Author Archives: Jim Lane

Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 1

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Book-coverWIn 1962, if I had known that the actor playing James Bond was the same actor who played Michael McBride in Darby O’Gill and the Little People, I might have taken the trouble to see Dr. No sooner than I did. But in all the publicity surrounding the screen debut of Ian Fleming’s secret agent, and the handsome young discovery of producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, there was scant mention (if any) of the picture Sean Connery had made for Walt Disney three years earlier. Small wonder: Darby O’Gill was a flop.
 
At this remove in time, it’s easy to forget how many of the movies we call “Disney Classics” were considered nothing of the kind when they were new. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a smash right enough, the top-grossing movie of all time — for a couple of years, until Gone With the Wind left it in the dust. But Pinocchio (’40) was a disappointment, Bambi (’42) was a flop, and Fantasia (’40) was a catastrophe. Only Dumbo (’41), followed by contract work for the government during World War II, kept Disney from going under altogether, and spared him the embarrassment of defaulting on the spiffy new studio he’d built with the profits from Snow White. In time, and thanks to persistent reissues every seven years, Disney’s faith in his pictures would be borne out as each one eventually found its audience. (Remember this when you hear talk about what a “bomb” Disney/Pixar’s John Carter was.)
 
Darby O’Gill and the Little People found its audience too…eventually…sort of. It wasn’t until 1969, a full decade after its release — and with Walt Disney nearly three years in his cremation urn — that the picture got its first reissue. There was another in 1977, but the picture still made few ripples — and certainly no splash — at the box office. After that, the studio made the ultimate surrender: they abandoned theatrical hopes for Darby and relegated it to two-part broadcasts on television.

 

The picture was never a flop as far as I was concerned. I loved it in 1959 when I saw it at the Stamm Theatre in Antioch, Calif. I loved it in 1960 when I read this novelization by Lawrence Edward Watkin of his own screenplay. And when it was reissued in ’69 (on a double bill with Dick Van Dyke and Edward G. Robinson in Never a Dull Moment) I went to see it almost every night it played — wondering with bemusement exactly when Sean Connery got into this movie. I contented myself with one viewing when it was reissued in ’77, but I said then what I say to this day: Darby O’Gill and the Little People is one of Walt Disney’s unsung masterpieces.

Disney himself attributed the picture’s failure to the unusually thick Irish accents of his actors, plus the fact that he was unable to make the picture as he originally planned, with Barry Fitzgerald playing the double role of Darby O’Gill and King Brian of the leprechauns. Maybe so, but personally, I think that in the long run the movie dodged a bullet. Barry Fitzgerald and softer brogues might have made Darby a bit more of a hit, but they would have made it much less of a masterpiece. (I’ve read that for some releases the dialogue was redubbed with more America-friendly voices, but if so I never saw or heard any of those prints. Thank God.)

 
 
 
And as for Barry Fitzgerald…Well, all due respect to the dear man, but by 1958, as Darby went into production, he was a real star, more identified with Hollywood than with Ireland. Fitzgerald turned Disney down because he felt too old to play either Darby or King Brian — ironic, then that the role of Darby went to Disney’s second choice, Albert Sharpe, who was three years older. Disney had seen Sharpe on Broadway in Finian’s Rainbow in 1947, about the time he (Disney) discovered H.T. Kavanagh’s book Darby O’Gill and the Good People. 
 
 
For King Brian, Disney settled on Jimmy O’Dea, a popular Dublin comedian who performed in both English and Gaelic. O’Dea had appeared in a handful of movies since 1926, and one Irish-American picture, John Ford’s The Rising of the Moon (1957), while Sharpe had played small roles in a smattering of Hollywood movies: Up in Central Park (’48) with Deanna Durbin, Royal Wedding (’51) with Fred Astaire, and Brigadoon (’53) with Gene Kelly, among others. When Disney came calling, Sharpe was retired from acting and living on a pension in working-class Belfast. Both he and O’Dea, despite long stage experience, were largely unfamiliar faces, and their performances give Darby O’Gill an aura of authenticity it could never have had with Barry Fitzgerald playing both roles.
 
Walt Disney’s two young discoveries for Darby O’Gill were Sean Connery as the young man come to take Darby’s place as caretaker on Lord Fitzpatrick’s country estate, and Janet Munro as Darby’s spirited daughter Katie. Of Connery — almost incredibly young and handsome here — hardly anything need be said. But it’s worth mentioning that when Albert Broccoli’s wife Dana saw Darby she told her husband he could stop looking: “Well, that is James Bond!” More than half a century on, after an Oscar, a knighthood, and five more actors playing Bond, Dana Broccoli’s judgment still stands, and all because she saw Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Walt Disney deserves more credit for setting Sean Connery on his road to world treasure-hood than he usually gets.
 
At the time, 24-year-old Janet Munro seemed like the safer bet for long-term stardom. “Miss Munro, a delight to behold,” said Variety’s reviewer, “may be at the threshold of a glamorous career.” The daughter of Scottish music hall artist Alex Munro (a stage name for both; the family name was Horsburgh), Janet had, like Connery, compiled a worthy resume in British television, and like him, was making her American screen debut. Disney signed her to a five-picture contract and she appeared in Third Man on the Mountain (’59), Swiss Family Robinson (’60) and The Horsemasters (’61; shown on Disney’s TV show in the States, released to theaters in Europe) before her contract was dropped (the reason is a little vague). The glamorous career forecast by Variety failed to materialize, though she worked steadily through the 1960s amid an onslaught of personal and health problems. She died of chronic heart disease (compounded, alas, by alcoholism) in 1972 at the age of 38.
 
Back in 1947, Disney had hired Lawrence Edward Watkin to adapt the Darby O’Gill stories into a screenplay. Watkin was the author of On Borrowed Time, a fantasy novel about an old man who traps Death in his backyard apple tree. The novel was adapted into a successful play by Paul Osborn and a 1939 movie starring Lionel Barrymore and Cedric Hardwicke. It would be 12 years before Watkin’s efforts on Kavanagh’s stories saw the light of a projector lamp; in the meantime, he did some of his best work on some of Disney’s best live-action pictures: Treasure Island (’50), The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men (’52), The Sword and the Rose (’53), The Great Locomotive Chase (’56), The Light in the Forest (’58).
 
The H.T. Kavanagh mentioned in Darby O’Gill‘s credits was born Herminie McGibney in 1861. She first published her stories in McClure’s Magazine in 1901-02, then in book form in 1903, using her first married name, Herminie Templeton. Abandoned by her husband in 1893 and finally widowed by 1907, she married Judge Marcus Kavanagh of Chicago in 1908; subsequent editions of her books bore the name Herminie Templeton Kavanagh. The Darby O’Gill imagined by Mrs. Kavanagh differs greatly from the one played by Albert Sharpe. In the stories Darby is younger, with a wife still living and more than just Katie among his offspring (Kavanagh never says exactly, but it’s clear that Darby and Bridget O’Gill have at least four children). The story Watkin concocted for the movie was entirely his own invention, though it incorporated many of Kavanagh’s details of Irish folklore and matched the stories’ spirit exactly. The movie’s credits say “Written by Lawrence Edward Watkin, Suggested by H.T. Kavanagh’s ‘Darby O’Gill’ Stories”, and that’s the simple truth of it.
 
I’ll have more to say about Darby O’Gill and the Little People in Part 2. I wanted to get at least this first part up in time for St. Patrick’s Day.
 

To be continued…

 

CMBA Blogathon: Kitty (1945)

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This post is Cinedrome’s contribution to the Classic Movie Blog Association‘s first blogathon of 2013, Fabulous Films of the 1940s. (Now there’s a topic; CMBA could probably do five such ‘thons, with all members taking a different title, and never exhaust the possibilities!) Go here for a complete list of entries; you’ll find my colleagues holding forth on a mouthwatering array of movies legendary and obscure, long-remembered and half-forgotten. 

Before I get into my own contribution to the blogathon, here’s a bonus: I can’t make it an official entry because I’ve already posted on this picture before. But if we’re talking about Fabulous Films of the 1940s, I can’t forgo mentioning one of my absolute favorites, Henry Hathaway’s Down to the Sea in Ships (1949). As I said in my post (which you can reach at the link), I simply don’t understand why this one isn’t one of the best-loved movies of all time; sooner or later (and if I have anything to say about it), I’m sure it will be. (UPDATE 2/18/13: Reader David Rayner of Stoke-on-Trent, England, whose admiration equals my own, has written to tell me that Down to the Sea has been released on Region 1 DVD in the US and is available here from Amazon. Don’t miss it!)

But now, getting back to the blogathon at hand — drumroll, please — here’s another one of my particular favorites from that embarrassment-of-riches decade…

*               *               *  

Paulette Goddard is one of the great also-rans of movie history. As she never tired of saying, she was the front-runner for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind — that is, until some pert little nobody from England came along. In an interview late in life, Goddard told how she had been finally offered the role and, understandably excited, decided to throw a party to celebrate. Selznick came, she said, and so did the English actor Laurence Olivier, in town shooting Wuthering Heights for Sam Goldwyn. Olivier (again, according to Paulette) brought along his girlfriend Vivien Leigh, Selznick took one look at her, and that was that.

The story is nonsense, of course. Goddard never had Scarlett nailed down, certainly not enough to throw a party over it. David Selznick’s first sight of Leigh is well-documented, and it wasn’t at Paulette’s house. Just about everybody knows that story, so I needn’t go into it here; suffice it to say the near miss on Gone With the Wind haunted Paulette Goddard for the rest of her life — through her 1940s peak at Paramount (when she never quite made it into the top rank of Hollywood stars), and especially through the long years before her death at 79 in 1990, years during which GWTW‘s fame grew even as her own dwindled.

There’s another sort-of connection with Gone With the Wind in Goddard’s career. It’s a bit of a stretch, I admit, but here goes: As you probably know, during the second half of the 1930s, Scarlett O’Hara was the most coveted role in Hollywood, and the novel’s millions of fans waited breathlessly for the movie David Selznick would make of it. Warner Bros. decided to cash in on the moss-magnolias-and-the-old-plantation fever by dusting off a 1933 Broadway flop by playwright Owen Davis called Jezebel, which also happened to be about a flirtatious and headstrong southern belle. Warners worked it up as a vehicle for Bette Davis and triumphantly swept it to the screen a year ahead of Gone With the Wind.

Fast-forward a few years to 1944. Another novel has set the hearts of America’s female readers a-flutter and got every actress in Hollywood rubbing her hands. The book is Forever Amber by 24-year-old Kathleen Winsor, about an ambitious village girl’s sexual exploits during the Restoration of Charles II of England, up to and including a liaison with the king himself. (Like Gone With the Wind, Forever Amber sparked a vogue for naming newborn girls after its heroine that endures to this day.) When this racy, titillating book by an unknown housewife sold 100,000 copies the first week (on its way to 3 million), Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox wasted no time nailing down the movie rights. Undaunted, the boys at Paramount decided to steal a march on Zanuck the way Warners had on Selznick, and the beneficiary of their ploy was Paulette Goddard.

The book they chose was Kitty by Rosamond Marshall, which had been published the year before Amber, but without gaining anywhere near the same amount of sales or notoriety.
 
Born in 1902, Rosamond Marshall wrote some 16 novels altogether between her first, None But the Brave: A Story of Holland in 1942 and her last, The Bixby Girls, published in 1957, the year she died. Her books sold pretty well during her lifetime — especially in paperback reprints with semi-lurid covers and titles like Duchess Hotspur, Rogue Cavalier and The General’s Wench — but only two of them ever made it to the screen: The Bixby Girls (filmed in 1960 as All the Fine Young Cannibals with Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner) and Kitty.
 

Actually, though, not quite all of Kitty did make it to the screen. Marshall’s novel was what we now call a bodice-ripper, the tale of a 14-year-old London prostitute blithely sleeping her way up the social ladder during the days of King George III. As the story opens, Kitty — she doesn’t have a last name, or at least doesn’t know it — lives with and works for Old Meg in the wretched slums of Houndsditch. Old Meg sold Kitty’s virginity when the girl was only nine, and now Kitty spends her days thieving and her nights whoring, turning her loot and her earnings over to Old Meg in return for squalid shelter and crumbs of food.

One day Kitty indulges a common ploy: stealing the shoes of a gentleman as he’s being carried piggyback on his footman across a muddy street. When she’s caught and brought back to the man’s doorstep, he finds her face interesting and invites her in. He’s the painter Thomas Gainsborough, and he wants Kitty to pose for him. Once he’s had her washed and decently clothed he’s surprised to see that she’s not a child but a rather attractive young woman; she in turn is overawed by his studio, especially one portrait, which she impulsively dubs “Blueboy”.

Kitty also catches the eye of a visitor to Gainsborough’s studio, Sir Hugh Marcy. Sir Hugh is an impecunious ne’er-do-well, impoverished but charming. In time, through the picture Gainsborough eventually paints of her — “Portrait of an Anonymous Lady” — Kitty becomes the talk of London society. During the same time, Sir Hugh and his gin-sodden aunt Lady Susan take her under their threadbare wings, passing her off as Miss Kitty Gordon, the orphaned child of a dear friend. Day after day, they subject her to a crash course in proper speech and manners — while at night, Sir Hugh schools her in the unsuspected pleasures of orgasmic sex.
 
As years pass, Kitty blooms under their tutelage and her prospects improve. She marries a wealthy shipping merchant, bringing a welcome dowry to Sir Hugh and Lady Susan — although Lady Susan soon succeeds in drinking herself to death. Not long after, Kitty’s husband dies and Hugh arranges a second marriage to the aged Duke of Malminster. Kitty thus becomes a duchess, and she soon gives the duke an heir. The old boy never suspects that “his” son is really Sir Hugh’s; Kitty’s affair with him has continued throughout both her marriages.
 
That’s as much of the novel’s plot as we need go into here, because that (aside from the endless rounds of sex with Sir Hugh) is what remains in the movie Paramount released on October 16, 1945. Between publication and premiere, however, Rosamond Marshall’s story had to undergo a major overhaul at the hands of writers Karl Tunberg and Darrell Ware and director Mitchell Leisen. 
 
Darrell Ware had been a prolific journeyman since 1936, turning out an array of dramas (A Yank in the R.A.F.), comedies (Charlie McCarthy, Detective) and musicals (Down Argentine Way, Orchestra Wives, My Gal Sal), none of which were particularly praised for their writing. Karl Tunberg’s career lasted longer, and he at least has the distinction of receiving sole screenplay credit for the 1959 Ben-Hur; his script was heavily doctored by Gore Vidal, Christopher Fry and others, and was conspicuous for being the only Oscar nomination that Ben-Hur didn’t win. Still, in Kitty, both Tunberg and Ware rose to the occasion with what was easily the best screenplay of their otherwise rather undistinguished careers. (Both men received associate producer credit on the picture — although their producing duties may not have amounted to much, at least not in Ware’s case: he died at age 37 in May 1944, nearly a year-and-a-half before Kitty‘s premiere.)
 
Their task with the novel’s plot was daunting. To begin with, of course, the idea of a prostitute as a heroine, let alone a 14-year-old one, was obviously out of the question. So Kitty was advanced to somewhere beyond the age of consent — and relieved of the need to have anything to consent to.
More important, Tunberg and Ware (with perhaps the collaboration of director Leisen) realized what Rosamond Marshall evidently did not: that next to Kitty herself, by far the book’s most interesting characters are the rakish cad Sir Hugh Marcy and the alcoholically haughty Lady Susan. In the novel, Lady Susan is dead halfway through; Sir Hugh disappears from Kitty’s life with far too many pages left to read, while Kitty rather unconvincingly transfers her affections to the now-adult subject of Gainsborough’s “Blueboy”. In the screenplay, both Sir Hugh and Lady Susan are kept around, to far more satisfying effect.

By the way, there’s a curious side note to this business of the painting: In reality the subject of Gainsborough’s famous portrait is not known for certain, but is believed to be one Jonathan Buttall, son of a wealthy London hardware merchant. In Marshall’s novel, this is the name of Kitty’s hot-tempered first husband, while the Blue Boy (a more accurate rendering of the portrait’s title) is named Brett Harwood, a cousin of Buttall’s. In the movie, all this was changed. The importance of the painting in Kitty’s life is downplayed, and Brett Harwood becomes a rival to Sir Hugh for Kitty’s heart. Meanwhile, her first husband is renamed Jonathan Selby — no doubt to avoid offense to any living descendants of the real J. Buttall.

But I digress.

Ware and Tunberg’s solution to Kitty‘s story problems — and its glaring conflicts with the Production Code — was elegantly inspired: They expanded and emphasized the scenes of Sir Hugh and Lady Susan schooling Kitty in ladylike comportment, thus changing Kitty‘s plot from the meteoric rise of an adolescent whore into an 18th century adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion, with Kitty (Paulette Goddard) as Eliza Doolittle, Sir Hugh Marcy (Ray Milland) as Henry Higgins, Thomas Gainsborough (Cecil Kellaway) as Col. Pickering, and Brett Harwood (Patric Knowles) as the sweetly besotted Freddie Eynsford-Hill. Shaw’s Mrs. Higgins, of course, became Lady Susan, and the role was entrusted to that grand dowager dragon of the British and Broadway stages, Constance Collier.
 
Bernard Shaw’s reaction to all this is unrecorded. I like to think the old boy would have been amused, but he may never have even seen the picture — and he almost certainly never read Marshall’s novel.
 
In addition to the “associate producers” credit for Darrell Ware and Karl Tunberg, Kitty is also billed as “A Mitchell Leisen Production”. In the mid-’40s Leisen was Paramount’s reigning arbiter of elegance, having begun his career as a set and costume designer for Cecil B. DeMille, the only Paramount director who outranked him in prestige. Leisen (it’s pronounced “Leeson”, by the way) has taken a beating from auteurists in recent decades. I suspect this is mainly because those two auteur darlings Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges both claimed to have turned director out of dissatisfaction with Leisen’s treatment of their scripts. But an unbiased look at the pictures Leisen made of Sturges’s screenplays for Easy Living (1937) and Remember the Night (’40), or Wilder’s (and Charles Brackett’s) for Midnight (’39) and Hold Back the Dawn (’41), makes them sound like a couple of whining prima donnas. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad and grateful that Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges moved into directing their own stuff; but they had no grounds whatever to complain about Mitch Leisen.

 

David Chierichetti’s 1995 book Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director does much to correct this injustice to Leisen, but its information on Kitty is sketchy and unreliable. Chierichetti calls it the story of “a filthy cockney street waif of Restoration Era England”; in fact it takes place in Georgian England a full 125 years after the Restoration in 1660. Leisen himself, interviewed, says: “I spent two years researching Gainsborough and the way he painted. We determined that the picture took place in 1659, and there’s nothing in the picture that was painted by him after that year.” Au contraire, Gainsborough wasn’t even born until 1727, and this frame from the picture states explicitly the year the story opens. Clearly, Leisen (who died in 1972) had not seen the picture recently when he discussed it with Chierichetti, nor had Chierichetti when he wrote about it. Leisen’s claim of spending two years in research is also plainly implausible: Kitty was ready for release by the end of 1944 but was held up a full year by Paramount’s backlog of product; two years of research would have had Leisen beginning in 1942, a year before Rosamond Marshall’s novel was published. Altogether, these facts cast doubt on much of the information in the seven pages Chierichetti devotes to Kitty.
 
But there is one point on which Chierichetti is absolutely right: Kitty “was precisely the kind of picture Leisen could do better than anybody else, and its mixture of mannered comedy and gutsy drama suited him perfectly”. The picture is a sumptuous feast for the eye, evoking 18th century London’s riot of teeming streets and Rococo decor as sharply as a series of engravings by William Hogarth. It’s a pity the picture couldn’t have been made in Technicolor — thus evoking Gainsborough rather than Hogarth — but Paramount was notoriously frugal on that score; among the major studios, even cheapskate Universal was more generous in their use of color. But even as it stands, Kitty richly deserved its Oscar nomination for art direction — for Hans Dreier and Walter Tyler; the production design was by Raoul Pene Du Bois. (Kitty lost; the award went to Anna and the King of Siam.)
 
Over and above its gorgeous look and elegent style, and entirely in keeping with it, Kitty gave Paulette Goddard the opportunity to deliver the performance of her career, and she came through with a performance nearly as good as Wendy Hiller’s in 1938’s Pygmalion (and considerably better than Audrey Hepburn’s in My Fair Lady). Always a conscientious actress rather than an inspired one, Goddard worked hard on her cockney accent. According to Chierichetti, Leisen credited Phyllis Loughton and Connie Emerald (mother of Ida Lupino) for this, adding that for Goddard’s diction as the new-and-improved Kitty, “we moved Connie Emerald out and Constance Collier in”, and the old girl coached Goddard/Kitty as much off screen as Lady Susan did on. There’s not a false note in Goddard’s performance, nor in any of the rest of the cast, which was surely one of the largest and best either she or Leisen ever worked with: Milland (against-all-odds charming as Sir Hugh, a more unsympathetic rotter than Henry Higgins ever was), Collier, Knowles, Kellaway, Dennis Hoey (as Kitty’s first husband), Reginald Owen (as her second), Sara Allgood (Old Meg) and the ever-popular Eric Blore as Sir Hugh and Lady Susan’s querulous manservant Dobson. (Blore has one of the picture’s best lines, which I hereby spoil for you: On Kitty’s first night in Sir Hugh’s household, Dobson hands her a tea tray and orders her to take it up to Lady Susan. Kitty: “‘Ow will I find ‘er?” Dobson: “Drunk, as usual!”)
 

Kitty is another of those pre-1950 Paramounts now owned by Universal. Like others I’ve written about before (MissMiss Tatlock’s Millions, Alias Nick Beal, Night Has a Thousand Eyes), it was often available in TV syndication during the 1960s and ’70s. Unlike them, however, Kitty hasn’t entirely vanished into the Universal vault. It’s turned up recently on Turner Classic Movies thanks to TCM’s agreement with Universal, so it’s out there somewhere for you to find, and to savor Leisen, Goddard, Milland et al. all at their best. There’s no “official” DVD yet — only ones of varying quality available here from Amazon and here from Loving the Classics. A full-scale DVD transfer, doing justice to those Oscar-nominated sets and Daniel L. Fapp’s cinematography, is long overdue. We can only wait, and hope, for Universal to come through.

UPDATE 2/14/18: Universal has come through. Kitty is now available in a very nice DVD transfer from the Universal Vault series (Universal’s answer to the Warner Archive). It’s bare-bones, of course, like all such issues from Warner, Universal and Fox, with no extras (if Universal is interested in adding a commentary, I’m happy to volunteer), but well worth having. You can get it here from Amazon. 

 

The Man Who Saved Cinerama

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Let us now praise John Harvey.

Somewhere in my scattered stacks of pre-digital photographs, I have a picture I took of John Harvey posing proudly beside one of his Cinerama projectors. I’ve been ransacking the house for over three months now, all the time I’ve been preparing and posting this series on Cinerama, and I absolutely cannot find the damned thing, or any of the other pictures I took on my visit to John’s home town of Dayton, Ohio in 1996. So I’ve given up and decided to make do with this image from the supplemental materials on the This Is Cinerama Blu-ray. I’ll keep looking, because it’s important: I knew from the start that this whole series was going to culminate in a grateful tribute to John. Besides, those pictures aren’t just important to me. They’re historic.
 
Not to mince words or beat around the bush, John Harvey is the man who — virtually single-handedly — preserved Cinerama for posterity. His service to movie history can scarcely be overstated.
 
This is not in any way to minimize or overlook the efforts of others who have often worked above-and-beyond to ensure the survival of Fred Waller’s marvel. Just a few examples: The International Cinerama Society was instrumental in seeing that Cinerama was installed at the National Media Museum (formerly the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television) in Bradford, UK. John Sittig, who recently retired as Director of Projection and Sound for ArcLight Cinemas, performed a similar service for the installation of Cinerama at ArcLight’s Cinerama Dome in Hollywood (he also capped his career by putting together last month’s 60th Anniversary Cinerama Festival at the Dome). David Strohmaier’s 2002 documentary Cinerama Adventure was — besides being one of the best movie-themed documentaries ever made — a major step in retrieving the forgotten process from the memory hole of the 1950s and ’60s (Strohmaier also wrote, directed and edited the 30-minute short In the Picture [2012], the first picture in Cinerama since How the West Was Won).
 
And Australian collector John Mitchell has done much at his end of the globe — it was his prints of Search for Paradise and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm that screened at the festival in Hollywood. But before any of them except John Mitchell Down Under — back when the ICS was still scouring the world for parts to put in that museum in Bradford, when David Strohmaier was just beginning to wonder what ever happened to Cinerama — John Harvey had been hosting screenings of This Is Cinerama and How the West Was Won for years. In his living room. 
 
Harvey’s interest in the movie projectionist’s craft began at an early age in Dayton. At the age of 10 he’d tag along when his older brother went to work at the local drive-in theater, and he began to wonder about the kind of machine it would take to project movies onto that massive outdoor screen. The projectionist noticed him peering in the windows night after night, invited him in to have a look around, and became his mentor, eventually sponsoring him into the projectionists’ union when John turned 17.
 
Meanwhile, when John was 16, his father (a loyal fan of Lowell Thomas) had taken the family to see This Is Cinerama when it opened at Cincinnati’s Capitol Theatre in 1954. For a boy with a budding interest in movie projection, here was movie projection on steroids; in time he would travel the 54 miles to Cincinnati to see all the Cinerama features at the Capitol. And when Dayton’s Dabel Theatre converted to Cinerama in 1963, John — now a union projectionist — worked backup to the Dabel’s crew, seeing How the West Was Won for 38 straight weeks and getting hands-on experience running a Cinerama setup.
 
When three-strip Cinerama was abandoned after HTWWW, Harvey missed it. He saw clearly the difference with the “new” Cinerama movies like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Greatest Story Ever Told (really only UltraPanavision — a big picture on a curved screen, but the viewer was no more “in” the picture than if he were standing in front of a billboard by the side of the road).
 
Harvey’s home cinema began as a a sort of laboratory where he experimented with ways of keeping a single wide-screen frame in focus on a deeply curved screen. He enlarged his living room three-fold by knocking out the walls of two unused bedrooms and raising the ceiling, installed a 35mm projector, and began tinkering with lenses, mirrors, beam-splitters and screen surfaces. Eventually — and I’m speculating here, but it may have been when he finally realized that classic Cinerama was never coming back — he decided to convert his home theater to Cinerama. “One day,” he remembered, “I finally took the initiative: ‘I’m gonna build my own projectors; I’m gonna run that film.’ Because it hadn’t been seen for years.”
 
And he did. It took him years of patient accumulation and painstaking work, but he eventually installed three full-size Cinerama projectors — sometimes having parts made from scratch when he couldn’t find them — and a Cinerama sound console the size of an armoire (the set-up even encroached on his kitchen). He tracked down snippets of film all over the world, splicing them together as they came into his hands (the sheer magnitude of that chore is mind-boggling). In time he had complete prints of This Is Cinerama, Cinerama Holiday and How the West Was Won. That’s at the very least; I seem to remember reading somewhere that he acquired, bit by bit, all seven features, but I can’t document that now. At any rate, he also amassed an impressive array of Fred Waller’s original test footage from the 1940s, and even a print of a Renault car commercial made to play with How the West Was Won in France. In addition, he had a museum’s worth of Cinerama memorabilia: posters, programs, lobby cards, stills — he even served guests popcorn in baskets lined with Cinerama napkins. Throughout the 1980s, to put it bluntly, John Harvey’s suburban Ohio home was one of only two functioning Cinerama theaters in the world; the other was in Australian John Mitchell’s backyard, 9,400 miles away. (It was about this time that I read of John and his happy obsession; I daydreamed about meeting him and wangling an invitation for a screening or two. If I had only known: I probably had only to look him up in Dayton directory assistance and drop him a line. In the end it didn’t come to that — but I’m getting ahead of my story.)
 
In the early 1980s a mutual friend invited Larry Smith to a screening at John’s home and introduced the two men. Smith remembered seeing Cinerama at the Dabel at the age of six, and his experience that night was a reunion with one of his most vivid childhood memories. He told Harvey that if there was any way he (Larry) could help bring this to a wider audience, he wanted to do it. In 1986, Smith became the manager of the New Neon Movies, a cozy little 300-seat art cinema nestled in one corner of a huge parking garage in downtown Dayton, and began a ten-year campaign to persuade Harvey to install his Cinerama equipment at the New Neon. (This picture, by the way, is a rather misleading likeness of Larry. It’s from a 1997 interview taken while Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet was playing at the New Neon, and Larry had bleached his hair and grown the moustache and soul-patch to emphasize his slight resemblance to Branagh as the Melancholy Dane.)
 
In John’s search for film and equipment, he had made the acquaintance of Willem Bouwmeester of the Netherlands. Like Harvey, Bouwmeester discovered Cinerama as a teenager and never lost his enthusiasm for the process. He grew up to work for IMAX in Europe and become a founding member of the International Cinerama Society, and from the Continent he had helped Harvey in his search. In 1993, when the ICS installed Cinerama at the Bradford museum, they sought and received advice and assistance from John Harvey. So now John’s house was no longer the lone outpost in a Cinerama-bereft world. But the only true Cinerama theater was in England; Cinerama remained a prophet without honor in the country of its origin (where it had once proved to be an honor without profit).
 

As 1995 became 1996, the landlord of the New Neon Movies announced plans to split the already-modest theater down the middle and turn it into a two-screen venue. Larry Smith at last persuaded John it was now or never, and they hatched a plan that was brilliant simplicity itself: Before the remodel, the New Neon would install John Harvey’s screen, projectors and sound equipment. The theater would continue showing its standard art-house fare every evening, but on weekends there would be full-Cinerama matinees of This Is Cinerama (on Saturdays) and How the West Was Won (Sundays). The landlord was doubtful the scheme would pay for itself, but he agreed to let Smith solicit a letter-writing campaign; if he could get 1,000 writers to pledge to come to Dayton for Cinerama, then they could talk.

Ads went out in movie-buff publications all over the country, things like Classic Images and Films of the Golden Age, soliciting interest. By the deadline Smith had received 1,200 expressions of interest and pledges to attend; the next day another 200 arrived. “Can you say ‘no’ to fourteen hundred people at once?” Smith asked. And so the project got a green light — but only for an eight-week run. 
 
Smith, Harvey and the New Neon staff had thirty days and almost no budget to retrofit the theater for Cinerama — something that had often taken months and as much as 200,000 1950s dollars to do when Cinerama was new. They did it with long hours and volunteer workers (“We can’t pay you,” Smith said, “but we can give you all the popcorn you can eat.”), ripping out 80 of the 300 seats to make way for the screen and auxiliary projection booth spanning the full back of the auditorium. As opening night drew near the story of their project made the Associated Press wire, drawing interest from all over the continent: Texas, Florida, Canada, New Orleans, Washington DC. “It just didn’t stop,” Smith remembered. “We had so many interviews that first week, we wondered if we’d ever get around to showing the movies.”
 
This Is Cinerama premiered a second time in America — and for the first time in over 30 years — at the New Neon on Thursday, August 29, 1996. The date was chosen to take advantage of the long Labor Day Weekend, but Harvey and Smith were in store for an eerie surprise. The guest of honor that night was Marianna Munn Thomas, widow of Lowell, and they learned from her that they had, without knowing it, brought This Is Cinerama back to America on the fifteenth anniversary of Lowell Thomas’s death. 
 
Now that’s what I call some kinda Karma.
 
I’ll never forget how I learned about the project. That summer of ’96, when my girlfriend LuAnn and I returned from vacation in Illinois and Indiana, we were picked up at the Sacramento airport by my uncle, himself on vacation from his home in Muncie, Indiana — the same uncle who had taken my parents and grandparents to see This Is Cinerama in San Francisco in 1953. As I sat down in the car, he dropped an issue of Classic Images in my lap, open to an ad announcing the eight-week return of This Is Cinerama and How the West Was Won. I stared, gobsmacked, for a few seconds, and once I realized it wasn’t some kind of trick, I turned to my uncle and said, “Let’s go.”
 
In October ’96, midway through the (supposedly) limited run, that’s what we did. I flew to my uncle’s home in Muncie, and from there we drove the 84 miles to Dayton. That’s when I met John Harvey and Larry Smith, and when I took all those pictures that I can’t find now.* And that’s when I had an experience I never expected to have again: seeing This Is Cinerama and How the West Was Won in honest-to-goodness Cinerama, the way Fred Waller and Lowell Thomas and Merian C. Cooper and Hazard Reeves and Henry Hathaway and everybody else intended them to be seen.
 
Improvements in projection technology — and John Harvey’s almost supernatural rapport with his own equipment — made it possible for him now to do alone what had once taken an entire team of projectionists, and both movies came off without a hitch. John’s print of How the West Was Won was simply flawless: richly brilliant colors without a scratch, splice or line from the first frame to the last. I saw HTWWW four times in Cinerama in 1963 and ’64, and I’ve seen it four more times since the revival of the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, but I never saw it looking better — or even as good — as it did that Sunday in Dayton. 
 
This Is Cinerama was more variable, having clearly been assembled from more disparate sources. There were a number of splices, a few scratches, and a second or two here and there (no more than 10 or 15 seconds overall) when a section of one of the three panels couldn’t be found and had to be filled in with black slugs. (There were even a few seconds, in the canals of Venice if memory serves, imprinted with Danish subtitles — this footage no doubt obtained through the efforts of Willem Bouwmeester.) Even so, it was the real article, no doubt about it; for 23 years I had carried the unhappy memory of the picture’s misbegotten 70mm reissue in 1973 — which should have been called This Isn’t Cinerama — and this erased it completely.
 
Chatting with Larry Smith in the lobby, it was clear that, no matter what the ads said about “for 8 weeks only”, he intended to keep Cinerama playing at the New Neon until the landlord dragged the projectors, the sound console and the screen out the front door and threw them into the street. And that’s pretty much what happened. 
 
People came — no exaggeration — from all over the world; the original eight weeks got extension after extension. After a year, the New Neon’s Cinerama matinees were still selling out seven and eight weeks in advance, and the shows continued. On at least one occasion Smith and Harvey screened John’s print of the second feature, Cinerama Holiday (rather badly faded Eastman color, but complete) and the guests of honor were the Marshes (now divorced) and the Trollers, the couples who had starred in it back in 1954. Ultimately, the New Neon’s Cinerama engagement lasted nearly four years of weekends and special occasions, finally drawing to a close in April 2000. 
 
 
 
Eventually, the landlord followed through on his original plan, and the New Neon is now a two-screen cinema incapable of showing Cinerama. Larry Smith has moved on; he now lives in Culpeper, Virginia, where he works in the film preservation unit of the Library of Congress, specializing in the salvage and preservation of nitrate film.
 

John Harvey suffered a series of health issues in the early 2000s, and was forced to sell off his Cinerama equipment, prints and memorabilia to pay his medical bills. He finally lost his battle with those issues on May 3, 2018, at the age of 81. But the seeds of his quest and crusade to preserve Cinerama have borne priceless fruit. His and Larry Smith’s phenomenal success in Dayton from 1996 to 2000 sparked renewed interest in Fred Waller’s lifework. Now, in addition to the National Media Museum in Bradford, there are the ArcLight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood and the Cinerama in Seattle; both had been slated for demolition before public enthusiasm for Cinerama saved them from the wrecking ball, and both were fitted for Cinerama with John’s advice and assistance. Those two theaters owe their new lease on life — and the one in Bradford owes its very existence — in no small measure to the dedication, enthusiasm and practical know-how of John Harvey.

 
 
___________________
 
*Those pictures may yet turn up; stranger things have happened. If they do, I’ll add them here.

 

*                         *                            *

UPDATE 8/4/13: As always seems to happen, the photographs I took on my trip to Dayton in October 1996 turned up when I least expected to run across them. Here are a couple of good examples.

 

 

First, a shot of my uncle standing in front of the New Neon Movies as we arrived for the Sunday matinee showing of How the West Was Won. He’s holding one of my souvenir programs for the picture.

Just so there’s no confusion about the marquee over the box office: The New Neon ran This Is Cinerama on Saturday and How the West Was Won on Sunday afternoons. The rest of the week, and Saturday and Sunday evening, was devoted to current art-house fare. The marquee shows that the (regular) feature is Big Night, the 1996 hit starring Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub as brothers operating a failing Italian restaurant. Opening on the coming Friday will be Robert Altman’s jazz-flavored Kansas City.

 And here, finally, is the picture I originally wanted to open this post. This was taken the day before, in the “auxiliary” projection booth set up at the rear of the New Neon’s auditorium. It’s after the showing of This Is Cinerama, and John is carefully monitoring the rewinding of the second half of the feature.

Returning to Lost London (Reprinted)

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Just for the fun of it, I think I’ll make this an annual Halloween
event here at Cinedrome: reposting
my series on the lost Lon Chaney picture London After Midnight
(1927), and on Marie Coolidge-Rask’s novelization of Tod Browning and
Waldemar Young’s scenario. I first posted these four parts in October 2010, then again last year. London After Midnight wasn’t really a Halloween movie — it actually opened closer to Christmas, on December 17, 1927 — but it’s ghostly and creepy enough (most of the way, anyhow) to qualify for the season. So, whether you read it last year or the year before and were thinking of looking it up again for a good chill, or are coming to it now for the first time, here is my series The Fog of Lost London. Be sure to read the
posts in order so you don’t get ahead of the plot.

Have a fun and safely spooky Halloween, everybody!

Nuts and Bolts of the Rollercoaster

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At This Is Cinerama‘s premiere on September 30, 1952, historian Greg Kimble tells us, Lowell Thomas and Merian Cooper were as nervous as expectant fathers. But not Fred Waller; he sat quietly confident, and as the cheers and bravos echoed at the end, he allowed himself only the slightest of smiles. “I knew 16 years ago,” he said, “it would be like this.”

Even so, Waller never considered that night’s showing to be Cinerama in its final form; this was, in a sense, only the “third generation” version. Just as he had refined Vitarama’s 11 cameras and projectors down to five, and those five down to Cinerama’s three, he fully expected that the process would continue to evolve, and that he would be there to see it was done.

Truth be told, there was room for improvement, and Waller knew it.

Some of Cinerama’s technical problems can be discerned in this frame (frames, actually) from Search for Paradise — although to be fair, by the time this picture was shot most of them had been considerably alleviated. Most often complained about were those dividing lines between the three panels. The panels overlapped by a degree or two, which meant that the overlap area would inevitably get the light from two projectors. To minimize this over-exposure, the sides of each projector’s film gate were supplied with little devices called (spellings vary) “gigolos”. These were serrated, comb-like assemblies mounted on cams that moved them up and down, once for each frame (i.e., 26 times per second) as the film passed through the gate. This was intended to cut down on the excess light hitting the overlap, and to blur the sharp division from one panel to the next. As a matter of fact, this worked reasonably well.
 
Actually, when people remarked on Cinerama’s join lines, they were reacting not so much to the lines themselves, but to other technical peculiarities that tended to draw attention to them. The resolution isn’t very high on this illustration of a shot from This Is Cinerama (photographed live in the theater), but it shows some of what I’m talking about. There were often variations in color and intensity from one panel to the next (particularly noticeable in the sky here). Several factors could contribute to this: minute differences in the emulsion on the three negatives, or in the processing and printing, or in the intensity of light from the carbon-arc projectors. The carbons burned away during operation, like fireworks sparklers but more slowly, requiring constant adjustment and frequent replacement (that’s a major factor in why carbon arc projectors and searchlights became obsolete). Cinerama’s carbons multiplied the problem by three, and all three had to be closely monitored during each show to keep the light output as uniform as possible. Also contributing to this was the three lenses of the Cinerama camera, each of which was “faster” (admitting more light) at the center than at the edges. Another occasional peculiarity that can’t be shown by a still illustration was a perceptible “jiggle” between the frames, caused again by minute variations — this time in the film perforations, the sprockets in the separate camera and projector movements, or a combination thereof.  

 

Most noticeable of all was the parallax effect caused by the fact that the Cinerama camera was really three cameras, each with its own vanishing point. (“parallax [pár-a-laks] n. 1 the apparent difference in the position or direction of an object caused when the observer’s position is changed.”) Imagine yourself looking out at a vista: First you look straight ahead; then you take a step to your right and turn your head left; then two steps left and turn your head right. You’re looking at the same view each time, but from three ever-so-slightly different places. That’s parallax. Take this frame on the right, from the last scene of How the West Was Won, flying under the Golden Gate Bridge. The join lines and the difference in color textures from one panel to the next are glaringly obvious, but even more pronounced are the “elbows” in the bridge; everyone knows that the Golden Gate travels in a perfectly straght line between San Francisco on the left and Marin County on the right.

Here’s a similar frame, on the left, from the same scene as it appears in a later DVD issue. The digital clean-up crew has been busy: Join lines have been digitally erased,  the color has been made uniform, and the “elbows” have been smoothed out. But the digital wizards couldn’t do anything about how the three lenses saw the bridge. That’s how it was with the Cinerama camera. The parallax wasn’t always obvious — especially when you were careening up and down rollercoaster tracks or swooping over Niagara Falls or through Zion Canyon in Utah — but when it was, it was impossible to ignore.

These were the things, as Cinerama opened in September ’52, that Fred Waller expected eventually to fine-tune. Early in 1953, as 20th Century Fox was beginning to beat the drum for CinemaScope, Cinerama announced plans for a single-booth, single-projector system. But that may simply have been a blue-sky announcement intended to take some of the wind out of CinemaScope’s sails. In any event, nothing ever came of it, at least not until It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World ten years later — which, despite sporting the name, wasn’t Cinerama at all. 
 
Also, by spring ’53, the Stanley Warner deal was in the works, and was finalized in August. Stanley Warner’s penny-wise-and-pound-foolish attitude toward Cinerama in general extended into the area of technical research, and Cinerama Inc., the manufacturing wing of the operation, was forced to eke out what technical improvements it could under the circumstances. New camera and projector assemblies were developed for the second feature, Cinerama Holiday, which had much greater registration accuracy than the industry standard, thus reducing considerably the jumping and jiggling of the three images. These new cameras also had improved focal ratios on the three lenses — from f/4.5 to f/2.8 — making them more sensitive to light.
 

As for the problem of slight variations in color, that was dependent on printing standards, which in most laboratories, as Hazard Reeves admitted, “have never been tight. If necessary,” he went on, “we’ll do our own printing.” But once again he ran up against the cheapskates at Stanley Warner. Not until 1958 did they agree to allot $200,000 for research into improved printing standards, and it wasn’t enough; Cinerama’s special in-house printers never materialized.

 
On May 18, 1954 Fred Waller died, and Cinerama lost its creator and conceptual genius. For all practical purposes, Cinerama remained, for the next (and last) nine years of its existence, what it was when Waller left it; the continuing evolution he envisioned would never happen — because there were no more Fred Wallers to drive it.
 
Waller left behind one final concept, designed to address the parallax problem inherent in Cinerama’s three-lens camera. This was a radically modified camera using a single lens that would duplicate the entire 146-degree field of vision of the three-lens camera, but on a single strip of film running horizontally through the camera 16 sprocket-holes at a time — the rough equivalent of a 102mm frame. This would eliminate the three-lens parallax, producing an image with a single vanishing point. That 102mm image could be divided in printing into three strips for projection (still necessary to cover Cinerama’s deeply curved screen) — and, as a bonus, could also be printed single-frame in any other format for conventional projection. The lens had been developed and a prototype camera was under construction in 1960 when the order came to abandon any further development.
 
In 1962, under Nicolas Reisini, Cinerama Inc. acquired the Photo Instruments Division of Benson-Lehner Corp. in Los Angeles, renaming it the Cinerama Camera Corp. Reisini might (and maybe should) have dedicated the new corporation to resolving the technical problems in Cinerama, perhaps even reviving that 102mm camera. But he didn’t. Instead, Cinerama Camera Corp. attempted to move into consumer products: a still camera that took 360-degree panoramic pictures, a wide-angle home movie projector, even (and I’ll bet you never knew this) a home videotape recorder. All of these ideas lost money in research and development (the videotape recorder was 20 years ahead of its time), and by 1964 Reisini had been ousted from Cinerama. The untapped potential of that single-lens, 102mm, 146-degree camera — Fred Waller’s last brainchild — is one of the great what-ifs of motion picture technology.
 

Cinedrome Wins 2012 CMBA Award

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I interrupt my series of posts commemorating the 60th anniversary of Cinerama at this point because the 2012 CiMBA Awards from the Classic Movie Blog Association have been announced — and Cinedrome has been honored with “Best Classic Movie Article” for my six-part series on Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons.

I won’t bore everybody with an endless Oscar-style acceptance speech, but I do want, gratefully, to thank my fellow CMBA members for this recognition, and to acknowledge the work of the many Welles biographers and scholars, especially Simon Callow and Prof. Robert L. Carringer, whose previous work contributed so much to my own and made my research such a pleasure. My conclusions may have differed from theirs, but I couldn’t have done it without them.

Links to the six parts of my Ambersons article are below. Meanwhile, you can go here for a complete list of CiMBA winners and nominees. Warmest congratulations to them all — and again, a grateful “Thank you!” to my colleagues for this honor.

Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons (January 13 – March 28, 2012):

.

Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 6

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There’s just no getting around the fact that Stanley Warner’s management of Cinerama was a disaster from the word go. To be fair, the limits imposed by the court gave SW little incentive to think beyond the short term: They could have no more than 24 Cinerama theaters, and they had to be out of Cinerama by the end of 1958 (SW did get a court-approved extension to that deadline). Still, with the purchase of International Latex, Stanley Warner behaved like a kid with a new toy. Cinerama became the old toy.
 

SW never operated more than 22 Cinerama theaters at one time, and they never produced enough pictures to keep even those busy (and nowhere near the court-imposed limit of 15 pictures). When they did produce a new Cinerama picture, all they could think to do was produce yet another travelogue, the only real change being where the picture traveled to. Even then, as we have seen, SW would delay release until they had wrung the current release dry; they insisted every picture had to premiere in New York, yet they wouldn’t open a second New York theater. Nor would they even consider beginning a new picture while they had one waiting in the wings; the idea of creating a backlog of pictures ready to go appears never to have been considered.

In 1957, when the foreign-rights agreement with Robin International expired, Stanley Warner ventured into that area themselves. They learned a lesson, though, from Nicolas Reisini’s practice of sub-licensing Cinerama to local exhibitors, who would pay to convert a theater, then lease rather than purchase the equipment from Cinerama Inc. Essentially, what Reisini had done, and what SW did now, was to sell Cinerama “franchises”. It was a policy that might have served Cinerama well from the outset — and indeed Reisini would employ it with some success after he took the driver’s seat — but it seems not to have occurred to anyone before Reisini came along.

In the end, Stanley Warner’s program of opening new Cinerama theaters was no more vigorous or aggressive than their production of Cinerama pictures. By the time SW’s management was drawing to a close, most of the theaters they’d opened had failed and been closed; only six remained in the U.S., with another 13 in other countries.
 

Part of the problem all along was Cinerama’s Byzantine corporate structure, which hampered any attempt to strategize Cinerama for the long run. Instead of one central corporation, Cinerama was first three, then four, all severely under-capitalized and with complicated financial relations. A serious simplification of the arrangement was called for, but Stanley Warner never made any effort in that direction.

Hazard Reeves, on the other hand, did, and he started as early as 1955. In that year, through Cinerama Inc., he absorbed the Vitarama Corp. by buying out the heirs of the late Fred Waller. It was about that time, too, that he initiated his futile breach-of-contract action against Stanley Warner, which may have been simply a negotiating ploy to prod SW into more decisive action. (If that was the intention, it didn’t work.)
 
As the clock ran out on Stanley Warner Cinerama, Reeves stepped up his efforts to consolidate things. I won’t go into all the arcane details, but the process entailed enlisting the participation of the Wall Street brokerage firm of Kidder, Peabody and Co. There was a flurry of stock sales, purchases and swaps as Buz Reeves gradually consolidated his control, and with his proven management expertise he was able in May 1959 to float a huge $12 million expansion loan from the Prudential Life Insurance Co., three-to-four million of which was used to buy out Stanley Warner once and for all. When the dust finally settled, Vitarama Corp. and Cinerama Productions Corp. were no more, absorbed into Cinerama Inc. And Hazard E. Reeves was in complete control of every facet of the process — something that had not been the case since Fred Waller formed Vitarama 21 years before. 
 
Reisini02WReeves’s proven management skills might have turned Cinerama around even then if he had taken the reins in a firm hand, but evidently that was never his intention. With hindsight, it appears that Reeves was simply tired of dealing with Cinerama; his concerted efforts to streamline Cinerama’s corporate structure may have been just a way of getting it in good order — like a real-estate speculator fixing up and flipping a rundown house — so he could sell it and roll the capital into his own company, Reeves Soundcraft. In any event, Reeves had control of Cinerama for less than a year before he put it on the market — negotiating first with Walter Reade Jr. of Reade Theatres, then with Nicolas Reisini of Robin International. In the end Reisini bought Reeves out, becoming president and CEO of Cinerama Inc. (In his history of Cinerama, Thomas Erffmeyer mentions that in 1947 Reisini had purchased a California asbestos mine for $350,000 — which now, in 1959, he sold for $4 million. Dr. Erffmeyer doesn’t say if it was this windfall which enabled Reisini to buy Cinerama Inc., but it strikes me as a logical inference.)
 

Nicolas Reisini was, if nothing else, an energetic and ambitious entrepreneur and wheeler-dealer, and he hit the ground running. Even before assuming the presidency of Cinerama in May 1960, he accomplished something nobody before him had been able to do: He established a co-production agreement with a major studio. The studio was MGM (then flush with the critical and box-office success of Ben-Hur), and the agreement was announced on December 11, 1959: They would produce at least two and as many as six features; MGM production chief Sol C. Siegel would supervise them, with Cinerama having script, director and cast approval; Cinerama would distribute and exhibit the pictures in their theaters, and MGM would handle distribution of 35mm general release versions after the Cinerama roadshow engagements.

A top priority for Reisini was to bring Cinerama to the widest possible audience — to increase its fan base, if you will. To that end he followed through on an idea Stanley Warner had flirted with in the mid-’50s but (typically) abandoned before doing much with it: portable Cinerama. A caravan of trucks criss-crossed France and other countries in Europe, visiting towns and villages like a 19th century travelling circus. The caravan would set up an enormous inflatable rubber tent — inflatable so it would be self-supporting with no internal columns or poles to block the view of the screen — that could seat up to 3,000 spectators on folding chairs. (Reisini had always been adept at thinking outside the box. In 1954, when Robin International undertook to open theaters overseas, he had tried to interest the United States Information Agency in mounting a travelling Cinerama theater on a retired aircraft carrier. USIA was game, and even President Eisenhower liked the idea, but Congress nipped it in the bud.)
 
 
Reisini’s touring “Cinerama Europe” was well-received everywhere it went; anyone who wasn’t working or in school would flock to the field where Cinerama was setting up to watch the battery of huge fans, each the size of a Volkswagen, blowing up the big blue tent. Local dignitaries turned out to walk the red carpet at every screening. Even Abel Gance showed up one night to see this successor to “Polyvision” from his 1927 Napoleon.
 
The tent had an Achilles’ heel, though, and it was the anchoring system, which was inadequate to a building of its size. One night in France a terrible storm struck. It huffed and it puffed and it blew the house down; the collapsing screen wiped out the first ten rows of seats. A genuine catastrophe was averted only because nobody was in the tent at the time.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Undaunted, Reisini had the tent design revamped, strengthened and improved. This new version went on to tour England, Scotland and Wales as “Itinerama”. 
 
 
 
At the same time, Reisini set out to expand the paltry stable of standing Cinerama theaters that Stanley Warner had left behind. Within nine months, by selling franchises to local exhibitors, Reisini had nearly doubled that number by opening 17 new theaters. Among them, opening in March 1961, was the first theater built expressly to show Cinerama, the Cooper “Super-Cinerama” outside Denver, Colo. By 1964, Reisini’s expansion efforts had been perhaps his most striking success: 70 theaters in the U.S. and 116 overseas — nine times as many theaters as Stanley Warner had been able to open on their own.
 
 
Now let’s review. By the end of 1962, Nicolas Reisini had inked a co-production deal with a major Hollywood studio; he was well on his way to establishing over 180 Cinerama theaters worldwide; and — another thing nobody else had been able to do — he had come out with two Cinerama movies in the same year. 
 
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm — the second picture to go into production but the first one released — opened in August 1962. It got novelty points as the first “story” Cinerama picture, but reviews were not great, and neither was the box office. How the West Was Won, however, was another story. It premiered at London’s Casino in December ’62 (the U.S. premiere was at L.A.’s Warner Theatre in February ’63) and was an immediate smash hit. It got rave reviews from all but the snootiest critics and played to sold-out houses for over a year.
 
We can only speculate how the Cinerama saga would have shaken out if Nicolas Reisini — or someone else with his energy and ingenuity — had taken the process in hand back in 1953. Things might have been very different. On the other hand, Cinerama might have died in its cradle; the process’s astronomical operating costs might have undone Nicolas Reisini in the mid-’50s — because they were what undid him now. 
 
How the West Was Won — which went on to snag eight Oscar nominations, including best picture, and to win three (original screenplay, editing, sound) — was universally acknowledged in 1963 as the best movie ever made in Cinerama. And it’s still the best — because it was the last. While the movie cleaned up at the box office, the problem was the same old bugaboo: as much as 80-90 percent of the take went to the overhead expenses of running the theaters. Reisini had wagered $13.5 milllion on Brothers Grimm and HTWWW (Cinerama’s share of the production costs), and when all was said and done, the profits didn’t begin to cover his bet.
 
Not all of HTWWW had been shot with the three-lens Cinerama camera. There were some stock shots inserted from MGM’s Raintree County (1957), which had been shot in MGM Camera 65 (actually a variety of Panavision), and John Wayne’s The Alamo (’60), which had been in Todd-AO. In both cases, the original one-frame negative had been split optically into thirds to run through the three Cinerama projectors. Also, a number of risky shots — Karl Malden and Carroll Baker battling the river rapids on their raft, for example, or Eli Wallach clinging to the undercarriage of a runaway train — were done using back-projections, which couldn’t be shot in true Cinerama; instead, they were shot in UltraPanavision (which combined 70mm film stock with a slight anamorphic squeeze) and, again, split optically. This was the penultimate nail in the coffin of three-frame Cinerama. Look [the word went], we used Panavision in all these shots in HTWWW and nobody noticed the difference. (That wasn’t true, by the way; there was a sharp degradation of photographic quality. It’s just that the scenes were so exciting nobody minded.)  Still, with cash-flow problems hammering at the door, Reisini saw no choice but to trim overhead by abandoning three-screen exhibition. He ordered a stop to all research into perfecting Cinerama (I’ll get into that next time) and announced that henceforth all “Cinerama” pictures would be shot in UltraPanavision.
 

It wasn’t enough to save his job. Enter William Forman of Pacific Theatres. Several of his theaters had installed Cinerama equipment, and Forman jumped in with both feet in February ’63: for $15 million he bought up the note Prudential Insurance Co. held from their 1959 loan of $12 million, and with it he acquired a series of stock options, all of which he excercised, to the point where he replaced Nicolas Reisini as president and CEO in December ’63. Reisini remained as chairman of the board for the time being, but in September ’64, with Cinerama Inc. teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, he resigned even from that, effective immediately. 

William Forman was now in charge, and Pacific Theatres retains control of Cinerama to this day. Forman ratified Reisini’s abandonment of the three-screen Cinerama process, and from that point on Cinerama became a releasing rather than a producing corporation. There has never been another feature produced in Cinerama; pictures bearing the name — It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; Khartoum; Grand Prix; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Ice Station Zebra; etc. — were actually in UltraPanavision, using the familiar accordion-fold logo to evoke the magic of Fred Waller’s process that was no more, to an audience that had heard of but never seen the real thing.
 

Next time: The technology of Cinerama…
 

Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 5

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In his 1977 memoir So Long Until Tomorrow, the 85-year-old Lowell Thomas — with nearly a quarter-century of frustrated hindsight — remembered the Stanley Warner deal thus:
 

“Our original group of founders had dwindled — Fred Waller, the gentle, bespectacled genius who started it all, had died before he even knew of his triumph; Mike Todd was busily hustling and working with American Optical on the process to be called Todd A-O … Arrayed against [Frank Smith], Merian Cooper and me were men of wealth who had gone into Cinerama solely for the investment possibilities, and at this critical juncture, either unwilling to go looking for the additional cash or simply ready to take their already large profits, they opted to sell out.

“The buyer was the Stanley-Warner company, and from a purely practical viewpoint, maybe the decision was not all wrong. In making it we all made a lot of money. But the bells began tolling for Cinerama then and there. Stanley-Warner was a brassiere manufacturing corporation, plus owners of a major theater chain. But they were not film producers … They didn’t really know what Cinerama was all about.”

Thomas’s memory wasn’t flawless. “Stanley Warner” wasn’t hyphenated, and “Todd-AO” was. Fred Waller lived long enough to know his triumph and collect an Oscar for it; he died in May 1954, nine months after the Stanley Warner deal was approved by the court.  And Stanley Warner wasn’t “a brassiere manufacturing company”. Not yet. They didn’t purchase the International Latex Corporation (maker of, among other things, the Playtex Living Bra) until April 1954, a year after buying their six-year control of Cinerama Productions Corp. (This expansion from theater operation to ladies’ undies and baby pants was an early example of the kind of diversification that ultimately led to the entertainment conglomerates of today.)

But Thomas’s basic point was well taken. The folks at Stanley Warner, it’s true, were not film producers. And despite S.H. Fabian’s advocacy of alternate entertainment technologies — he was an early proponent of drive-in theaters, 3-D, and closed-circuit theatrical television — he really didn’t know what Cinerama was all about. Even if nobody heard it at the time, the bells were definitely tolling.

Thomas can be forgiven a certain amount of bitterness. By May 1954, Stanley Warner had managed to open only seven new Cinerama theaters and had yet to complete a follow-up feature to This Is Cinerama; yet they had managed to scrape up $15 million ($166.18 million in 2022) to buy International Latex. Moreover, in the next four years SW would lavish far more care and resources on International Latex, where profit margins were high and they were not under the thumb of the U.S. Justice Dept. Small wonder that, decades later, Thomas remembered SW being already in the brassiere business when Cinerama came along.

Stanley Warner was contractually obligated to produce a picture within the first year, and their original plan was the same as Cinerama’s before them: to involve one of the major studios in making Cinerama pictures. In early August, even before the court approved the buyout, talks were held with Columbia, Paramount and Warner Bros. All came to nothing, including a proposed picture about the Lewis and Clark expedition to star Gregory Peck and Clark Gable as the great explorers (excellent casting, that).

With the success of The Robe, studios began stampeding to CinemaScope in preference to the more expensive Cinerama, and any chance of a deal in that direction evaporated. SW negotiated with Merian Cooper, who was thinking of molding Paul Mantz’s 200,000 feet of aerial footage into a picture to be called Seven Wonders of the World, but talks broke down when they couldn’t agree on a completion schedule.

So Stanley Warner turned to producer Louis de Rochemont, who had experience in both documentary (We Are the Marines, the March of Time newsreel shorts) and fiction filmmaking (The House on 92nd Street, Boomerang!). De Rochemont had an idea that combined the two: follow one pair of American newlyweds as they honeymooned in Europe, and another European pair as they honeymooned across America. The Thrill of Your Life began shooting in December 1953 with John and Betty Marsh of Kansas City, Mo. and Fred and Beatrice Troller of Zurich, Switzerland touring the Cineramic stops on their respective honeymoon tours. Production wrapped in June ’54 and, with the title changed to Cinerama Holiday, the picture was ready for release by the August deadline.
 
But Stanley Warner held off on releasing Holiday. By this time there were 11 Cinerama theaters in operation, and This Is Cinerama was still playing to sold-out houses everywhere — even in New York, where it was nearly two years old. Why cut a thriving box office short when there was still a lot of money to be made?
 
And here’s where Cinerama’s can of corporate worms came home to roost — if you’ll forgive a mixed metaphor. At one end of the corporate arrangement was Vitarama and Cinerama Inc.; at the other end was Cinerama Productions — now a mere holding company for Stanley Warner Cinerama, but with its own stockholders. And in between was Stanley Warner. 
 
Cinerama Inc. made most of its money from the equipping of Cinerama theaters — the sale or lease of equipment and supplying of replacement parts — and was annoyed that Stanley Warner wasn’t opening theaters at a quicker pace. The remaining investors in Cinerama Productions were annoyed that SW wasn’t opening more theaters and producing a steadier stream of pictures to show in them. And Stanley Warner, who had to put up all the money for both the theaters and the pictures but had to share almost half of any profits (when operating costs alone could eat up as much as 90 percent of gross ticket sales), was beginning to wonder if investing in the process had been such a good idea in the first place. The cracks among the partners in Cinerama were beginning to show, and were the subject of chatter in the trade press.
 
The general public, however, saw none of this. All they knew, if they hadn’t seen This Is Cinerama yet, was that Cinerama was the miraculous more-than-a-movie that everybody was talking about. If they had seen it, all they knew was that the theater was jam-packed, at top-dollar prices; if they saw it more than once, showing that their own enthusiasm hadn’t dimmed, they saw that nobody else’s had either. And when Cinerama Holiday finally opened in February 1955, the box office didn’t fall off a dime. Movie houses in towns or neighborhoods may bring in picture after picture in CinemaScope, but to the public Cinerama was the gold standard. More than a movie, indeed — it was a tourist attraction.
 
There had been talk of plans to expand Cinerama into foreign countries almost from the first opening in September 1952, but nothing had ever come of that idea. In the spring of 1954, Stanley Warner sought to farm out the foreign exhibition rights — find somebody who would foot the bill for overseas expansion and pay SW for the privilege. After three months of negotiations, S.H. Fabian hammered out a deal with Nicolas Reisini, president of Robin International.
 

Neither Robin International nor the Greek-born Reisini had any experience in the movie business. Robin International was reportedly an import/export company, although exactly what it imported and exported wasn’t clear. Nothing shady, mind you, it’s just that Reisini seems to have had his fingers in a bewildering number of pies — none of them having anything to do with the movie industry.

But there was another factor. According to his son Andrew (interviewed for David Strohmaier’s 2002 documentary Cinerama Adventure), Nicolas Reisini as a young man had seen the Paris premiere of Abel Gance’s Napoleon in 1927 and been spellbound — especially by Gance’s three-screen “Polyvision” triptych that climaxed the picture. When Reisini saw This Is Cinerama in New York in late ’52 or early ’53, it revived that youthful excitement and seemed to be the fulfillment of Gance’s earlier vision. Son Andrew says Reisini decided on the spot that he wanted to get in on Cinerama one way or another, and when Stanley Warner went looking for someone to buy foreign rights, Reisini was ready.

Reisini’s deal, announced in July 1954, licensed him to establish Cinerama theaters in any five cities (later amended to six) outside the western hemisphere. He ponied up a deposit of $500,000, to be refunded $100,000 at a time for each new theater as it opened. Robin International was responsible for all the expenses of converting and operating the theaters. And with this agreement, yet another corporation was added to the cluster of those already in place, each straining for its share of the trickle of profits that remained after Cinerama’s sky-high operating costs.
 
As things turned out, the first foreign showing of Cinerama — outside North America, that is; theaters in Toronto, Montreal and later Vancouver were considered “domestic” — wasn’t a permanent installation. It was in September ’54 at an international trade show in Damascus, Syria. This Is Cinerama was a huge success there, and again later that year at another fair in Bangkok, Thailand — where it was such a hit that it was held over an additional two weeks after the fair closed. (It was the Soviet Union’s fury at being upstaged in Damascus that led them to pirate their own three-screen process, which they called Kinopanorama. They couldn’t even come up with an original name for it.)
 
Robin International’s first “permanent” theater was the Casino in London, opening October 1, 1954. Reisini reduced his own expenses by sub-licensing to local exhibitor companies in each country, letting them shoulder the cost of converting and equipping the theater (more corporations, more straining for ever-thinning profits). That’s how it went when theaters opened in Japan (Tokyo and Osaka, January ’55), Italy (Milan, April ’55; and Rome, in May) and France (Paris, May ’55). 
 
Meanwhile, back home, Stanley Warner and Louis de Rochemont had fallen out over money — and SW’s reluctance to invest in perfecting the Cinerama process. De Rochemont stalked off to produce Windjammer: The Voyage of the Christian Radich in CineMiracle (a competing process just different enough to avoid infringing Cinerama’s patents). SW had enticed Lowell Thomas back to produce Seven Wonders of the World (revived after the departure of Merian Cooper). Shooting wrapped in June ’55, but as with This Is Cinerama before it, Cinerama Holiday was drawing so strongly that SW was in no hurry to release Seven Wonders (it finally opened in April 1956).
 
Buz Reeves at Cinerama Inc. finally lost patience with Stanley Warner’s dilatory production schedule. He charged SW with breach of contract and announced that Cinerama Inc. would produce its own picture, a documentary about the peaceful uses of atomic energy to be called The Eighth Day. But Reeves didn’t really have any leverage; any production would still be dependent on SW for theaters to show it in. The Eighth Day staggered along for over three years at a cost of $439,688 before being written off. (The Cinerama camera reportedly filmed the last above-ground nuclear test during this period, but the footage has mysteriously disappeared. Wouldn’t that be a sight to see!)
 
In the interim, Stanley Warner had produced two more travelogues, another one with Lowell Thomas (Search for Paradise, about India and the Himalayas), September ’57; and South Seas Adventure with producer Carl Dudley, narrated by Orson Welles, July ’58. 
 
And with that the Stanley Warner era at Cinerama came to a close, after four pictures in five years. (For the record, in that same time 20th Century Fox and the other Hollywood studios had produced 291 pictures in CinemaScope.) When the dust from the transition settled, the new big cheese at Cinerama Inc. was none other than our starry-eyed friend Nicolas Reisini. He was an adroit wheeler-dealer who loved Cinerama and had a genuine vision for the process, and he would accomplish things that nobody before him had been able to do. But he would also fall victim to Cinerama’s chronic cash-flow problems, and in the end he presided over the process’s march into oblivion. 
 
I’ll get into that next time, then I’ll add a brief coda about the mechanics of Cinerama, and efforts to perfect Fred Waller’s revolutionary invention.
 

To be concluded…
 

Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 4

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Remember all those movie-industry honchos trekking out to Oyster Bay to see Cinerama? One of them was Joseph M. Schenck, chairman of the board of 20th Century Fox. Like everybody else, Schenck passed on Cinerama, but as he did so he added ruefully: “I’ll be buying this process someday, and it will cost me ten times as much.”
 
Fox president Spyros Skouras spared Schenck the embarrassment of that. Skouras had gone out to Oyster Bay too, and been impressed, but he allowed Fox’s research department to talk him out of buying into Cinerama. Now, as This Is Cinerama‘s sensational debut woke Hollywood from its slumber, Skouras turned to his research department, saying in effect: You blew this one, boys; you’d better make it good.
 
They did. Digging back, they came up with a process a French professor named Henri Chretien had tried unsuccessfully to peddle in Hollywood back in the ’20s. He called it Anamorphoscope, and it involved using what Chretien called a “hypergonar” lens on the camera to squash a wide angle of view onto standard 35mm film, then a compensating lens on the projector to stretch it back out again. The good news was that Chretien’s patent had expired in 1951 and Anamorphoscope was now in the public domain; the bad news was that Chretien had the only set of lenses. Long story short, Skouras tracked Prof. Chretien to his home in Nice, reached an agreement for the use of his lenses (which were later refined and reproduced by Bausch & Lomb back in the States), and in February 1953 Skouras announced the process under a new name, CinemaScope (whoever came up with that replacement for “Anamorphoscope” surely earned his pay for the week!).
 
The first CinemaScope picture was to be Fox’s Biblical epic The Robe (pre-production was already underway, but was suspended to retool for the new process), and henceforth every 20th Century Fox picture would be shot in CinemaScope. Skouras and studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck encouraged other studios to sign on with their “new” process. MGM and Walt Disney took the bait at once; other studios hung back, exploring their own wide screen options.
 

Early ads for CinemaScope, like the one I’ve reproduced here, emphasized a resemblance to both Cinerama and 3-D (“It’s the miracle you see without glasses!”) that didn’t really exist. While CinemaScope did originally call for a curved screen, most theaters didn’t bother with that. Even in The Robe‘s first-run engagements, the curve was much shallower than in this ad, and nowhere near as deep as Cinerama’s. (A good thing, too: you have to feel sorry for that poor sucker on the left end of the seventh row — what kind of view could he have had?) Anybody who compared Cinerama and CinemaScope side-by-side (so to speak) could see there was no real comparison. But in truth, most moviegoers couldn’t do that. Among Hollywood professionals, CinemaScope didn’t have to be as good as Cinerama, as long as they could sell it that way to the millions who hadn’t yet seen the real McCoy. Besides, it was still a huge change from movies-as-usual, and something folks couldn’t get on those newfangled 17-inch black and white TV screens in their living rooms.

And it was relatively cheap. While the Cinerama people did their best to lowball the estimated cost of converting a theater, the truth was it could run as high as $200,000. Moreover, hundreds of seats could be lost either to make room for the three projection booths or because of unacceptable viewing angles, thus limiting potential revenue. Conversely, CinemaScope (Fox promised) could be installed with no loss of seats, and for the mere cost of a set of lenses, a new screen, and a three-channel magnetic sound system — a sizeable investment, yes, but nothing like the fortune needed for Cinerama. (This is a good time to remind you that we’re talking about Eisenhower dollars here; to get a sense of 2022 equivalents, you should multiply by about 11.25 — $2,250,000.)

Fox mounted an aggressive and well-organized campaign to promote CinemaScope (Skouras was battling a hostile takeover, so ‘Scope had to succeed), and in the end it would effectively sink Cinerama Productions Corp.’s hopes of partnering with one of the major studios. Even as early as March and April ’53, when Fox began holding nationwide demonstrations of CinemaScope for industry and press, Cinerama was feeling the pinch. Not only were leads on new investment drying up, but some contractually committed investors were backing out, citing a “changed circumstances” escape clause in their contracts. Cinerama still had only three venues in the world (a fourth, the Palace in Chicago, wouldn’t open until July due to a protracted haggle with the local projectionists’ union). Cinerama Productions Corp. had to find funding to supplement their high-overhead box-office take if they were going to open more theaters and maintain a foothold in the market they had created, to say nothing of producing follow-up features to This Is Cinerama.

They considered their options. A public stock offering was one, but sales of Cinerama Inc. stock had already been less than expected. Another possibility was to seek financial participation from a theater circuit rather than a studio, and they decided on that. A logical choice for such an arrangement was the Stanley Warner Corporation, since Cinerama had already been dealing with them: the newly Cineramified Warner Theatre in Los Angeles was theirs, and This Is Cinerama was slated to move from the Broadway Theatre to New York’s Warner in June 1953 (the Shubert brothers wanted their house back).

Before we go on, a clarification: “Stanley Warner” wasn’t a person. How the name came about (as simple as I can make it) was this: Stanley Warner’s president was S.H. Fabian, who had gotten into the theater business in his father’s small circuit of houses in New Jersey in the 1920s. In 1926 Fabian Theatres merged with another chain, Stanley Company of America. Two years later that circuit was acquired by Warner Bros. for the exhibition of their pictures, and Fabian partnered with one Samuel Rosen to rebuild his own chain in New York State, Fabian Enterprises. In the early 1950s, when federal antitrust action compelled the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains, Fabian went to Harry, Albert and Jack Warner to (essentially) buy his old theaters back. The corporation he formed for this might have been called Fabian Rosen, or Warner Fabian, but instead it was Stanley Warner.
 

As the corporate heir (as it were) to Warner Bros. Theatres, Stanley Warner became a party to the federal suit’s consent decree, and needed approval from federal court (and by extension the U.S. Dept. of Justice) for any venture into movie production, distribution or exhibition. That included any agreement with Cinerama Productions Corp., so it added yet another layer of negotiation. A tentative agreement for Stanley Warner to take over Cinerama theater operations was announced in May 1953, but there were a multitude of details to work out. Cinerama Productions’ licensing agreement with Cinerama Inc. ran only through 1956, so Stanley Warner wanted a two-year extension of that to help recoup their investment. They also wanted control of production and distribution as well as exhibition, to ensure a steady flow of pictures for the theaters. Meanwhile, Cinerama Productions was behind in payments to Cinerama Inc. for equipment, so Cinerama Inc. wanted at least something towards that before any talk about extending the license. And the Dept. of Justice had their own demands before they’d recommend court approval.

It took three months of intense dickering to sort this all out, with the clock ticking — if court approval wasn’t received by August 15, the whole deal was off. They finally made it with four days to spare, and the deal was this: For a little over $2.5 million, Stanley Warner essentially bought control of Cinerama Productions Corp. through 1958, adding yet another layer to the corporate tangle with its wholly-owned subsidiary Stanley Warner Cinerama. They would produce at least five Cinerama pictures but (the feds insisted) no more than 15. For each feature they could also produce a conventional 35mm version, but (again, per the feds) could not exhibit the 35mm versions in any of the Cinerama theaters. And — yet again, here was the hand of the U.S. Dept. of Justice — Stanley Warner could open no more than 24 Cinerama theaters in the United States. (So much for Dudley Roberts’s dream of a hundred theaters getting six to eight pictures a year.)

A month later, on September 16, 1953, The Robe premiered to respectful reviews and boffo box office. 20th Century Fox had three more CinemaScope pictures ready to go, MGM had one, and dozens more were in various states of production at one studio or another. Spyros Skouras’s gamble had paid off in a big way. 

After that, things started getting complicated.
 

Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 3

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Lowell Thomas decided right off the bat — and Merian Cooper, when he came aboard, concurred — that the star of the first Cinerama picture would be Cinerama itself. “If Charlie Chaplin had offered to do Hamlet for us,” Thomas remembered, “I’d have turned him down. I didn’t want people judging Chaplin or rediscovering Shakespeare…The advent of something as new and important as Cinerama was a major event in the history of entertainment and I was determined to let nothing upstage it.” In other words, This Is Cinerama wasn’t a movie, it was a demonstration, just like Waller and Reeves’s screenings at their tennis court command post in Oyster Bay. The difference this time was that the presentation was more organized and formal, with tuxedo-clad personnel escorting the audience to their seats — and it was in Technicolor. (Mostly, anyhow; when opening night loomed and the feature was still a little short, Thomas and Cooper decided to splice in Waller’s black-and-white clip of the Long Island Choral Society singing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus — it made a good demo of the sound system, with an invisible choir marching down the aisles of the theater before coming into view on the screen.) So in a sense, Cinerama was exactly where it was before the opening — only now the whole world was watching. 
 
The first new development, barely three weeks after the premiere, was the appointment of Louis B. Mayer as chairman of the board of Cinerama Productions Corp. (with Lowell Thomas stepping down to vice-chairman). There was a certain irony in this; Mayer was one of the movie industry figures who trooped out to Long Island for those demonstrations, only to take a pass on investing. Back then, Mayer had been probably the most powerful man in Hollywood, but this was now. In the interim there had been that ugly power struggle at MGM between Mayer and Dore Schary, ending in a humiliating palace coup that sent Mayer packing in July 1951. By October ’52, Mayer was restless in forced retirement, and Cinerama looked like his passport back into the business. For Cinerama it was a windfall in both money (Mayer’s personal investment reportedly amounted to over $1 million) and prestige: Mayer’s status as a pioneer and longtime chief of the Tiffany of Hollywood studios gave an aura of solidity to Cinerama, and his reputation for showbiz acumen was expected to reassure and attract investors. He brought along some possible material, too: Mayer personally held the screen rights to several properties. One of them, Blossom Time, a moldy Viennese operetta of the sort Mayer had once so lovingly dusted off for Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, would never do. But others might work very nicely, like the Lerner and Loewe musical Paint Your Wagon and the Biblical epic Joseph and His Brethren.
 
There was a flurry of announcements in trade papers. Dudley Roberts, president of Cinerama Productions, said Cinerama would open theaters in 100 cities, to be supplied with six to eight full-length features a year. Merian Cooper, now head of production, promised that Cinerama would either buy or build its own studio in Hollywood. (Might Cooper have had his eye on RKO? The studio was then in the process of being run into the ground by Howard Hughes, and ripe for the picking. If so, it didn’t happen; when RKO finally sold it went first to General Tire and Rubber Co., then to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, who renamed it Desilu.)
 

The first dramatic Cinerama picture, Cooper said, would begin shooting within two months with himself producing and directing, followed within a year by a second feature, probably directed by Cooper’s Argosy Films partner John Ford. (As it happened, Ford didn’t work in Cinerama until almost ten years later, and he wasn’t happy with it or well suited, contributing the shortest and weakest episode of How the West Was Won.)

An array of productions were considered, and some even announced. Paint Your Wagon. Tolstoy’s War and Peace. A remake of King Kong. Lawrence of Arabia (this would have been a much different picture from the one we eventually got; Lowell Thomas didn’t much care for David Lean’s 1962 take on his old friend). Paul Mantz climbed back in the cockpit of his converted B-25 and shot another 200,000 feet, at a cost of $500,000, without anybody knowing when or how it would be used.

Some of Mantz’s footage eventually wound up in Seven Wonders of the World (’56). But as for all those other ambitious plans, none of them ever came to pass.

Part of the reason was L.B. Mayer himself. Biographer Scott Eyman speculates that Mayer’s enthusiasm for Cinerama was never that great in the first place; he may have been clinging to the forlorn hope that his exile from MGM was only temporary, intending Cinerama as a base from which to stage a return to Culver City. Whatever his intentions, the battle with Dore Schary had left him, in Lowell Thomas’s words, “aging, tired [and] unable to make up his mind about anything.” (Eyman memorably quotes writer Gavin Lambert, who covered Mayer at the time, in almost the same words: “He was an aging, tired man in a dark suit, who looked like a businessman but was actually an exiled emperor.”) Mayer eventually left Cinerama, though sources vary on exactly when. Eyman dates Mayer’s departure to November 1954; Thomas Erffmeyer’s history implies (and an article in the Winter 1992 issue of The Perfect Vision says outright) that it may have been as early as May ’53. In any event, Cinerama Productions Corp. produced nothing under Mayer’s chairmanship, and frittered away much of its early momentum. 

Another major factor was the Byzantine corporate structure under which Cinerama operated. It was in fact three separate but complexly interrelated entities: 
 
Vitarama Corporation. This was the original corporation set up by Fred Waller and Ralph Walker in 1938, when Waller designed that petroleum industry exhibit for the 1939 World’s Fair (which was never used, and which morphed into the Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer). A private corporation owned by Waller (43 percent), Walker (14 percent) and Laurance Rockefeller (43 percent, an interest Rockefeller retained when he sold his interest in Cinerama to Buz Reeves in 1950), Vitarama owned all the basic Cinerama patents and received a percentage of the box office take.
 
Cinerama Inc. This corporation, created in the wake of the dissolution of Cinerama Corp. in August 1950, manufactured the equipment for Cinerama — cameras, projectors, screens, sound systems, etc. This was the only publicly-traded of the three Cinerama corporations, but only about 16 percent of stock was available to the general public. The controlling stockholder was Buz Reeves, through his personal stock and stock belonging to Reeves Soundcraft. Cinerama Inc. received an initial 25 percent share of theatrical profits from the process, to decline over (presumably prosperous) time to a flat 10 percent. Cinerama Inc. also held the production and exhibition rights to the process, which it sub-licensed to…
 
Cinerama Productions Corporation. Privately owned like Vitarama Corp., this was the successor corporation created when Mike Todd was squeezed out of Thomas-Todd Productions. Lowell Thomas was originally chairman of the board; president was Dudley M. Roberts, a Wall Street broker who joined the crew — and brought along a cadre of other investors willing to buy in — once the loose cannon Todd was out of the picture. This was the corporation that enlisted, and later regretted, Louis B. Mayer.
 
The financial arrangements among these corporations were a real can of worms: Cinerama Productions Corp. paid profit royalties to Cinerama Inc., which paid a percentage of those to Vitarama Corp., which licensed the manufacture and use of its equipment to Cinerama Inc., which sub-licensed production and exhibition to Cinerama Productions, which bought the equipment for its theaters from Cinerama Inc. 
 
In the flurry of excitement after the premiere of This Is Cinerama, the price of Cinerama Inc. stock had soared from $4.00 to $8.00 a share. But when investors, who thought they were buying into “Cinerama”, realized they were buying stock in the manufacturing company while most profits would go to the production company, the price fell back to $5.25. Some brokerage houses cautioned against Cinerama Inc. as a “speculation”, and stock-sale income dropped off accordingly.
 
Besides which, Cinerama was a high-overhead operation — requiring, for example, 12 to 16 projectionists, plus a technician to channel the six soundtracks into the appropriate surround speakers, and a “theater engineer” manning a master-board overseeing the synchronization of the whole operation. While the box-office take was huge, profits were minimal, and it was the profits that trickled over to Cinerama Inc. and Vitarama Corp. Moreover, it was profits from which Cinerama Productions Corp. needed to buy the equipment to convert additional theaters to the process.
 
All these factors contributed to cash-flow problems for the three Cinerama companies, and it made Cinerama Productions, which was both taking in and spending most of the cash, ripe for a takeover. And that’s just what happened in the spring of 1953, even as two new Cinerama theaters held triumphant openings in Detroit (the Music Hall on March 23) and Los Angeles (the Warner, April 29). I’ll get into that takeover next time. 
 
Two other players entered the game about this time, and they put some new wrinkles on the playing surface. One was 3-D, which actually came along (with the surprise hit Bwana Devil) before This Is Cinerama opened; in the sudden interest in movies-with-a-difference, 3-D began to look like a cheaper alternative to Cinerama, and a number of studios grasped at it. As things turned out, 3-D fizzled within the year and wouldn’t make a real comeback for another half-century. 
 
The other player, though, dealt a serious blow to Cinerama’s plans for development and expansion. It was something the Cinerama boys (especially Waller, with his background in photography) might have seen coming, but they didn’t: