival purposes, I think it would behove studios to encode the film as it originally mixed with the LE and RE channels on the DCP harddrive edition. DCI (digital cinema initiative) specs have the extra channels in place already, but no one has implemented them yet… With theaters adding more and more speakers/channels into the fray (Barco 11.1 Auro, Dolby Atmos, 7.1, etc), the non-use of the LE and RE seems like a glaring omission and needs to be rectified.
There are a few curved screens left on the planet. In70mm.com lists a few of the active theaters showing wide format films many of them have curved screens. http://in70mm.com/now_showing/index.htm
That’s along the line I was thinking, CSWalczak. I just wonder, with movies now being stored as digital files, rectification might be something that could be virtually replicated. Of course, there are probably a very select number of screens in the world that would require such work to be done – no matter how easily completed the manipulation of data would be. Apart from the three extant Cinerama facilities, are there any deeply curved screens left on the planet?
That is a problem that needs to be corrected as without the LE and RE channels there are two distinct holes in the sound field. This is only a problem in venues like the Dome where there is a Ultra large screen. The movies that the sound was mixed to end up with five screen channels should be able to be played back in the format they were meant to shown in. It is unfortunate that the sound mix that was used for so many big films has been remixed to eliminate the Left extra and Right Extra channels.
so I gather since DCP does not encode the left center and right center channels of sound (typical in the standard pre-1977 70mm configurement), Ben Hur’s DCP soundmix mirrors what’s on the bluray – three front channel + stereo surround
I could be wrong, but I doubt that any prints of “Ben-Hur” were given the rectification treatment for curved screen presentation based on Martin Hart’s information on the Wide Screen Cinema Museum site. My impression is that the only films for which specially rectified prints were ever produced that were those shot in Ultra Panavision 70 from 1963 on that were specifically intended for initial roadshow presentation “in Cinerama”. This was not the case with “Ben-Hur” which came out in 1959.
This would appear to limit the list of films for which rectified prints were made to “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” “Khartoum,” “The Hallelujah Trail,” and “Battle of the Bulge.” It does not appear that just because a film was originally lensed in Ultra Pan 70/Camera 65 that recitified prints were automatically made. I suppose that a rectified print of “Ben-Hur” could still be made, but I doubt that anyone would go to the bother and expense.
Yes, Ed the image was such that it would project onto a deep curved screen. A special projection lens was needed for flat screens.
Todd-AO made special prints to correct for screen curve for keystone and other distortion caused by the angle of projection.
So, Ultra-Panavision, meaning a rectified image for the curvature of the screen?
I was projectionist back when Ben-Hur was first released. After the roadshow ended, the theater I work at ran the film on 35mm. The wide image of Camera65 was letterboxed into the 2.35 frame so no picture information was lost. Sounds like the 4K digital is doing the same thing.
BEN HUR, Doctor ZHIVAGO and GWTW are all in 4K
oh, so they did what Rialto did with the recent rerelease of ‘Lola Montes’ and place the wider aspect ratio image inside a scope 2.35 framing. Isn’t the movie on a DCP hard drive? Is it 2K or 4K?
Zubi, I just ran a little of BEN HUR. Warners has done an excellent job in restoring the original Camera 65 (ultra-Panavision) image. The TI chip has information edge to edge, but there are black bars at the top and bottom of the regular “scope” image to give it more width. You will see a little more information than you saw at the Dome in 70mm as that was a spherical print with 220: x 1 aspect ratio. John
r1_83 In the Cinerama Dome were use five JBL 4632 three-way ScreenArray speakers for L-XL-C-XR-R behind the screen plus 6 JBL dual 4642A subwoofers. In the auditorium, we have 48, JBL 4630 surrounds We use QSC amplifiers, Dolby CP650 processor for standard presentations and a modified CP200 for magnetic 7 channel playback for Cinerama. We can also play 35mm and 70mm DTS, and SDDS 8 channel. projection on Kinoton EP75 for 35/70mm, 3-Century Cinerama projectors and 2 Christie Solaria 4230, 4K digital projectors
Mr Sittig – Can you comment on the sound system at the dome? I visited the Dome on vacation last year and was blown away. Curious to know what you have behind that enormous screen :–)
jsittig: I see Ben-Hur does play a couple of other times throughout the weekend at Arclight but it’s only at the Dome for the one showing(Sun, May 13). Sorry, just not the same experience on the other screens. This is the type of film that should get at least a one-week run at the Dome, like The Godfather did a few years back.
Sadly, that is something that most likely will never happen again, at least not at the Dome.