ZapTown

Cinerama, the triple-lens screening technique once called the future of cinema, really only screened two true feature films, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, and the epic Western How the West was Won. Weighed down by the exorbitant costs, the format never really took off economically. In 1963, Cinerama, Inc. ceased development of the technique.

By 1968, the Indiana Theater screened films in Super Panavision 70, which enjoyed greater success. Still marketed as Cinerama, the Panavision 70 format was a single lens format that still provided a pretty good cinematic experience. The Indiana hosted premiers of a number of Super Panavision 70, including It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World, Ice Station Zebra, and…the original roadshow engagement of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 The Star and News started running full page ads weeks in advance, of the now-familiar scenes of the PanAm spaceliner docking with a space station, of astronaut Dave freaking out on mind bending alien special effects. At the height of the space race, and for a diehard SF fan, this was the holy freaking grail. Not until Star Wars a decade later would space science be portrayed in such scope.

Roadshow engagements still retained a portion of the old Golden Age Hollywood treatment. Seats were available on a reserved seat basis. The big ads contained a clipout order form which you filled out and mailed in with your check. Being on a teenager’s tight budget, I opted for the cheaper balcony seat. A good choice, as it turned out.

Still just a little young to drive the family car downtown, I boarded an Indianapolis Transit system bus from the Northeast side of the city, where it bordered the suburban community of Lawrence. The round trip would more or less take up a full day. That was fine. The journey is the thing, after all. I remember nothing of the trip, except the anticipation.

Downtown was a heady mix of honking cars and diesel fumes, which for some reason I thought smelled good—don’t ask; I can’t explain it. I think it stinks, now. Maybe it was the extra lead content…

The first suburban “shopping centers” that present day humans call malls had already opened, but downtown was still where the cool stores, like Wasson’s and L.S. Ayers, where people of wealth and status still went for their clothes. I ate lunch at the Monument Circle Woolworth’s, which smelled of fresh caramel corn and served milk shakes in stainless steel cups. I picked up some red, leathery licorice whips for the show.

I had not been to the Indiana since that day that my Cub Scout troop got the free tickets, but it had not lost a single bit of its glory. I got a center seat, front row balcony, which gave me an up-close view of both the elaborate stucco work that framed the screen, and the Theater’s sweeping size. I’m sure once again I toyed with dropping stuff on the people sitting in the mezzanine.

When the curtains parted, and kept parting, the great 120 degree curved screen filled my field of vision. You can still get that, let the movie swallow you whole, but you have to sit really close, even in 70 mm. There, in the balcony, when I got the first view of space liner scene, it was like I was space walking…before there ever was a space walk.

Director Stanley Kubrick spared no effort to make the movie technically accurate, though a few scenes stand out as wrong. While it’s possible to briefly survive in a vacuum for a few seconds, as Dave (Keir Dullea) did, you would definitely not want to hold your breath. And who knows what would happen to your eardrums, going from earthly air pressure, to vacuum, and then back again? No matter; even today, the film’s effects and portrayals of space and space travel still stand up very well.

When the lights came up, I picked up my jaw from where it had landed on the floor, I realized that, the theater was more empty than full. The movie did not fare well at the box office, and enjoyed only mixed reviews. Roger-Ebert-the-eternal loved it; Pauline Kael hated it. At the first nationally televised Oscars, it enjoyed only minimal success, with a shoo-in win for best special effects, and nothing else. This has not stopped it from becoming timeless, and winning a spot among the greatest films ever shot.

As for Cinerama and all its widescreen formats, the energy crisis that followed in years to come made these grand movie palaces impractical; they must have been outrageously expensive to heat, and as suburbs sprawled and malls crawled, no one went downtown as much anymore.

There are currently three theaters worldwide equipped with the original 3-lens Cinerama equipment. It’s still possible to see 2001, How the West was Won, and other classics of the wide screen formats, if you know where to go. Microsoft gazillionaire Paul Allen rescued the Seattle Cinema from becoming a rockclimber’s gym and restored it to its former glory. The Cinerama Dome at ArcLight Cinemas in Los Angeles occasionally hosts festivals in which the old classics are still screened in the original 3-lens Cinerama. A screening room in the National Media Museum in Bradford, England frequently screens some of the early Cinerama travelogues.

There’s a certain classical grandeur in these old places, like the Indiana, and a crazy but empowering excess to big-big dreams like Cinerama. But today of course, there’s stadium seating, CGI, and Dolby 5.1 sound, and some places you can even buy beer, so not all is lost…movies can still leave you sitting with your jaw on the floor.

Special thanks to the following Websites for help with researching and permission to use graphics: The American Widescreen Museum at www.widescreenmuseum.com, Cinematreasures.org, and the very gracious Thomas Hauerslev at www.in70mm.com.