This Is Cinerama!

Former Paramount special effects technician Fred Waller invented Cinerama, a widescreen process which produces a 165-degree curved image, in the early 1950s. It evolved from an earlier Waller system called Vitarama, which used eleven synchronized projectors to create an illusion of vastness and motion on a curved theater screen. Vitarama was a big hit at the 1937 World’s Fair, but its expense and technical requirements made it impractical for common use.

Waller refined the system over the next two decades and introduced a new version in 1952 with the travelogue film This Is Cinerama. The Cinerama process required a film to be shot with three cameras, one facing straight ahead and the other two slightly to the left and right of the middle camera. Three synchronized projectors then projected all three films on a curved screen simultaneously.

Like This Is Cinerama, the early films shown in the process focused on spectacular visual effects, breathtaking rollercoaster rides, and soaring plane flights over the Grand Canyon. Unlike 3-D, Cinerama survived the 1950s, perhaps because its equipment restrictions limited the number of theaters that could show Cinerama films and elevated the process to special event status.

The first nontravelogue was 1962’s How the West Was Won. Occasional films continued to be made in Cinerama throughout the 1960s. However, technical difficulties, specifically problems with keeping the projectors synchronized, drove the development of a one-projector Cinerama process. The “new” Cinerama amounted to little more than projecting a 70mm image on a curved screen. It was abandoned in the 1970s, though expositions and amusement parks continued to exhibit popular Cinerama-like projection systems.

The Seattle Cinerama Theatre, which opened in 1963, is one
of the last remaining Cinerama venues.

As Cinerama faded, a new system called IMAX--its name derived from Image Maximum)--emerged at Expo '70 in Japan. It was refined over the next 45 years into the IMAX system in use today at many theaters throughout the world.

Here's a sampling of Cinerama films (both the original and the later single-film format):

This Is Cinerama (1952)
Cinerama Holiday (1955)
Seven Wonders of the World (1956)
Search for Paradise (1957)
South Seas Adventure (1958)
How the West Was Won (1962)
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962)
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
Circus World (1963)
The Best of Cinerama (1964)
Battle of the Bulge (1965)
Grand Prix (1966)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Ice Station Zebra (1968)
Custer of the West (1968)
Krakatoa, East of Java (aka Volcano) (1969)

This post is part of the Cinemascope Blogathon hosted by ClassicBecky's Brain Food and Wide Screen World. We encourage you to check the full schedule of posts by clicking here.