The co-founder of Microsoft, Seattle billionaire Paul Allen, is investing in the revival of the legendary movie format, Cinerama. Allen has enlisted a team of experts to refit his Cinerama picture house to accommodate the spectacular ultra-wide format it was built to show.
Cinerama was created before the war, when it was used by the US military to train aircraft turret gunners, and reached the height of its popularity in the 1950s and 60s, when seven films, including the epic How the West Was Won, were made especially for the format.
Cinerama uses a 96-foot-long curved screen, 50% bigger than screens used today. Three giant projectors cast three images side-by-side. Recreating the means to screen Cinerama wasn't easy. "We took every screw out, every bolt out, repainted - we basically have brand-new projectors, brand-new from 1952," says Jeff Graves, Cinerama project manager. Prints for the Seattle project were pieced together from scraps by John Harvey, a 63-year-old enthusiast who kept Cinerama alive in the US by screening movies in Ohio home.
"People have not seen a Cinerama movie inside a Cinerama theater for some 35 years," says Jeff Graves, Cinerama project manager. "It's just a great opportunity to show this fantastic format." Larry Smith, president of the Cinerama Preservation Society, argues that his beloved format presaged IMAX and the blockbuster. "When you're going down a canal in Venice (in a Cinerama film), you feel like you can reach out and touch the walls. In How the West Was Won, with the horses galloping and kicking up dust, you want to cough," says Smith. "It's a virtual reality system."
Those involved in the project hope to persuade Hollywood to take up the Cinerama cause, Graves said, so later generations accustomed to (comparatively) tiny screens can experience the eye-goggling marvel that is Cinerama.
