Cinerama

And it doesn't require theaters to install any new equipment.

You don't need any new lenses or anything, which is what CinemaScope, Cinerama would do.

And you could kind of vary the aspect ratio so it wouldn't mean you had to put in a whole new screen.

In its initial use case though, VistaVision was pretty short-lived.

Rob has been the projectionist at the Sun Theatre in Yarraville, Melbourne for over 20 years, which was just named one of the Time Out's top 100 cinemas in the world.

He made a documentary called Splice Here about the history of Cinerama and projection, ending up in the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library.

And the film led to Quentin Tarantino visiting the Sun Theatre for The Hateful Eight.

But the big news right now is that the Sun Theatre is installing a VistaVision projector.

I was kicking myself.

Do you have any favorites from it?

I've been to the Cinerama Dome, of course.

I haven't seen anything projected there, but look, that was amazing just to see the

It was shot on a format that That is, you know, virtually impossible really to project.

Essentially, it was projected on a dome, on a Cinerama dome.

So it was a 360 degree environment.

So they had to build kind of a theater, kind of like a planetarium to show the film.

... right? So that version.

There was a thing called Cinerama which was even wider than CinemaScope.

It was like three different projectors basically like you were in the sphere, but in a movie.

Oh.

So that's...

It was, like, this stitch work.

So, like, Cinerama was three cameras essentially-

Oh

And, um, if you've seen the news items recently, uh, after six years they're going to reopen it again and, uh, start showing films again.

It's the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard.

And, uh, Mad World opened it in November of 1963, and I hope that when they reopen it in two, 2028, that it'll, uh, be the first film they show again.

I, I was really fascinated [laughs] to know, uh, Jim, in reading the book, that, uh, even at the Cinerama Dome they weren't really finished building it [laughs] at the premiere.

Well, well they, they, they were on three shifts a day to, to get it done in time because they had announced the film's opening and also the, um, the international press preview before they ever had even a, a, a plot of land to put it on.

And, uh, so, uh, as you know from the book, uh, they were still installing fixtures, light fixtures, in the, uh, uh, lounges, uh, on the afternoon of the opening.

... marketing made it successful.

Mike Todd was a, was a genius.

I mean, what you do is less looking at films and looking at technological advances.

So this is Cinerama, started to pull people into the theaters, but it was impossible to actually tell narratives because you would-- needed three projectors and three cameras, and the screen was so big you couldn't do close-ups.

But that led, in nineteen fifty-three, to CinemaScope.

And CinemaScope almost immediately, because Twentieth Century Fox was charging so much to use it, led to all the other studios creating their own.

Literally, the width of it was three times greater than the height of it.

Hmm.

So it, it was almost Cinerama.

It took up most of the vision.

Um, which began around the same time.

And I think, um, Cinerama was the kind of first-

Oh

... process that came along, I think in 1952, I think.

Um, and Cinerama [laughs] is this incredible process that I find it hard to believe that even happened where, you know, you had three cameras recording simultaneously, and it was 180 degree, or I think it was actually 170 degree view.

And then you had three projectors running simultaneously projecting on a giant curved stre- screen.

Um- But as you can imagine, a system like that is hugely problematic [laughs] because you've got to sync the three cameras.

You've got these, uh, s- you know, where the three, um, projections come together, you get these lines, um, where you can see the, the, um, the, uh, I guess, edges of each frame coming together.