The Brutalist in Vistavision

[Harold Hallikainen]

Deeply curved screens absolutely suck in modern movie theater auditorium designs. That's because the projector can't be aimed in a level horizontal line at the center of the screen. You could do that in old movie theaters that had large auditoriums and gradual sloped seating areas. The projector port would be far enough above the back row of the audience. The lens still needed to be a special design in order to throw a focused and not-so-distorted image.

A modest room with stadium seating where the projector port is close to the ceiling creates a severe angle. Even if you could correct the "smile" distortion with some optical trickery you would never get the image properly focused.

I wonder if you could design an auditorium where the projector was perpendicular to the center of the screen. The booth could be under the stadium seating with an area where there is no seating directly below and in front of the projector.

[Ed Gordon]

I wonder if you could design an auditorium where the projector was perpendicular to the center of the screen. The booth could be under the stadium seating with an area where there is no seating directly below and in front of the projector.

The Coliseum theater (now closed) was built this way in 1916. The Cinerama theater in Seattle was also built this way. I believe it was required for Cinerama.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

For the uninitiated, were any production VV projectors beyond the Century's described here ever produced?
https://www.in70mm.com/presents/1954...ctor/index.htm

I had not read that article start to finish previously. A whole new mechanism in 4 weeks is crazy pants. Amusing reading it after having just shown White Christmas on DCP... which unfortunately has abandoned the original intended ratio of 1.66 from the VistaVision format. Did not know that film was the first public viewing of VistaVision.

I wonder in the modern era if you could revive VV printing with dolby digital and still have it be playable with existing equipment. Maybe DTS would be more compatible for double the film speed?

Yes, Ballantyne made some. Not sure I'd want to use one of those though as it did not frame... The Century's in the beginning had issues with the intermittent sprockets snapping the three taper pins that secured them to the intermittent shaft. Until they switched to the screw and nut type fastening for the intermittent sprockets. Century also switched to using Brenkert Intermittent's. There was also a pusher type VV projector made out of a Century. But if Editorial didn't get the tape splices just right, you had a bad pile up in just a few seconds. this is what inspired me to build one.

As far as VV Horizontal showings back in the 1950's, they ran White Christmas and Strategic Air Command horizontally. If there were others shown horizontally, I am not aware of them. They ran them at The Paramount theater in NYC, At least one theater in Hollywood, and at the State Lake in Chicago.