Nuts and Bolts of the Rollercoaster
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.

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. Take this frame from the last scene of How the West Was Won, flying under the Golden Gate Bridge. This is taken from the DVD; the join lines have been digitally erased, and the “elbows” in the bridge (quite pronounced in the theater) have been rounded out — but the digital wizards couldn’t do anything about how the three lenses saw the bridge. 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 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.
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.
Jim, I agree with Ruth: with all the work you've put in on this fascinating, riveting series, I think it's well worth putting together and marketing a CINERAMA book. I say put together a synopsis and go for it! For that matter, I'd make make sure it had plenty of pictures, too! Now I'm off to read your next installment! 🙂
I just an online search for a book on Cinerama, and all I can find is a Lowell Thomas' paperback, "This is Cinerama". So, what do you suppose this means? It means that you are poised to write a book about Cinerama. You've already done the research; you just need to put in book format.