i should also like to see a a new cinerama transfer of SEARCH FOR PARADISE. this would be an awsome event for people to see and really experience the music of tiomkin in all its magnificence.
S F P will be screened at the ArcLight Hollywood Cinerama Dome in late September to commemorate Cinerama's Sixtieth Anniversary.
The project dates back to 1999 when Gunther Jung (Cinerama Inc.) called Hal Dennis (owner to the rights of the film) and asked about the location of the film. He said he didn't know where it was. Nothing happened for almost 7 years until 2006, when there was some glimmer of hope from an apartment building on Yucca Street in Hollywood.
The tenants there had started to complain about a strange vinegar like smell coming from somewhere in the basement. One of the tenants was an Arclight employee, a projectionist who has helped us show Cinerama at the Dome. The building manager let him into the locked room and there he discovered a "ton" of film, of which much of it was 6 perf! At that point John Sittig and I got involved and tried to get a look into the room. We talked to the Dennis family and they said they used to own the building 10 years ago but they had sold it to a big corporation. And we needed to somehow prove it was Cinerama property in order to see it.
The building had changed hands several times in the intervening years and a few months went by. We heard nothing about it until one morning when Fritz Herzog at the Motion Picture Academy called me. He said the new manager of KNXT, an old CBS tv station (due to be demolished) had called him. They found some 6 perf Cinerama-like footage with Hal Dennis’s name on it and the title "Cinerama's Russian Adventure". Fritz suggested we'd get over there right away, because it looks like it will be tossed out any time now. I called John Sittig and the next day he sent a truck and a crew (along with me) to check it out. Somehow over a year or so the film had been moved from the apartment building on Yucca to the Sunset Blvd. TV station building.
Once we got over there we got into an argument with security. The building manager reluctantly let us get a look at the film. We found it. It was the last surviving 3-strip print of "Cinerama's Russian Adventure". The problem was the building was to be used one last time for a charity art exhibit and the artist had been given the film to use. They planned to spray paint the reels of film with fluorescent paint for a large mobile to hang from the ceiling.
The head artist saw me looking through the reels and wanted to call the cops, because he felt we were stealing his sculpture! Security came and said that I had permission to take the film. It became quite a discussion and I tried to convince them that they would be responsible for destroying a lost film. After all this time trying to save the film I finally said, "Enough"! At this time security, artists, and his supporters were all ganging up on me, so I decided to yell “fire” in a crowded theater.
"I don’t want to panic anyone but if you don’t back off now I will have to shut down this whole building maybe this whole block!!! You have a “hazmat” situation here, I will be forced to call OSHA, the Occupational Safety + Health Administration, and they will shut you down. There are major acetic acid fumes coming from this material and it is highly dangerous. Clear out and let me handle this or I will close down this operation with one phone call." They all backed off very quickly and let me finish the job of rescuing the only surviving print of "Cinerama's Russian Adventure".
CINERAMA restorer Dave Strohmaier describes what has been done to restore the film:
"The telecine of the 65mm negs for CINERAMA'S RUSSIAN ADVENTURE is done and the 6 track mag sound is preserved and synced up to the film and we have SmileBoxed it & added the curtains. This was one of the 3 strip titles where the image across the screen is simply a "process shot" similar to the Windjammer remastering. In other words when the film went out to theaters in 1966 most Cinerama theaters had no 3 strip projectors left in the booths so the entire film (a 3 strip print) was re-photographed on a rear screen set up in 65mm at Film Effects of Hollywood, Lynwood Dunn's efx house. The result is that all three panels are there but a lot of extra grain, dirt and a lack of contrast exists and the color is not the best, also the panel alignment is built into the negs. so not much we can do about a better blend line.
"We had no financing at all on this title as it is not owned by Cinerama Inc. so we got a little bit of private financing to do the "bare minimum", telecine, stripe off the sound etc. Our computers were tied up doing South Seas at the time so hardly any real clean up was done on this title but you will see pretty much what you saw if you saw it in 1966 at most all the 70mm Cinerama theaters. Only one or two actually ran this title in 3 strip Cinerama as they still had the old projectors. So we call this a remastering & reconstruction from 65mm dupe elements it is not a digital restoration like the ones we are doing from original 3 panel negs. We would still need to clean up and then re-mix the tracks for 5.1 Since then the family who actually holds the copyright has contacted me and (may) decide to have it put out on DVD sometime later this year but nothing is cast in stone."
Here’s something cool on the classic film front: Flicker Alley has set Cinerama Holiday and Cinerama: South Seas Adventure for release on Blu-ray/DVD Combo on 10/22 (SRP $39.95 each but you can pre-order them for just $29.96 on the Flicker Alley website).
Cinerama Holiday had lovely score released in mono recordings by Morton Gould on 45 rpm EP & Jack Shaindlin on a Mercury LP. I wore them both out. Cinerama Holiday, the 2nd film in that process, was the first I saw. Of course, South Seas Adventure was the 5th & last film, scored by Alex North.
I'm glad these are being restored, though they're not such great films to sit through.
Unfortunately, on a small screen, their original grandeur is mostly diminished.
But, it's better to have them in some way, than for them to be only memories.
And the scores are wonderful.
(Still, cynical me, all I could think of while watching the preview, is to consider how much changed those lovely vistas are today. Waikiki is amass with hotel towers, lining practically the entire beach, and I wonder how many of those pristine shores are now awash in condo complexes...)
Oh well.
Beautiful images, lovely music. From a time now so very long gone.
If you're lucky enough to be in Bradford ( England ) this weekend, the annual Bradford Film Festival is in full swing. This Friday sees the start of WideScreen Weekend, with a load of BIG screen goodies lined up including:
The European Premiere of the restored print of "Cinerama Holiday". (3 strip Cinerama)
The only known 50 year old surviving print of "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm". (..and, apparently, it's colour is still excellent.) (3 strip Cinerama)
A new, 35mm print of "How to Marry a Millionaire" (...to mark it's 60th Anniversary).
New, 70mm prints of "Hello, Dolly!" & "The Sound of Music".
70mm Screenings of "The Great Escape" & "The Longest Day".
A few months ago TCM aired both "This is Cinerama" and "How the West was Won", in the SmileScreen format. I remember seeing both these movies at theaters in NYC and Syosset, L.I., in my early years. It was a pleasure watching the movies again, on a HD TV. TCM did a nice job of presenting them.
This will not be easy to explain in print. Let me start by saying that I remember having an old American Cinematographer issue, which reprinted some frame enlargements from HTWWW. If you put the magazine right up to your face, and bent the magazine into a curve, you could see instantly the way Cinerama worked, and how wrong the image looked when you again laid out the magazine flat. I have recently looked at HTWWW again in Smilebox, as well as the trailers posted here for other Cinerama films, and I have to say, that while it's an improvement over seeing the films in a regular rectangular format, I just wish something could be done to correct the orientation of the side panels. As it stands, things coming at you tend to bend in an odd way when turning off to the left or right sides of the screen. As we know, the side panels were not meant to be simply on the left and right edges of at flat screen, they were meant to be projected a deeply curved screen, so that if you were sitting in a prime seat, those images would be at YOUR left and right. I know this obviously can't be done on a flat screen, Smilebox or no Smilebox, but I wonder if there might be some type of optical answer to this. Perhaps a special pair of glasses that would push the center image back, while wrapping the side images around you.
This will not be easy to explain in print. Let me start by saying that I remember having an old American Cinematographer issue, which reprinted some frame enlargements from HTWWW. If you put the magazine right up to your face, and bent the magazine into a curve, you could see instantly the way Cinerama worked, and how wrong the image looked when you again laid out the magazine flat. I have recently looked at HTWWW again in Smilebox, as well as the trailers posted here for other Cinerama films, and I have to say, that while it's an improvement over seeing the films in a regular rectangular format, I just wish something could be done to correct the orientation of the side panels. As it stands, things coming at you tend to bend in an odd way when turning off to the left or right sides of the screen. As we know, the side panels were not meant to be simply on the left and right edges of at flat screen, they were meant to be projected a deeply curved screen, so that if you were sitting in a prime seat, those images would be at YOUR left and right. I know this obviously can't be done on a flat screen, Smilebox or no Smilebox, but I wonder if there might be some type of optical answer to this. Perhaps a special pair of glasses that would push the center image back, while wrapping the side images around you.
Just dreaming out loud.
I think the best answer to that problem Jim would be for the TV boffins to hurry up and come up with a very thin, flexible screen that could be automatically adjusted to the correct depth of angle for the various film formats.
I'm sure that it's not too much of a pipe-dream.
After all, look at this 85" baby from Samsung, currently on sale in Selfridges. Do you have a spare £35,000.00 to give it a whirl?
