Cinerama adventure: a labor of love: a documentary on this obsolete, curved widescreen format took editor David Strohmaier on a fantastical journey

Post, August, 2004 by Christine Bunish

VAN NUYS, CA -- In post-WWII America, movie attendence had declined by 50 percent. Americans had other diversions, including cars, night baseball and TV. Then, out of wartime gunnery-simulation technology, Cinerama was born in 1952.

The IMAX of its time, Cinerama was a giant, curved widescreen format requiring three 6-perf 35mm films running simultaneously in sync to create a wrap-around feeling. Furthering the sense of audience immersion was a separate, seven-channel magnetic surround track.

For a little more than a decade it took millions of viewers to exotic locales and, later, to epic adventure tales. Several of its features--like How The West Was Won--were the top-grossing films of their year.

Episodic television and movie-of-the-week editor David Strohmaier had seen Cinerama as a kid and decided someone should make a documentary on the motion picture phenomenon. He began making inquiries not knowing he'd embark on an epic of his own, a true Cinerama adventure whose production would span three and a half years and rally the Hollywood post production community to his cause: the preservation of a unique part of film history and a lost piece of Americana.

Cinerama Adventure, produced by Strohmaier's Van Nuys, CA-based CA Productions (www.cineramaadventure.com), proved extraordinarily complex. It not only required locating a fast-dwindling roster of people who played key roles in Cinerama and finding Cinerama picture and sound elements but also developing a way to display the format for viewers (no theater was projecting Cinerama at the time). The completed 96-minute doc would eventually go through an NTSC finish, an HD finish with multiple aspect ratios and a 35mm film out.

First-time filmmaker Strohmaier was unsuccessful in seeking grants and funding so he used his own savings to shuttle back and forth across the country with DP Gerald Saldo to shoot Beta SP interviews with Cinerama crew members and historians. He bought an Apple Final Cut Pro 3.0 system so he could edit in his spare time.

He secured home-made VHS tapes of old, scratched projected Cinerama prints from a collector in Australia. Dubbed Flicker-Rama, they became his visual reference.

Pacific Theaters, the last known owner of the Cinerama assets and negatives, put invaluable Cinerama film clips at Strohmaier's disposal. Several 35mm full-coat magnetic soundtrack prints were unearthed in a North Hollywood warehouse and in Australia.

When the ASC heard about Strohmaier's project and screened a rough cut for its membership, more doors opened including help developing the crucial telecine process. "It takes three 6-perf images set side by side to create one complete frame of a Cinerama picture," Strohmaier reminds us. "We had to come up with a way to telecine the images in HD and composite them together."

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Senior VP of engineering Jon Trucken-miller at Crest National devised the three-panel telecine process. "The engineers somehow tricked the Vistavision setting on the DAV Cine Glyph telecine to cover 6-perf full aperture," Strohmaier says. Crest's Ron Fenis "transferred one panel, held it in the still store, transferred the next panel in position, held it, transferred the third, then toggled back and forth to adjust color."

Using Discreet Flame, Greg Kimble at Riot Santa Monica combined the three HD frames into one and blended the edges. At LaserPacific, Brian Ross imported Kimble's 122 composited three-image shots into his Flame and developed a technique called SmileBox to bend the shots as if they were projected on a 146-degree curved Cinerama screen.

Chace Productions, which possesses original Cinerama mag heads, duped the seven-channel sound onto a TASCAM DA-88. Under the direction of Richard Anderson, Technicolor Weddington performed fresound design and dialogue editing to finish in 5.1.

At first, Strohmaier intended to finish Cinerama Adventure only in NTSC. LaserPacific onlined the work in progress for opening night at the 2002 Telluride Film Festival as part of a Cinerama 50th anniversary salute. Interest grew, people encouraged him to seek limited theatrical release and the doc was rebuilt in HD widescreen by Laser Pacific, at no charge, over the next year.

Eastman Kodak provided 35mm color film stock, soundtrack and print stock for the film out from the HD 16:9 master. Ascent Media's Matt McFarland performed the film recording at no cost using its newly installed Lasergraphics Producer 2.

Jeremy Hoenack, president of Sound Trax Studios in Burbank, volunteered to perform the final mix, which took four days, on his main stage. Dolby Labs did the layback and provided SRD certification services at no charge. Technicolor Labs authorized the creation of two 35mm prints for the festival circuit.

It's been estimated that the value of the labor, services and clip rights provided for Cinerama Adventure would have required about a $1.8 million budget. With Hollywood's Cinerama Dome and Paul Allen's recently restored Seattle Cinerama now equipped to project the format, it looks like special-occasion screenings will continue to delight moviegoers for generations.