Audio Video News

Like the 1959 Cadillac convertible, Cinerama was one of the peak expressions of 1950s excess. With three synchronized projectors casting overlapping images on a curved screen 96 feet wide, the format was the era's ultimate form of cinematic entertainment and the precursor to today's IMAX.

Budgetary constraints on film production and theater construction limited the number of films and the number of theaters that could be devoted to the format, which enjoyed its heyday for about a decade, until the early 1960s. For the past 35 years, movie fans who wanted to see a Cinerama film as it was meant to be seen could do so only in the homes of a handful of diehard enthusiasts, or in a museum in Bradford, England. The format was as near extinction as it could be.

Billionaire Paul Allen and his Vulcan Northwest holding company are working to change that. The Microsoft co-founder is funding the revival of downtown Seattle's Cinerama theater, with the aid of a team of technical specialists and Cinerama enthusiasts. In conjunction with the Seattle Film Festival, the theater recently celebrated its overhaul by showing How the West Was Won, perhaps the greatest of the Cinerama epics. "People have not seen a Cinerama movie inside a Cinerama theater for some 35 years," project manager Jeff Graves told Reuters reporters. "It's just a great opportunity to show this fantastic format."

Cinerama was invented by Fred Waller for the 1939 World's Fair. Waller's system used a domed screen and 11 projectors, similar to today's IMAX. The number of projectors was reduced to five by US military technologists during World War II, who used the system to train turret gunners. The projectors later were reduced to three, and Waller devised a seven-channel sound system.

Shooting a film in Cinerama was so expensive—the camera weighed half a ton—that only seven films were ever made in the format. The first Cinerama movie debuted in 1952, and was the forerunner of all big-screen films to follow. Seattle Film Festival director Daryl Macdonald described the Cinerama undertaking as "probably the most exciting thing we've ever been able to be involved in in our 26 years."