Tonight, I watched a movie.......at The Cinerama Dome in Hollywood! How awesome is that? So here's a cool little movie story for ya : I hadn't been to The Dome in 36 years. Yep. The last time I was there was for "E.T." in 1982. Pretty weird, eh, for a Los Angeleno who loves movies? Grimsley thought it was weird when I told him. I guess the thing is that, when I was younger, it was more of a "thing" to go down to Hollywood to see a movie. And actually, for me and my friends in the late 70s, it was even more of a thing to go to Westwood. We used to go down to the Bruin Theater at least once a month to see whatever big movie that had just been released. And we went to Hollywood, too - to Graumann's Chinese to see "The Empire Strikes Back" in 1980. But what happened was, by the mid-80s, many more theaters had opened in the Valley, and what's more, they were multiplexes, which was something fairly new. So, new movies that in the past would only open in Hollywood and Westwood before going into wide release, were now available to see much closer to home. The multiplex theaters didn't have screens as huge as the ones in Hollywood, but they were big enough to get the job done.
Also, L.A. began to change, and traffic got worse, and we began to change and have other interests, and suddenly, we slowly stopped going down to Hollywood to see movies. We saw them in the Valley instead, mostly in Northridge or Granada Hills.
So I hadn't been to The Cinerama Dome since 1982. It's a legendary theater and an iconic image of Hollywood. It's wide, curved screen was made for showing films in the short lived "Cinerama" format, for which three projectors were initially used. I better not get into the technical details or I'll go way off track like I always do, but to make a long story short, The Dome was a theater that was constructed to show 70mm films, i.e. spectacle films.
"2001: A Space Odyssey" was just such a film - the ultimate Sci-Fi Spectacular - and in April 1968 when it was first released, my Dad took me to The Cinerama Dome to see it. I was 8 years old, and it remains one of the great moviegoing experiences of my life. Mostly, what I remembered many years later, was the ending, with all of the colors and alien landscapes and finally, Commander Dave Bowman's transition from old man to fetus. I also remembered the music; who can forget "Blue Danube" or "Thus Spake Zarathustra", set to those unforgettable scenes?
The movie as a whole, though, I did not remember entirely. I knew the HAL plot, and most of the major stuff about the mission, but as a kid I didn't get the subtleties.
Tonight I sat in the front row, almost dead center. Nowdays, The Dome has reserved seating, and I specifically chose my seat. It cost $18.50, the most I have ever paid for a movie. It was worth every penny, though, because I felt like I was inside the spaceships and pods, and like I was on the Moon looking at the Monolith, and like I was out in space. The Dome also has the most incredible sound system I have heard in a theater.
You already know the story of "2001", so I won't give a synopsis.
But I will say : I thought it was cool that I've only seen the movie two times.
The first time was in 1968, with my Dad, at The Cinerama Dome.
The second time was in 2018, also at The Cinerama Dome (with Dad in spirit).
Two screenings, same movie, fifty years apart, same theater. Pretty far out, I think.
It's even more far out when I stopped to consider that from 1979 to 1981 I ran the 70mm processing machine at Metrocolor, the MGM film processing lab that did the prints for "2001" in 1968.
The film is a marvel, and even now, fifty years later, as I watched it I thought, "the special effects will never be topped", and the 25 minute ending has no chance of being topped.
I also thought that, for movies, film will never be surpassed. Christopher Nolan knows this. He is the man who led the effort to strike the new 70mm prints for this re-release, and he is a big proponent of film. In an article for the LA Times, he talked about the physical aspects of film, the very fact that it takes light to strike an image on a camera negative....and that the light is carrying the original optical image, through the camera lens and onto the film. The image brought by the light is impressed upon the film.
I had my own Space Odyssey tonight, 50 years in the making. Life is far out.
Thanks to Dad, and Christopher Nolan, and to The Cinerama Dome, and to Metrocolor.
And to Stanley Kubrick, most of all.
Wow. ///// xoxoxoxoxoxoxooxo :):)
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