Cinerama Dome Hollywood Celebrates Cinerama’s 60th Anniversary

Images: Huffington Post

The Cinerama Dome, which has been around for 50 years, on Sunset Boulevard is hosting a film festival to celebrate Cinerama technology’s 60th anniversary.

From September 28 to October 4 the Dome will host a film festival showcasing 12 classic Cinerama films like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “How the West was Won”.

Cinerama technology is a trademarked way of widescreen projection into a deeply curved screen. It essentially works by simultaneously projecting images from three synchronized 35mm projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen with a 146 degree arc. It was the first of a number of such processes introduced during the 1950s, when the movie industry was reacting to competition from television. Unlike the continuous surface of most screens, a Cinerama projection screen is made of hundreds of individual vertical strips of standard perforated screen material. Each strip is angled to face the audience, to prevent light scattered from one end of the curved screen and washing out the image on the opposite end.

The Cinerama Dome in Hollywood is also a unique and architecturally interesting object in its own right.  Designed by famed architect Welton Beckett, who is responsible for the Capitol Records building in Hollywood and the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the Dome is the only concrete geodesic dome in the world, according to Turner Classic Movies.