cinerama--6/6/25

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Today's selection -- from Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties by Foster Hirsch. How the unlikely team of Lowell Thomas, Merian C. Cooper, and Robert L. Bendick banded together to produce Cinerama, a new type of viewing experience.

“This  Is  Cinerama  had  its  world  premiere  in  New  York  on  September  30,  1952,  at  the  Broadway  Theatre,  a  legitimate  house  reconfigured  in  order to present the new wide-screen sensation. Why didn't Cinerama open in Hollywood? And why was the Hollywood opening delayed until April 29, 1953? The answer: it was industry outsiders who developed, produced, and promoted Cinerama. Moguls who saw Cinerama in its development phase admired the process, but for a number of reasons they were wary. They expressed concern that the process was still in the experimental stage; that the cost of converting theaters to make them Cinerama-ready would be prohibitively expensive; that the new medium, for technical reasons, would not easily accommodate the kind of narrative filmmaking that was Hollywood's stock-in-trade; and that the huge screen would compete with, and undermine the market value of, films that had been shot in a conventional format and were awaiting distribution. They conceded that Cinerama was impressive, but felt that in the face of the challenges the industry had to confront in 1950 the format was simply too risky. They passed.

“As a result, the Broadway opening of This Is Cinerama was a triumph for a group of pioneering industry outsiders: Lowell Thomas, Merian C. Cooper, and Robert L. Bendick. Thomas was a world-famous commentator, journalist, author, adventurer, and radio personality whose voice at the time had been heard by more people than that of anyone else in history, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Merian Cooper was an intrepid independent producer of early ethnographic documentaries (Grass [1925] records the arduous trek of Persian nomads bringing their herds to market; Chang [1927] is about survival in the jungles of Siam) but was most famous for having coproduced and codirected with Ernest B. Schoedsack the 1933 adventure fantasy King Kong. Bendick, a pioneer in early television, was an executive at CBS who in 1946 produced the first televised baseball game and in 1948 the first national broadcasts of the Republican and Democratic conventions as well as the first United Nations television broadcast. Also prominent in the Cinerama team were theatrical producer Mike Todd and sound engineer Hazard Reeves. 

“An East Coast conglomerate, working outside the studio system, they were the promoters of a process that had been invented by Fred Waller, a motion-picture engineer who had worked at Paramount in the 1930s as head of the studio's ‘crick’ film department. From his earliest days at Paramount Waller had been interested in constructing a large screen that would approximate the scope of peripheral vision. During World War II he developed a method of gunnery training used by the air forces of the Army and the Navy; the Waller Gunnery Trainer provided trainee pilots with a facsimile of peripheral vision as they aimed guns at enemy aircraft. In Waller's aerial-gunnery program, four trainees in a large room watched a monumental spherical screen on which five projectors presented shots of enemy planes aimed at the gunnery from every possible direction. Surrounded by wraparound images, the gunners fired an electronic machine gun at the attacking planes. Preparing gunners for aerial warfare, Waller's revolutionary immersive film was credited with saving thousands of lives during the war. 

“Over a fifteen-year period, Waller worked closely with Hazard Reeves, a pioneer in magnetic sound recording, and Ralph Walker, an architect who devised a curved screen on which to install a petroleum exhibit Waller had been hired to develop as a main attraction at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Waller, who discovered that our vision is arc-shaped—two human eyes give us a curved view of about 180 degrees wide and 90 degrees high—recognized that curvature was exactly what he had been looking for as the way to present an all-encompassing image. 

Scene from This Is Cinerama

“When he saw Waller's exhibit at the world's fair, Laurance Rockefeller was enticed. He offered Waller a laboratory at the old Rockefeller carriage stables on West Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Henry Luce's Time Inc. also became a partner in what was then called the ‘Vitarama’ experiment. When his original sponsors withdrew their support, Waller relocated to a tennis court in Oyster Bay, Long Island, where he continued his experiments in devising a curved screen that approximated human peripheral vision. (The Cinerama process that he developed in Oyster Bay, 146 degrees wide and 90 degrees high, reproduces an almost complete half-circle-not exactly, but close enough to, the scope of peripheral vision.) The camera that Waller created weighed 150 pounds and had three 27 mm lenses set at 48-degree angles. Each lens took one-third of the picture's total width. 

“Because Waller intended his new process to be revolutionary in sound as well as sight, Hazard Reeves was by his side throughout his time in Oyster Bay. ‘Since this would be the first multiple magnetic sound recording equipment ever devised,’ Reeves recalled, ‘we could establish our own sound standard. We decided to go all out for high fidelity. We concluded that five loudspeakers behind the screen was the very minimum for a good stereophonic effect. (Ideally, there should be an infinite number of speakers behind the screen.) In addition, we wanted speakers in the rear and to the sides of the house to create offstage effects when desired.’ 

To prevent distortion, Waller devised a trick: rather than being a single white sheet, his Cinerama screen was composed of eleven hundred vertical strips of perforated tape arranged like the louvers of a sideways Venetian blind. The vertical strips were arranged in such a way as to prevent light from bouncing off the screen. 

“As Waller and Reeves were solving technical challenges, they made short demonstration films to show to industry power brokers. As Reeves said, ‘We invited everyone we could think of out to Oyster Bay—not only movie executives, but leaders of industry, leaders in the theater, writers, technicians. Everyone was impressed. But there was a terrifying inertia about their enthusiasm, too many buts. People were afraid.’

“After numerous rejections, Reeves, on a hunch, reached out to Lowell Thomas, hoping that the world-renowned traveler had exactly the kind of daring to take on—and to promote—Cinerama. Initially, Thomas was reluctant even to visit the developers' tennis-court laboratory. Once he saw a demo reel, however, he was hooked. Recognizing Cinerama's potential, Thomas signed on as coproducer. He had the right instincts about how to showcase the process. ‘We agreed that nothing should be done to take the spotlight away from Cinerama itself,’ Thomas said. ‘If, to take an extreme example, in our first picture we had some tremendous attractions, let's say Charlie Chaplin doing Hamlet, the focus of attention would be either on the great down or on a new approach to Shakespeare. We didn't want to be judged on subject matter. This advent of something as new and important as Cinerama was in itself a major event in the history of entertainment. The logical thing to do was to make Cinerama the hero. And that is what we have tried to do.’"

author:	Foster Hirsch
title:	Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher--Television
publisher:	Knopf
pages:	143-145