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"in70mm.com" |
"THIS IS CINERAMA!", part 3 |
Read more
at in70mm.com The 70mm Newsletter |
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| Written by: Greg Kimble | Date: 06.10.2002 | |
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In a business
know for its larger-than-life personalities, few stand taller than Merion
C. Cooper. A life-long adventurer in the 19th century fashion, he resigned
from the Naval Academy in his senior year, and shipped out as an able
seaman intending to get to Britain and join the Air Corps during WWI.
Passport problems sent him back to the States where he joined the Georgia
National Guard and chased Pancho Villa across Mexico. Merion
C. Cooper and Lowell ThomasHe finally got his chance to fly when the US entered the war, but in 1918 he was shot down behind enemy lines and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp, where his severe facial burns were excellently repaired by German plastic surgeons. The next year he joined the Polish Army to help them resist the Russian invasion, but was again shot down. He escaped his Soviet prison after 10 months, and 26 days later, with the aid of a professional smuggler, made it to the Latvian border. After a short stint as a reporter for the NY Times, he and cameraman buddy Ernest Schoedsack hit upon an idea to combine their two loves - flying and exploration. They headed for the Persian Gulf and spent the next several months with one of the wandering tribes there as they sought pasture during the terrible equatorial summers of the Middle East. The result was "Grass" (1925), a landmark in documentary film. Two years later, they released "Chang", shot in Siam, to even greater success. Brought to RKO by David O. Selznick to help with production, Cooper saw some dimensional animation tests by effects man Willis O'Brien for the studio's unmade "Creation". Cooper had no interest in the project, but was very interested in O'Brien, who's magic with animated model animals he saw as the answer to a major production problem on a giant ape picture he wanted to make. Selznick left for MGM in 1933, and Cooper was appointed Head Of Production at RKO. His jungle adventure picture had taken a year to complete and cost an astronomical $650,000. But when released, "King Kong" was just as astronomical a success. It played continuously at New York's Radio City Music Hall and the Roxy for over a year. Eventually, Kong would take its place as one of the greatest fantasy adventure films ever made - perhaps the greatest. Cooper was instrumental in the early success of 3-strip Technicolor, and in 1941 re-enlisted in the Air Force where he was Chief of Staff for the famous "Flying Tigers" which flew against the Japanese - over the Himalayas. After the war, he returned to producing, and with his partner John Ford, made several pictures, including She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and The Quiet Man. Without Mike Todd, Lowell Thomas knew Cinerama needed a new producer, and he called Cooper, who agreed to take over production, direct new material and personally edit it all into a releasable film. The board liked the idea of shooting in Cypress Gardens (where the Waller-invented water ski would be featured) but hated his plan for a 26-minute flight across the country. And, oh yes, would he please put the roller coaster at the end of the film? But the board was no match for the man who had faced enemy fire, imprisonment and charging elephants. Cooper got his way, and the picture was finished - barely in time. |
Further
in 70mm reading: Part 1 Part 2 Part 4 Home Cinerama Films Internet link: |
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 Front
view of the Cinerama camera. Note three contact-lens sized lenses."Prior to the premier [of "This Is Cinerama"]…no one - including myself - had seen the whole thing put together. Some wheat field shots were barely out of the lab in time for opening night. I only made the final cut a couple of hours before the opening." The lights dimmed on the invitation-only black tie audience, and on the screen, the familiar face of Lowell Thomas droned on for 15 minutes about the history of photography - from a regular 1.33 frame, and in black in white. Patrons began to wonder if they'd been had. "Cinerama, so what's the big deal?" Suddenly, the curtains parted - it seemed they would never stop - until a deeply curved screen nearly 40' high and over 90' wide was filled with the Rockaway roller coaster, introduced by Thomas' simple, triumphant, "Ladies and gentlemen, THIS IS CINERAMA!" No wonder Fred Waller was smiling. The next morning a rave review of the opening appeared on the front page of the NY Times, the only time any film has been so honoured. Executive phones lit up all over Hollywood. Cinerama was an unprecedented success. The standard format of 1.33 was dead overnight. Audiences suddenly wanted wide screen films. How would the studios, who had all passed on it, react? The way they always react to success, of course - copy it. |
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| Spyros Skouras, head of Fox,
dispatched a team to France to track down Prof. Crétien, who's 1927
anamorphic lens was well known around town. Cooper had considered using it
on Chang, and Selznick flirted with the idea for "Gone With The
Wind" but decided to go with Technicolor instead. Warners sent
out a search party as well - and found the good professor the day after
Fox had signed him to an exclusive contract. Although his patents had
recently expired, putting his invention in the public domain, the contract
secured his expertise for Fox. A year after "TIC", "The
Robe" would be the first film in Cinemascope - advertised as
"The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses" to distance it from
the 3-D craze. Advertising artwork for the new process was strikingly
similar to that for Cinerama. Across town at Paramount, the camera department went into overdrive to come up with a viable widescreen system and created VistaVision, which used 35mm film run sideways, each frame being twice as big as normal (8 perfs). Release prints in any aspect ratio could be made from the 1.5 aspect ratio negative. The larger negative area was especially important in the early days of monopack color film which was very slow and grainy. Technicolor, seeing the end of 3-strip photography coming, retooled their cameras for 8-perf shooting, added a 1.5 squeeze anamorphic lens and called it Technirama. |
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 Michael
Todd and the big 128 degree Todd-AO lens. Spanish bull ring is reflected
in lens.And of course there was Mike Todd, who's 70mm Todd-AO was the closest copy of Cinerama. All this was for the best. In the five years since the end of WWII, the picture business had seen a loss of 50% of its revenues, due to the combined effects of the Paramount Consent Decree, which had stripped them of their theaters, increased options for leasure time use, and the big meanie - television. Widescreen got people back into theaters - for a while. This, in fact, is Cinerama's greatest legacy. Since it premiered in 1952, widescreen cinema and stereophonic sound have not disappeared from movie screens for a single day. Of course, all of these copycat systems used only one projector, and none were designed to fill your peripheral vision to give you a sense of being in the scene. They were merely wide, and successful as they eventually were, the effect of Cinerama was (and is) completely unique. Because it fills your peripheral vision, your brain interprets what it is seeing as a real experience. Which explains those woozy patrons running out at intermission for Dramamine… |
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   Three
strips of film. Click frames to see enlargements. |
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| "This Is
Cinerama" (referred to as "TIC" by fans) had
cost $512,000 to make - and made over $4 million in its first year. This
success caught everyone off guard. The film had been made just to
demonstrate the process. No real thought had been given to what would come
next. And then there were the corporate politics. The company was split into two separate units - Cinerama Inc. which made the cameras, sound equipment and projectors, and Cinerama Productions which made the films. Cooper was given a 5-year contract as general manager in charge of production. Knowing a good thing when he saw it, Cooper tried to get control of the company but lost out to Stanley Warner Theaters who bought it in a paper transaction to allow Mike Todd to sell his shares, which he hadn't told the IRS he owned.  3-strip
frame composite from "This is Cinerama". Click image to see
enlargement.Not being a production entity, Stanley Warner had less than no idea what to do with their new acquisition. Audiences, returning to TIC in lieu of any other product, filled out suggestion cards as to what the next Cinerama film should be. It took 3 years, but finally "Cinerama Holiday" hit the screen in 1955. The idea was simple enough - two couples, one American and one Swiss, would swap continents, each followed by a Cinerama camera crew. It is now a priceless time capsule of mid-1950's life. |
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 Filming
of "Cinerama Holiday".Recovering from their lost momentum, Cinerama Productions began to release a new film each year. 1956 gave us "Seven Wonders of the World", a Lowell Thomas concept which begins at the pyramids - the only surviving wonder of the original seven - and continues around the world to Victoria Falls, St. Peters in Rome, the Suez Canal (where the camera plane was fired upon) and the Taj Mahal. |
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| The idea of exploration infuses the next release, "Search For Paradise" (1957) shot entirely in the rugged mountain ranges of Katmandu, where the crew was the first to run the rapids of the treacherous Indus River, with 5 times the flow of the Colorado at its flood. On the last run, cast member Jim Parker rode along but didn't bother with a life jacket. The raft flipped, and both Jim and the camera were lost. Just days before, he had been heard to remark, "I wish I could spend the rest of my life here." | ||
 Actual
3-strip frame composite from "Search For Paradise".In 1958, what would be the last Cinerama travelogue was released. "South Seas Adventure" took a camera crew throughout the South Pacific on a sailing ship, recording colorful Polynesian life. On Pentecost Island, the production found a tribe who once a year had a day-long ceremony where the men would leap off a one hundred foot tower with vines tied around their legs as a test of manhood. This Cinerama sequence was the first recorded incidence of bungee jumping. Pentecost had been occupied by the Japanese during the war. They never found the tribe, but Cinerama did. |
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| 1958 also saw
the release of a complementary format film, "Windjammer",
which followed the Norwegian tall ship Christian Radich around the world.
It was filmed in CineMiracle, which used three Mitchell cameras converted
to 6-perf pulldown, and photographed the side panels by reflecting them in
mirrors. This handily evaded the Cinerama patents. When "TIC" became the surprise hit of the 1954 Exposition in Damascus, completely eclipsing the Soviet exhibits, the Russians built their own 3-panel system, claiming the US had stolen it from them (of course). KinoPanorama was a huge hit both in the Soviet Union, where 15 films were made, and took prizes at later world fairs. In 1966, a compilation of scenes from these films was released in America as "Cinerama's Russian Adventure". It only played for a short time in Chicago and was unseen elsewhere in the States. |
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