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The Birth of an Idea
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Written
by: Ralph Walker,
1953 |
Date:
26.10.2010 |
Ralph Walker, architect
An architect had a unique conception of a building for a client at the
World's Fair of 1939 in New York. That concept had a profound influence
on the evolution of what became known as the entertainment wonder,
Cinerama. The story is told by the architect himself. Ralph Walker is
well known in his field for many imposing structures, including
telephone company buildings and oil research laboratories. He is a
member of the firm of Voorhees, Walker, Foley & Smith.
I THINK I SHOULD say at the very outset that this brief article is in no
way intended to detract from Fred Waller's impressive originality of
thought and surely the no less impressive persistence that has
culminated in the successful presentation of his Cinerama. But
inventions of this kind never spring fully-developed from one mind
alone, pondering in splendid seclusion. They are the result of years of
toil, of trial and error and trial again. Often the difference between
success and failure is the discovery of a single clue, a key that
unlocks the entire riddle. Waller and I had the good fortune to meet at
a moment when I happened to be carrying just the key he needed.
For some years Fred had been trying to impart to films a complete
illusion of reality. From his background in special effects photography,
combined with his innate genius for all things photographic, he had been
approaching the problem from the direction of the wide-angle lens and
multiple images on an extra-wide screen. Through actual experimentation
he had arrived at the conclusion that much of our perception of depth is
based in fact on what he calls "peripheral vision," those fleeting
glances we catch out of the corners of our eyes. The obstacle, the
stumbling block in the way of attaining peripheral vision on an ordinary
wide screen was the fact that such a screen, to provide all the
environmental details required to complete the illusion, would have to
be the width of a city block. But all of his experiments had been upon
the ordinary, flat screen, the screen that had been universally accepted
as standard until the advent of Cinerama.
As an architect, I had been concerned with a remarkably similar problem
for a number of years before we met. In 1929 I was commissioned by
Curtis Bok, the Philadelphia philanthropist and patron of music, to draw
up plans for a new auditorium, an ideal theatre for the presentation of
symphonies and opera. To me this was an exciting challenge. All too
often such an assignment is hedged about with all sorts of restrictions—
usually, getting the maximum number of chairs into the minimum amount of
space. Here, on the contrary, I was asked to create an auditorium the
only specifications for which were that it provide the finest acoustics
and the best sight lines possible.
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More
in 70mm reading:
The Entire Development of the Cinerama Process
mr. cinerama
The Birth of an Idea
Cinerama Goes
to War
Adding the Sound to
Cinerama
This Cinerama Show
Finding Customers for a
Product
in70mm.com's Cinerama page
Internet link:
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Click on image to see an enlargement
I began by making a study of existing theatres, both here and abroad.
Repeatedly, I climbed up on the stage to see what the actors saw, as
well as into the top balconies to get the audience's view—or, not
infrequently, lack of view. I spoke to theatre people like Roxy, to
musicians like Stokowski, and to numerous ordinary theatre-goers like
myself. And gradually I came to think that almost all auditoriums have
been constructed backwards. Most theatres are built like a megaphone,
the mouthpiece at the stage, the widest part at the rear of the hall.
Instead, I began to suspect, the plan should be just the reverse, with
the widest part of the house being the stage itself and the seats
banking up in gradually narrowing tiers.
I reached this conclusion after, like Waller, I had studied the special
characteristics and requirements of the human eye. I too had noticed the
importance of peripheral vision in giving a sense of depth and
perspective even to live action on a three-dimensional stage. I noticed
how the downward sweep of the conventional proscenium cuts into the
spectator's line of vision, reducing the illusion built by the settings
of a play. I saw too that the conventional stage, with its slight tilt
to provide a better view for the customers in the orchestra, was
actually providing audiences all over the house with an excellent view
of the stage floorboards while drastically reducing the effectiveness of
the scenery itself.
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I had prepared nine very detailed sets of plans for my ideal theatre
before the depression came along and removed the need for any of them at
that particular time. In all of these, however, I stressed the removal
of what I like to call the "blindness of architecture," those details of
structure that obtrude between the spectator and his complete absorption
in the atmosphere of the theatre piece he is witnessing. I tried to
conceive an auditorium that would give the fullest play to just those
elements of peripheral vision that Fred Waller, quite independently, was
trying to achieve on the screen.
At this point we should have one of those old movie titles, "Five years
later." In 1937 my firm, Voorhees, Gmelin and Walker was invited by the
Petroleum Industry to prepare plans for an exhibit at the New York
World's Fair. They wanted, they said, something that had never been done
before. We worked out many sketches. I, with my special interest in the
theatre, took particular pride in one proposed exhibit. I wanted a huge
room, spherical in shape, on the walls of which would be thrown a
constant stream of moving pictures from an entire battery of projectors.
Through them, in a sort of contrapuntal montage, we would show the
entire panorama of petroleum built around the theme of "A World Without
Friction." I could manage the architectural end all right; what I needed
to know was whether it could be worked out cinematically.
And thus, enter Fred Waller. For expert technical advice I put in a call
to an old friend, Charlie Bonn of the Jules Brulatour office. Bonn had
only one name to suggest. It was, of course, Waller. "If it's within the
realm of the possible," Charlie said, "Waller is the man who can do it
for you."
We met, and I think from the very moment I outlined my problem to Waller
he realized that he had found the solution to his own. Not an entire
sphere, but an arc - that was what he needed to delimit the field of
vision and yet convey a sense of the all-embracing environment of his
films. Furthermore, he realized, normal human vision is actually
arc-shaped. The way our eyes are fixed in our head gives us a curved
view of the world around us, a sweeping arc of about 160° wide and 60°
high. If a picture covering .that same area were projected on a curved
screen, he argued, anyone watching it would feel as if he were right in
the center of it.
Waller undertook the petroleum assignment in a fever of excitement,
already looking forward to uses for this new form of motion pictures far
beyond the scope of the World's Fair installation. Fired by his
enthusiasm, Voorhees, Walker, Foley and Smith, our firm, put up some
working capital and together we formed the Vitarama Corporation, an
organization that still holds certain of the basic patents on the
Cinerama machinery. Our ideas on peripheral vision coincided, and I felt
that if anyone could put them into practical form, that man was Fred
Waller.
Eleven months later, Fred was ready with a working model which he
demonstrated to some of the oil men in charge of the petroleum exhibit.
They thought Vitarama was great—but perhaps just a little too radical
for their purposes. As it turned out, they finally used a fairly
conventional little puppet film for their show (although I do like to
think that at least the auditorium in which it was projected, a huge
triangular shed open to the sun on all sides, was somewhat
unconventional.) Waller himself was called in to do the dramatic exhibit
in the Eastman Kodak building, a vast mosaic of rapidly changing color
photographs, and he was also a consultant on the motion picture
installation within the towering dome of the Fair's perisphere.
In the meantime, work went ahead on Vitarama. At this point it consisted
of not only the now-familiar curving screen, but also a quarter-dome
that capped it and seemed to swing the image far out over the audience's
head.
In the course of his experiments, Fred had actually gone so far as to
chain together eleven cameras—and, to show his pictures, eleven
projectors - in an effort to produce the effect of natural vision.
Obviously, with all this complexity there were many technical obstacles
to be overcome. And a good deal of extra financing needed to overcome
them. We were able to interest Laurance Rockefeller in the project, and
soon the whole Vitarama works moved into the old Rockefeller carriage
stable on West 55th Street in New York City and Perry Coke Smith, one of
my partners in the architectural firm, also became absorbed in the
challenge of Cinerama. We stayed on with Waller through the development
of the Waller Gunnery Trainer which proved so valuable during the last
war, and contributed to its engineering and construction.
Indeed, as time went by we all became so fascinated with the
potentialities of Waller's new cameras that I realized one day a
decision had to be made: Were we going to be architects or movie
producers? I settled for architecture, although retaining a
"sentimental" - and, with the current success of Cinerama - not
unprofitable interest in Vitarama Corp.
I know Cinerama is still imperfect. The difficulty of matching three
separate images from three separate light sources still has to be worked
out. But, as against any of the other wide-screen processes that have
followed in the wake of Cinerama, I feel that Waller is theoretically on
the right track to completing the illusion of depth perception in motion
pictures without glasses. Cinerama most nearly fulfills the necessary
requirements to fool the eye.
And I have every confidence in Waller's ingenuity and inventiveness to
bring his process to perfection. It is a confidence that was born
sixteen years ago when we first sat down together to discuss the
possibilities of creating something that had never been done before for
a project that was never completed.
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