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The 70mm Promotion Tour |
This article first appeared in |
| Written by: Johan C M Wolthuis, secretary International 70mm Association. | Issue 36 - December 1994 |
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It was a valuable experience to visit San
Francisco and Los Angeles as part of our "70mm Promotion Tour". On
my way to California I had to spend one night in the "Boeing city"
Seattle and guess what: just around the corner of my hotel, what a surprise:
they screened the just restored 70mm version of "My Fair
Lady" on the large curved screen of the former Seattle
Cinerama Theatre. And it was unbelievable, but on a Thursday evening there
was a large queue outside the theatre and the performance was sold out! The
manager invited me into the cinema and gave me a review and the new advertisement
of "My Fair Lady". It was a special
experience to see this wonderful musical back on the big screen after so
many years. In San Francisco we visited Dolby Laboratories and saw how they had restored an enormous old wooden factory building into a beautiful Dolby film theatre with offices all around it and transformed it into an earthquake safe building. In this city we also saw two beautiful old film theatres, the Alhambra that looks like a mosque and the Castro theatre with its famous cinema organ. Arriving in Los Angeles we had not enough time to visit all the companies and theatres we wanted. But thanks to our friendly host, Mr Dan Leimeter, a lot of appointments could be made. Let me mention a few highlights: at first we visited the Todd-AO soundstages where we saw one reel of the unsurpassed musical "Oklahoma!" in 70mm 30 fps. And the visit to the Panavision plant in Tarzana, where we met Mikael Salomon and watched the chariot race from "Ben Hur" in the original 70mm 2,76:1 format! And of course we saw all that beautiful old and new 70mm cameras. And let us not forget the visit to the MGM headquarters in Santa Monica where we had a very important conversation with Mr Larry D Gleason about old 70mm prints. We too made a short visit to the Academy Film Archives and Library where we could have stayed for dayes to see everything. After a short visit to the DTS digital sound company, in the late Friday afternoon we visited the Amblin Studios which were located on the Universal lot. I was very exited to be so near to Mr Steven Spielberg, but he himself was too busy forming his new company. But we saw the offices, entertaining rooms and the projection booth with among other things an original 35mm horizontal VistaVision projector for screenings of special effect rushes. On our last evening we visited the famous Samuel Goldwyn theatre and saw a special screening of a restored lovely "Mary Poppins" in the presence of one of the leading characters and some people of the original production team. That was a nice end of our trip and you can imagine that we were very tired when we flew home the next day. |
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