New Cinerama Is Just Part Of The Big-Screen Revival -- Popular Movies Again Feature Really Big Picture

The big-screen movie experience, created largely to combat television in the 1950s, is definitely here to stay.

The most popular pictures of the past year - "Titanic," "Armageddon," "Saving Private Ryan" - have all been big-screen movies. They're not quite the same on video. Indeed, some Academy Award experts think "Ryan" lost the best picture Oscar because too many Academy voters saw it on tape, where its riveting battle sequences were diminished.

"Titanic" was the last movie to play the Cinerama when it closed its doors last year. Paul Allen, who purchased the theater for $3.75 million, then began his multi-million-dollar remodeling job. With two huge screens, two separate sound systems and various other technical improvements, it may be the most spectacularly versatile movie theater in the world.

It opens to the public at 11 a.m. Friday, with continuous screenings of the 70mm restoration of "Lawrence of Arabia," which plays two days only as part of a Columbia Pictures retrospective. IMAX influential

Multiplexes, which used to have the dinkiest auditoriums, now heavily promote their huge screens and THX sound systems. Indeed, some of them have added super-70mm IMAX auditoriums, thanks to the blockbuster success of such IMAX productions as "Everest," which could be the first IMAX movie to hit a $100 million gross, and "T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous."

While this hasn't yet happened in Seattle, our city will soon have three IMAX theaters operating on a daily basis.

Pacific Science Center has just announced that, due to the crowds that pack the Boeing IMAX theater to see "Everest" and the IMAX 3-D movie, "Into the Deep," it will reopen its old Eames IMAX Theater for the summer. The Eames had been scheduled for conversion to other Science Center uses, but it will be back June 1 and throughout the summer with a new IMAX production, "Wolves." Cinerama has own magic

Still, the name IMAX, which first caught on in the 1970s, doesn't yet carry the magical associations of Cinerama, which has been with us much longer. The original three-projector Cinerama process premiered in New York in 1952, and made its Seattle debut in 1956 at the Paramount Theater.

Our Cinerama theater, the only one in the Northwest that was built especially for the original three-projector system, opened in January 1963. It actually showed only two films that were shot in the process: "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm," an uninspired children's entertainment that lasted just a few months, and "How the West Was Won," an Oscar-winning all-star epic that opened in April 1963 and closed in April 1964.

After that, the theater converted to the single-projector Cinerama process, which can be impressive but lacks the visceral impact of the three-projector system. When the single-projector Cinerama process was phased out in 1969, it somehow didn't hurt the theater's reputation. No matter what was projected there, it seemed to be enhanced by the curved screen and the womb-like auditorium.

Allen's multimillion-dollar remodel is wired to accommodate a new technology, Electronic Cinema, that can project a movielike image without using celluloid at all. It also has the extra booths needed to project three-strip Cinerama, and a separate sound system for those presentations.

The latest high-tech features include movie poster displays that move and a marquee that can be controlled from the manager's office. The theater is equipped with the latest digital sound systems, plus a wave-shaped ceiling designed to improve the acoustics. Sound consultant Neil Grant worked on this setup; the Cinerama claims the acoustics rival any symphony hall.

Purple curtains and red sound baffles dominate the auditorium, while the lobby has been completely redesigned with wheelchair access in mind (for more about the theater's handicapped-friendly features, see Melanie McFarland's Backstage Pass column tomorrow in the Times' Ticket section.)

Memories varnish reality

Over the years, a kind of benign hallucination has lent a legendary quality to the Cinerama. I've talked to a number of people, some of them film critics with long memories, who claim to have watched movies at the Cinerama that they could not have seen there. People seem to want to remember seeing a favorite film there, even if they didn't.

Just in the past few weeks, it's been reported in the press that the original "Star Wars" opened there in 1977, though the now-defunct United Artists Cinema 150 actually enjoyed that privilege. One critic claimed to have seen "Apocalypse Now" there during its first run (it opened at the Town, which was demolished years ago).

Another claimed that his father had taken him to see "2001: A Space Odyssey" there in three-projector Cinerama. But it was never presented that way because it wasn't filmed that way. Under other circumstances, "2001" and "Star Wars" did play the Cinerama. The single-projector "2001" had its longest first-run engagement at the Cinerama, lasting from May 1968 to November 1969; in New York City it played for only nine months.

And the 1997 reissue of "Star Wars" did so well at the Cinerama that it became obvious that the theater itself was a major draw. It outgrossed all other theaters in the Northwest that were playing the film. This led to reconsideration of plans to close the theater, and Allen's purchase of it.

Bookings impressive

The new Cinerama has already lined up an impressive list of must-see wide-screen specials. Over the next few weeks, we'll get a chance to see the restored 70mm print of "Lawrence of Arabia," along with Steven Spielberg's "definitive" version of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (never screened here before) and a new 70mm print of the long-unavailable 1959 movie of George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess."

("Porgy" will be part of the Seattle International Film Festival's opening weekend. Next year, the festival will be involved in the restoration of original three-projector Cinerama productions. Among the glorified travelogues produced in the process: "This Is Cinerama," "Cinerama Holiday," "Seven Wonders of the World," "Search For Paradise" and "South Seas Adventure." The only conventional narrative films were "Brothers Grimm" and "How the West Was Won.")

Of course "Star Wars" fans are hoping that "Episode 1: The Phantom Menace," which makes its debut May 16 at the Cinerama as a pricey benefit, will take up much more screen time there.

If it does end up there, it will most likely tie up the Cinerama for the rest of the year. And while it's great to have a crowd-pleaser guaranteed to fill a theater, it makes some moviegoers impatient for the next attraction at such a showcase. The same kind of problem is transforming the Pacific Science Center into a kind of IMAX multiplex.

"3-D has been so successful, and `Everest' so popular, that we've decided to expand our offerings through the summer," said Diane Carlson, longtime programmer of the Science Center IMAX shows.

"In addition to `Wolves' at the Eames Theater, we'll be adding `Everest' late shows, Friday and Saturday nights at 9:45 p.m."

The next 3-D film at the Boeing auditorium will be either "Mark Twain" or "T-Rex," though Carlson can't predict when they will arrive. The same goes for such Oscar-nominated 2-D IMAX movies as "Amazon" and "Cosmic Voyage," which have played Vancouver, B.C., but not Seattle.

"It's a juggling act right now," she said. "We've had only six weeks' experience with 3-D programming, but we hope to have more flexibility so we can get additional films. We're looking at lots of options."

Among the 2-D movies under consideration are "Dolphins," "Island of the Sharks" and Disney's feature-length update of "Fantasia," which is due January in IMAX theaters only.

Seattle's other IMAX theater, the Omnidome, continues to show "Whales," "Alaska: Spirit of the Wild," "The Living Sea" and "The Eruption of Mount St. Helens" on Pier 59.

-------------------- Hartl's Top 10 Cinerama experiences --------------------

"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968, 1969, 1970). It had the longest run of any film to play the Cinerama and it kept on coming back, often to fill in when a first-run movie flopped. Altogether, I think I saw it seven times there, more than once from front-row center, where the sense of weightlessness during the zero-gravity scenes seemed quite genuine.

"Lawrence of Arabia" (1989 restoration). Although I'd seen the movie in flat-screen 70mm at the Fox Theater in Portland when it was first released in the early 1960s, it had already been severely cut. It looked and played better at the Cinerama, not just because of the restored scenes, but because of the slight peripheral effect the curved screen gave to the hallucinatory desert sequences.

"Vertigo" (1996 restoration). Filmed in an early 70mm process called VistaVision, Hitchcock's 1958 classic was fully restored with a controversially juiced-up Dolby soundtrack. Some purists hated it, but I thought the stereo rendition of Bernard Herrmann's great score added to the film's hypnotic quality. So did the enveloping curve of the Cinerama's screen.

"Days of Heaven" (1982 reissue). Terrence Malick's 1978 classic wasn't filmed in 70mm, but it's surely the loveliest blow-up from 35mm to 70mm ever created. William Friedkin was so impressed that he tried it with a reissue of "The Exorcist," but the result was murky and grainy. Malick's film is arguably the most beautiful movie ever made, and it never looked more stunning than it did in 70mm.

"West Side Story" (1980s reissue). The 70mm print was faded and scratchy at times, but the relatively primitive early-1960s six-track stereo sounded wonderful. And certain sequences, especially the "Dance at the Gym" and the opening "Jet Song," could not have been more effective.

"Ben-Hur" (1980s reissue). Unfortunately, the original 70mm version was shown only once at the Cinerama, as part of a festival midnight marathon. Filmed in the obsolete Camera 65 process, it's one of the widest movies ever made - three times wider than it is high - and the chariot race has never seemed more harrowing. (A ghastly, chopped-up 35mm revival played the Cinerama for a regular run in the early 1970s; almost an hour was missing, and the intermission was placed in the middle of the race.)

"Oklahoma!" (1980s reissue). One of two major-studio 70mm movies that were shot in the original Todd-AO process at 30 frames per second, Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical looked and sounded spectacular in this restoration. The other Todd-AO film is "Around the World in 80 Days," which has never been restored and is apparently beyond salvaging.

"Grand Prix" (1966). Director John Frankenheimer is a whiz with racing cars, as he proved last year with "Ronin," and he designed this three-hour racing epic for the single-projector Cinerama process. The movie is a complete wash-out on television, but I still remember jamming my feet into the nonexistent brakes on the Cinerama's floor.

"That's Entertainment!" (1974). Originally shown in 70mm, MGM's love letter to its own musical history looked especially grand on the Cinerama's screen, where the psychedelic ballet from 1951's "An American in Paris" and the jaw-droppingly lavish big number from 1936's "The Great Ziegfeld" looked as if they had been designed to be presented in Cinerama.

"How the West Was Won" (1963). It's hardly a great film, but it's easily the best three-projector Cinerama movie ever made. The action sequences, which look ridiculously distorted when the three film strips are lined up and mismatched on television, are truly exciting when they're presented as they were meant to be. Seattle's Cinerama hopes to bring the three-projector version back next year.

- John Hartl