Cinerama is a widescreen process that originally projected images simultaneously from three synchronized 35 mm projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen, subtending 146-degrees of arc. The trademarked process was marketed by the Cinerama corporation. It was the first of several novel processes introduced during the 1950s when the movie industry was reacting to competition from television. Cinerama was presented to the public as a theatrical event, with reserved seating and printed programs, and audience members often dressed in their best attire for the evening.
The Cinerama projection screen, rather than being a continuous surface like most screens, is made of hundreds of individual vertical strips of standard perforated screen material, each about wide, with each strip angled to face the audience, to prevent light scattered from one end of the deeply curved screen from reflecting across the screen and washing out the image on the opposite end. The display is accompanied by a high-quality, seven-track discrete, directional, surround-sound system.
The original system involved shooting with three synchronized cameras sharing a single shutter. This process was later abandoned in favor of a system using a single camera and 70 mm () prints. The latter system lost the 146-degree field of view of the original three-strip system, and its resolution was markedly lower. Three-strip Cinerama did not use anamorphic lenses, although two of the systems used to produce the 70mm prints (Ultra Panavision 70 and Super Technirama 70) employ anamorphic lenses, anamorphic reduction prints were produced for exhibition in theatres with anamorphic CinemaScope-compatible projection lenses.
History Process and production Cinerama was invented by Fred Waller (18861954) and languished in the laboratory for several years before Waller, joined by Hazard "Buzz" Reeves, brought it to the attention of Lowell Thomas who, first with Mike Todd and later with Merian C. Cooper, produced a commercially viable demonstration of Cinerama that opened on Broadway on September 30, 1952. The film, titled This Is Cinerama, was received with enthusiasm. It was the outgrowth of many years of development. A forerunner was the triple-screen final sequence in the silent Napoléon (1927) directed by Abel Gance; Gance's classic was considered lost in the 1950s however, known of only by hearsay, and Waller could not have viewed it. Waller had earlier developed an eleven-projector system called "Vitarama" at the Petroleum Industry exhibit in the 1939 New York World's Fair. A five-camera version, the Waller Gunnery Trainer, was used during the Second World War.
The word Cinerama combines cinema with panorama, the origin of all the -orama neologisms (the word panorama comes from the Greek , , and , , , , ). It was suggested in the documentary Cinerama Adventure (2002) that Cinerama could have been an intentional anagram of the word American; but Dick Babish, present at the meeting when it was named, says this is "purely accidental, however delightful."
The photographic system used three interlocked 35 mm cameras equipped with 27 mm lenses, approximately the focal length of the human eye. Each camera photographed one-third of the picture shooting in a crisscross pattern, the right camera shooting the left part of the image, the left camera shooting the right part of the image, and the center camera shooting straight ahead. The three cameras were mounted as one unit, set at 48 degrees to each other. A single rotating shutter in front of the three lenses assured simultaneous exposure on each of the films. The three angled cameras photographed an image that was not only three times as wide as a standard film but covered 146 degrees of arc, close to the human field of vision, including peripheral vision. The image was photographed six sprocket holes high, rather than the usual four used in conventional 35 mm processes. The picture was photographed and projected at 26 frames per second rather than the usual 24 FPS.
According to film historian Martin Hart, in the original Cinerama system "the camera aspect ratio [was] " with an "optimum screen image, with no architectural constraints, [of] about , with the extreme top and bottom cropped slightly to hide anomalies". He further comments on the unreliability of "numerous websites and other resources that will tell you that Cinerama had an aspect ratio of up to ."Martin Hart, The American Widescreen Museum website.
In theaters, Cinerama film was projected from three projection booths arranged in the same crisscross pattern as the cameras. They projected onto a deeply curved screen, the outer thirds of which were made of over 1,100 strips of material mounted on "louvers" like a vertical Venetian blind, to prevent light projected to each end of the screen from reflecting to the opposite end and washing out the image.
This was a big-ticket, reserved-seats spectacle, and the Cinerama projectors were adjusted carefully and operated skillfully. To prevent adjacent images from creating an over-illuminated vertical band where they overlapped on the screen, vibrating combs in the projectors, called "jiggolos", alternately blocked the image from one projector and then the other; the overlapping area thus received no more total illumination than the rest of the screen, and the rapidly alternating images within the overlap smoothed out the visual transition between adjacent image "panels."
Great care was taken to match color and brightness when producing the prints. Nevertheless, the seams between panels were usually noticeable. Optical limitations with the design of the camera itself meant that if distant scenes joined perfectly, closer objects did not. (parallax error). A nearby object might split into two as it crossed the seams. To avoid calling attention to the seams, scenes were often composed with unimportant objects such as trees or posts at the seams, and action was blocked to center actors within panels. This gave a distinctly "triptych-like" appearance to the composition even when the seams themselves were not obvious. It was often necessary to have actors in different sections "cheat" where they looked to appear to be looking at each other in the final projected picture. Enthusiasts say the seams were not obtrusive; detractors disagree. Lowell Thomas, an investor in the company with Mike Todd, was still raving about the process in his memoirs thirty years later.
Sound system In addition to the visual impact of the image, Cinerama was one of the first processes to use multitrack magnetic sound. The system, developed by Hazard E. Reeves, one of the Cinerama investors, played back from a fully coated 35 mm magnetic film with seven tracks of sound. There were five speakers behind the screen fed by tracks one to five, and arrays of speakers on the left, right and rear walls. A sound engineer directed the sound between the left, right and rear speakers according to a cue sheet. Either tracks six and seven were directed to the left and right of the theater respectively, or track seven was directed to the rear and track six to both sides. This manual steering of the sound was abandoned after the travelogues. For the two MGM features, only the left and right speaker arrays were used.
The projectors and sound system were originally synchronized by a system involving a rotating black disk with 32 white gradations on it, which was attached to the sound reproducer. Each time the disk completed a revolution, an electrical pulse was sent to slave units on the three projectors. If all four units were in sync, a green light would flash. If not, a timing motor would accelerate or decelerate the film in the affected projector by the required amount. This system was later replaced by one using selsyn motors to keep the projectors and sound in sync.
Drawbacks
The Cinerama system had some obvious drawbacks. If one of the films should break, it had to be repaired with a black slug exactly equal to the missing footage. Otherwise, the corresponding frames would have had to be cut from the other three films (the other two picture films plus the soundtrack film) in order to preserve synchronization. The use of zoom lenses was impossible since the three images would no longer match. Perhaps the greatest limitation of the process is that the picture looks natural only from within a rather limited "sweet spot." Viewed from outside the sweet spot, the picture can look distorted. Furthermore, while the screen was a continuous curve, the projected image itself was a polygonal triptych, which often resulted in the combined image appearing bent or creased. Finally, any misalignment of the two intersections of the three films was quite noticeable which prompted the use of a vertical element at these intersections (tree, lamp pole, etc.) to hide this flaw.
The system also required a bit of improvisation on the part of the film producers. It was not possible to film any scene where any part of the scene was close to the camera, as the fields of view no longer met exactly. Further, any close-up material had a noticeable bend in it at the joins. It was also difficult to film actors talking to each other where both were in shot, because when they looked at each other when filmed, the resultant image showed the actors appearing to look past each other, particularly if they appeared on different films. Early directors sidestepped this latter problem by only shooting one actor at a time and cutting between them. Later directors worked out where to have the actors looking to create a natural shot. Each actor was required not to look at their fellow actor, but at a predetermined cue place instead.
Finally, the three individual films would jitter and weave slightly as the films moved through the projectors.Film preservation#Obstacles in restoration This normal frame-to-frame movement is typically imperceptible to cinema audiences where only a single projector is in use. However, in Cinerama, this resulted in the center picture constantly moving slightly relative to each of the side pictures. The shifting displacements were perceivable at the two points where the center picture met the side pictures, resulting in what appeared to many viewers to be jittering vertical lines at one-third and two-thirds of the way across the screen as the two touching images constantly moved around relative to each other. Cinerama projectors used a device to slightly blur the join lines to make the jitter less noticeable. Future systems such as Circle-Vision 360° would correct for this by having masked areas between the screens. The jitters continued, but viewers were less aware of them with the adjoining pictures no longer so close together.
The impact these films had on the big screen cannot be assessed from television or video, or even from 'scope prints, which marry the three images together with the seams clearly visible. Because they were designed to be seen on a curved screen, the geometry looks distorted on television; someone walking from left to right appears to approach the camera at an angle, move away at an angle, and then repeat the process on the other side of the screen.
Premiere
The first Cinerama film, This Is Cinerama, premiered on September 30, 1952, at the Broadway Theatre in New York City. The New York Times judged it to be front-page news. Notables attending included New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, violinist Fritz Kreisler, James A. Farley, Metropolitan Opera manager Rudolf Bing, NBC chairman David Sarnoff, CBS chairman William S. Paley; Broadway composer Richard Rodgers, and Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer.
In The New York Times a few days after the system premiered, film critic Bosley Crowther wrote: