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"in70mm.com" |
"THIS IS CINERAMA!", part 1 |
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at in70mm.com The 70mm Newsletter |
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| Written by: Greg Kimble | Date: 06.10.2002 | |
"THIS IS CINERAMA!"
- These three words changed movies forever, just as Al Jolsen's ad libbed,
"You ain't heard nothing yet" had done in 1927.
It was September 30, 1952 at the Broadway Theater in Manhattan where a
world-famous adventurer, a media pioneer, and a first-time producer sat
nervously with a quietly confident inventor as the curtain rose on an
entirely new medium that would revolutionize motion picture production and
exhibition - just when the industry needed it most. |
Further
in 70mm reading: Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Home Cinerama Films Internet link: |
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As the
astonished first night audience tore the theater apart with cheers, the
inventor sat quietly, the slightest of smiles on his lips. "What are
you, a man or a fish?" asked an aghast friend. "How can you just
sit there?" "Oh," the inventor gently replied, "I knew
16 years ago it would be like this." Actual
3-strip frame composite from "This is Cinerama". Click picture
to see enlargement.Fred Waller had indeed labored that long on his dream of a motion picture experience that would recreate the full range of human vision. It used three cameras and three projectors on a curved screen 146° deep. Making an anagram of the letters in "American," he called it "Cinerama". Even in an industry up to its Mitchell magazines in hyperbole, its impact was staggering. Running only 13 weeks in one theater in New York, "This Is Cinerama" was the highest grossing film of 1952. Several more travelogues would follow, climaxed by two dramatic films co-produced with MGM in 1962. Cinerama, which had been rejected by all the majors as too expensive - however impressive it was - now created a landrush. When they saw its drawing power, every studio scrambled to come up with a copycat process. The 1.33 aspect ratio was dead and the widescreen era was on. |
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 Actual
3-strip frame composite from "This is Cinerama". Click picture
to see enlargement.Cinerama's 3-panel glory days lasted only 11 years, but it has never been forgotten by anyone who saw it. Completely lost for 40 years, now on its 50th anniversary, Cinerama is making a comeback. But the roots of this astonishing system begin much earlier than Waller's experiments in the '30's… |
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| In 1787, English
artist Robert Barker was awarded a patent for developing the perspective
techniques to give a continuous painting the appearance of all-around
vision. His creation was the Cyclorama, a 360° painting, first displayed
in a purpose-built cylindrical building in London's Leicester Square in
1793. |
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 View
of Cinerama screen louvres.To view London From the Roof of the Albion Mills, you stood on a platform built to resemble a rooftop, with the painting all around you, just as if you were standing atop the actual mills, just blocks away. It was sensationally popular, and cycloramas became a major attraction in all the large cities. You may still view one today in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania at the battlefield museum there. It wasn't long before photographers were creating a truncated version of the cyclorama. Panoramic photography used three or more exposures to cover a viewing angle that a single lens could not encompass. Perfectly suited to landscape photography, the technique was often used to document Civil War battlefields at the end of fighting. While Disneyland's "CircleVision" is the direct descendant of the cyclorama, it was not the first use of the motion picture camera in this way. Surprising, the 1900 Paris Exposition featured a 10-projector simulated balloon ride. Patrons stood on top of a projection room dressed like a giant balloon basket, under a huge prop balloon. The images were projected on a full 360° screen around them. Closed after only a few days as a fire hazard (the booth was unvented) the exhibit had a prescient name - Cineorama. |
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 70mm
frame from "Napoleon". Click on picture to see enlargement.The first use of a 3-projector panorama in a motion picture was in 1927 (curiously, the same year the anamorphic lens was invented). French director Abel Gance felt that the climax to his 5-hour "Napoleon" needed a big finish, so he shot the final scenes with three cameras mounted over-and-under, and was pleased to see that his "polyvision" really worked. No one would attempt it again for 25 years. Fred Waller was head of the effects, and later, short subjects departments at the Astoria, NY studios of Paramount Pictures during the 1920's & 30's. When he noticed that pictures photographed with very wide angle lenses had a slight impression of depth, he embarked upon a quest to reproduce, as nearly as possible, the full range of human vision. He succeeded - spectacularly. |
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The man who
accomplished this was always something of a prodigy. Born in 1896 in
Brooklyn, he was repairing his own bicycle -and his friends' - at the age
of 4. His father was the first commercial photographer in New York, and
after a bout of teenage pneumonia, Waller left Brooklyn Polytechnic at 14
to join him, no doubt to the relief of his physics teachers who were
forever losing arguments with him.
While there, he invented many labor saving devices he kept secret, and
patented the first automatic printer/timer for still photographs. When a
shortage of photo supplies during WWI led to the closing of the business,
he opened an art studio for the creation of silent film intertitles,
working exclusively for Famous Players Lasky (later Paramount Pictures).In 1924 Fred joined Paramount directly as head of Special Effects at their east coast production facility in Astoria, Queens. While there, he produced a cyclone for D. W. Griffith, a shipwreck for Cecil B. DeMille, turned Cinderella's pumpkin into a coach and four and in 1925 built the studio's first optical printer. He was intrigued when he noticed that just as a telephoto lens will flatten an image onto a plane, a wide angle lens does the opposite - gives a sense of depth - without any cumbersome 3-D apparatus. Thus began an intense study of perception that would last over a decade. Paramount closed Astoria in 1927, but Waller didn't waste the hiatus - he went into the boat business and invented the water ski. Returning to Paramount in 1929 as head of short subject production, he became the favorite director of Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith and other major black talent of the day. His musical shorts were distinguished by their creative camerawork and high production value. |
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 Fred
Waller with Vitarama camera rigAll the while, Waller was continuing his study of perception. He recognized that each human eye sees two-thirds of the total viewing angle, but we see in 3-D only where the two eyes overlap - directly ahead. Everything further than a few dozen yards away is a flat plane. Often found walking around the house with toothpicks stuck in the brim of his hat, he conducted experiments that surprisingly revealed that it was peripheral vision - and not straight ahead vision that mattered most in spacial perception. Subjects with this center portion blocked navigated a room full of furniture without incident. Those with their peripheral vision obscured (like a horse wearing blinders) fell about. Only one facet eluded him - a panoramic depiction of reality would require an enormously flat screen, perhaps hundreds of feet wide. Ready at last to turn his studies into a practical motion picture system, he set up shop in the carriage house of boating pal David Rockefeller's Manhattan mansion. His first generation system worked - but was far from "practical". It used 11 (!) 16mm cameras to shoot a combined hemispherical image of 2 over 4 over 5 individual films. Connected by external drive belts which synchronized the cameras, the "11-eyed monster" was used for several test films which revealed that the angle of view was so large that the outside cameras were photographing each other. Waller called the contraption the VITARAMA. |
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 Fred
Waller on waterskiAbout this time, Waller was contacted by some exhibitors at the 1939 New York World's Fair. For Eastman Kodak he provided several multi-panel slide displays for their Hall of Color. But it was his first glimpse of the interior of the theme building that made it all come together. The Perisphere was curved. Imagine Waller clapping his hand to his forehead with the 1939 equivalent of "Duh!" flickering across his mind. Human vision is a curved - not a flat - field. |
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