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>>> 2025-06-08 Omnimax (PDF)
In a previous life, I worked for a location-based entertainment
company, part of a huge team of people developing a location for Las
Vegas, Nevada. It was COVID, a rough time for location-based
anything, and things were delayed more than usual. Coworkers paid a
lot of attention to another upcoming Las Vegas attraction, one with a
vastly larger budget but still struggling to make schedule: the MSG
(Madison Square Garden) Sphere.
I will set aside jokes about it being a square sphere, but they were
perhaps one of the reasons that it underwent a pre-launch rebranding
to merely the Sphere. If you are not familiar, the Sphere is a
theater and venue in Las Vegas. While it's know mostly for the video
display on the outside, that's just marketing for the inside: a
digital dome theater, with seating at a roughly 45 degree stadium
layout facing a near hemisphere of video displays.
It is a "near" hemisphere because the lower section is truncated to
allow a flat floor, which serves as a stage for events but is also a
practical architectural decision to avoid completely unsalable front
rows. It might seem a little bit deceptive that an attraction called
the Sphere does not quite pull off even a hemisphere of "payload,"
but the same compromise has been reached by most dome theaters. While
the use of digital display technology is flashy, especially on the
exterior, the Sphere is not quite the innovation that it presents
itself as. It is just a continuation of a long tradition of dome
theaters. Only time will tell, but the financial difficulties of the
Sphere suggest that follows the tradition faithfully: towards
commercial failure.
You could make an argument that the dome theater is hundreds of years
old, but I will omit it. Things really started developing, at least
in our modern tradition of domes, with the 1923 introduction of the
Zeiss planetarium projector. Zeiss projectors and their siblings used
a complex optical and mechanical design to project accurate
representations of the night sky. Many auxiliary projectors,
incorporated into the chassis and giving these projectors famously
eccentric shapes, rendered planets and other celestial bodies. Rather
than digital light modulators, the images from these projectors were
formed by purely optical means: perforated metal plates, glass plates
with etched metalized layers, and fiber optics. The large, precisely
manufactured image elements and specialized optics created
breathtaking images.
While these projectors had considerable entertainment value,
especially in the mid-century when they represented some of the most
sophisticated projection technology yet developed, their greatest
potential was obviously in education. Planetarium projectors were
fantastically expensive (being hand-built in Germany with incredible
component counts) [1], they were widely installed in science museums
around the world. Most of us probably remember a dogbone-shaped
Zeiss, or one of their later competitors like Spitz or Minolta, from
our youths. Unfortunately, these marvels of artistic engineering were
mostly retired as digital projection of near comparable quality
became similarly priced in the 2000s.
But we aren't talking about projectors, we're talking about theaters.
Planetarium projectors were highly specialized to rendering the night
sky, and everything about them was intrinsically spherical. For both
a reasonable viewing experience, and for the projector to produce a
geometrically correct image, the screen had to be a spherical
section. Thus the planetarium itself: in its most traditional form,
rings of heavily reclined seats below a hemispherical dome. The dome
was rarely a full hemisphere, but was usually truncated at the
horizon. This was mostly a practical decision but integrated well
into the planetarium experience, given that sky viewing is usually
poor near the horizon anyway. Many planetaria painted a city skyline
or forest silhouette around the lower edge to make the transition
from screen to wall more natural. Later, theatrical lighting often
replaced the silhouette, reproducing twilight or the haze of city
lights.
Unsurprisingly, the application-specific design of these theaters
also limits their potential. Despite many attempts, the collective
science museum industry has struggled to find entertainment
programming for planetaria much beyond Pink Floyd laser shows [1].
There just aren't that many things that you look up at. Over time,
planetarium shows moved in more narrative directions. Film projection
promised new flexibility---many planetaria with optical star
projectors were also equipped with film projectors, which gave show
producers exciting new options. Documentary video of space launches
and animations of physical principles became natural parts of most
science museum programs, but were a bit awkward on the traditional
dome. You might project four copies of the image just above the
horizon in the four cardinal directions, for example. It was very
much a compromise.
With time, the theater adapted to the projection once again: the
domes began to tilt. By shifting the dome in one direction, and
orienting the seating towards that direction, you could create a sort
of compromise point between the traditional dome and traditional
movie theater. The lower central area of the screen was a reasonable
place to show conventional film, while the full size of the dome
allowed the starfield to almost fill the audience's vision. The
experience of the tilted dome is compared to "floating in space," as
opposed to looking up at the sky.
In true Cold War fashion, it was a pair of weapons engineers (one
nuclear weapons, the other missiles) who designed the first tilted
planetarium. In 1973, the planetarium of what is now called the Fleet
Science Center in San Diego, California opened to the public. Its
dome was tilted 25 degrees to the horizon, with the seating installed
on a similar plane and facing in one direction. It featured a novel
type of planetarium projector developed by Spitz and called the Space
Transit Simulator. The STS was not the first, but still an early
mechanical projector to be controlled by a computer---a computer that
also had simultaneous control of other projectors and lighting in the
theater, what we now call a show control system.
Even better, the STS's innovative optical design allowed it to warp
or bend the starfield to simulate its appearance from locations other
than earth. This was the "transit" feature: with a joystick connected
to the control computer, the planetarium presenter could "fly" the
theater through space in real time. The STS was installed in a well
in the center of the seating area, and its compact chassis kept it
low in the seating area, preserving the spherical geometry (with the
projector at the center of the sphere) without blocking the view of
audience members sitting behind it and facing forward.
And yet my main reason for discussing the Fleet planetarium is not
the the planetarium projector at all. It is a second projector, an
"auxiliary" one, installed in a second well behind the STS. The
designers of the planetarium intended to show film as part of their
presentations, but they were not content with a small image at the
center viewpoint. The planetarium commissioned a few of the
industry's leading film projection experts to design a film
projection system that could fill the entire dome, just as the
planetarium projector did.
They knew that such a large dome would require an exceptionally sharp
image. Planetarium projectors, with their large lithographed slides,
offered excellent spatial resolution. They made stars appear as point
sources, the same as in the night sky. 35mm film, spread across such
a large screen, would be obviously blurred in comparison. They would
need a very large film format.
Omnimax dome with work lights on at Chicago Museum of Science and
Industry
Fortuitously, almost simultaneously the Multiscreen Corporation was
developing a "sideways" 70mm format. This 15-perf format used 70mm
film but fed it through the projector sideways, making each frame
much larger than typical 70mm film. In its debut, at a temporary
installation in the 1970 Expo Osaka, it was dubbed IMAX. IMAX made an
obvious basis for a high-resolution projection system, and so the
then-named IMAX Corporation was added to the planetarium project. The
Fleet's film projector ultimately consisted of an IMAX film transport
with a custom-built compact, liquid-cooled lamphouse and spherical
fisheye lens system.
The large size of the projector, the complex IMAX framing system and
cooling equipment, made it difficult to conceal in the theater's
projector well. Threading film into IMAX projectors is quite complex,
with several checks the projectionist must make during a pre-show
inspection. The projectionist needed room to handle the large film,
and to route it to and from the enormous reels. The projector's
position in the middle of the seating area left no room for any of
this. We can speculate that it was, perhaps, one of the designer's
missile experience that lead to the solution: the projector was
serviced in a large projection room beneath the theater's seating.
Once it was prepared for each show, it rose on near-vertical rails
until just the top emerged in the theater. Rollers guided the film as
it ran from a platter, up the shaft to the projector, and back down
to another platter. Cables and hoses hung below the projector,
following it up and down like the traveling cable of an elevator.
To advertise this system, probably the greatest advance in film
projection since the IMAX format itself, the planetarium coined the
term Omnimax.
Omnimax was not an easy or economical format. Ideally, footage had to
be taken in the same format, using a 70mm camera with a spherical
lens system. These cameras were exceptionally large and heavy, and
the huge film format limited cinematographers to short takes. The
practical problems with Omnimax filming were big enough that the
first Omnimax films faked it, projecting to the larger spherical
format from much smaller conventional negatives. This was the case
for "Voyage to the Outer Planets" and "Garden Isle," the premier
films at the Fleet planetarium. The history of both is somewhat
obscure, the latter especially.
"Voyage to the Outer Planets" was executive-produced by Preston
Fleet, a founder of the Fleet center (which was ultimately named for
his father, a WWII aviator). We have Fleet's sense of showmanship to
thank for the invention of Omnimax: He was an accomplished business
executive, particularly in the photography industry, and an aviation
enthusiast who had his hands in more than one museum. Most tellingly,
though, he had an eccentric hobby. He was a theater organist. I can't
help but think that his passion for the theater organ, an instrument
almost defined by the combination of many gizmos under
electromechanical control, inspired "Voyage." The film, often called
a "multimedia experience," used multiple projectors throughout the
planetarium to depict a far-future journey of exploration. The
Omnimax film depicted travel through space, with slide projectors
filling in artist's renderings of the many wonders of space.
The ten-minute Omnimax film was produced by Graphic Films
Corporation, a brand that would become closely associated with
Omnimax in the following decades. Graphic was founded in the midst of
the Second World War by Lester Novros, a former Disney animator who
found a niche creating training films for the military. Novros's
fascination with motion and expertise in presenting complicated 3D
scenes drew him to aerospace, and after the war he found much of his
business in the newly formed Air Force and NASA. He was also an
enthusiast of niche film formats, and Omnimax was not his first dome.
For the 1964 New York World's Fair, Novros and Graphic Films had
produced "To the Moon and Beyond," a speculative science film with
thematic similarities to "Voyage" and more than just a little
mechanical similarity. It was presented in Cinerama 360, a
semi-spherical, dome-theater 70mm format presented in a special
theater called the Moon Dome. "To the Moon and Beyond" was
influential in many ways, leading to Graphic Films' involvement in
"2001: A Space Odyssey" and its enduring expertise in domes.
The Fleet planetarium would not remain the only Omnimax for long. In
1975, the city of Spokane, Washington struggled to find a new
application for the pavilion built for Expo '74 [3]. A top contender:
an Omnimax theater, in some ways a replacement for the temporary IMAX
theater that had been constructed for the actual Expo. Alas, this
project was not to be, but others came along: in 1978, the Detroit
Science Center opened the second Omnimax theater ("the machine itself
looks like and is the size of a front loader," the Detroit Free Press
wrote). The Science Museum of Minnesota, in St. Paul, followed
shortly after. The Carnegie Science Center, in Pittsburgh, rounded
out the year's new launches.
Omnimax hit prime time the next year, with the 1979 announcement of
an Omnimax theater at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada. Unlike the
previous installations, this 380-seat theater was purely commercial.
It opened with the 1976 IMAX film "To Fly!," which had been optically
modified to fit the Omnimax format. This choice of first film is
illuminating. "To Fly!" is a 27 minute documentary on the history of
aviation in the United States, originally produced for the IMAX
theater at the National Air and Space Museum [4]. It doesn't exactly
seem like casino fare.
The IMAX format, the flat-screen one, was born of world's fairs. It
premiered at an Expo, reappeared a couple of years later at another
one, and for the first years of the format most of the IMAX theaters
built were associated with either a major festival or an educational
institution. This noncommercial history is a bit hard to square with
the modern IMAX brand, closely associated with major theater chains
and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Well, IMAX took off, and in many ways it sold out. Over the decades
since the 1970 Expo, IMAX has met widespread success with commercial
films and theater owners. Simultaneously, the definition or criteria
for IMAX theaters have relaxed, with smaller screens made permissible
until, ultimately, the transition to digital projection eliminated
the 70mm film and more or less reduce IMAX to just another ticket
surcharge brand. It competes directly with Cinemark xD, for example.
To the theater enthusiast, this is a pretty sad turn of events, a
Westinghouse-esque zombification of a brand that once heralded the
field's most impressive technical achievements.
The same never happened to Omnimax. The Caesar's Omnimax theater was
an odd exception; the vast majority of Omnimax theaters were built by
science museums and the vast majority of Omnimax films were science
documentaries. Quite a few of those films had been specifically
commissioned by science museums, often on the occasion of their
Omnimax theater opening. The Omnimax community was fairly tight, and
so the same names recur.
The Graphic Films Corporation, which had been around since the
beginning, remained so closely tied to the IMAX brand that they
practically shared identities. Most Omnimax theaters, and some IMAX
theaters, used to open with a vanity card often known as "the
wormhole." It might be hard to describe beyond "if you know you
know," it certainly made an impression on everyone I know that grew
up near a theater that used it. There are some videos, although
unfortunately none of them are very good.
I have spent more hours of my life than I am proud to admit trying to
untangle the history of this clip. Over time, it has appeared in many
theaters with many different logos at the end, and several variations
of the audio track. This is in part informed speculation, but here is
what I believe to be true: the "wormhole" was originally created by
Graphic Films for the Fleet planetarium specifically, and ran before
"Voyage to the Outer Planets" and its double-feature companion
"Garden Isle," both of which Graphic Films had worked on. This
original version ended with the name Graphic Films, accompanied by an
odd sketchy drawing that was also used as an early logo of the IMAX
Corporation. Later, the same animation was re-edited to end with an
IMAX logo.
This version ran in both Omnimax and conventional IMAX theaters,
probably as a result of the extensive "cross-pollination" of films
between the two formats. Many Omnimax films through the life of the
format had actually been filmed for IMAX, with conventional lenses,
and then optically modified to fit the Omnimax dome after the fact.
You could usually tell: the reprojection process created an unusual
warp in the image, and more tellingly, these pseudo-Omnimax films
almost always centered the action at the middle of the IMAX frame,
which was too high to be quite comfortable in an Omnimax theater
(where the "frame center" was well above the "front center" point of
the theater). Graphic Films had been involved in a lot of these as
well, perhaps explaining the animation reuse, but it's just as likely
that they had sold it outright to the IMAX corporation which used it
as they pleased.
For some reason, this version also received new audio that is mostly
the same but slightly different. I don't have a definitive
explanation, but I think there may have been an audio format change
between the very early Omnimax theaters and later IMAX/Omnimax
systems, which might have required remastering.
Later, as Omnimax domes proliferated at science museums, the IMAX
Corporation (which very actively promoted Omnimax to education) gave
many of these theaters custom versions of the vanity card that ended
with the science museum's own logo. I have personally seen two of
these, so I feel pretty confident that they exist and weren't all
that rare (basically 2 out of 2 Omnimax theaters I've visited used
one), but I cannot find any preserved copies.
Another recurring name in the world of IMAX and Omnimax is
MacGillivray Freeman Films. MacGillivray and Freeman were a pair of
teenage friends from Laguna Beach who dropped out of school in the
'60s to make skateboard and surf films. This is, of course, a rather
cliche start for documentary filmmakers but we must allow that it was
the '60s and they were pretty much the ones creating the cliche.
Their early films are hard to find in anything better than VHS rip
quality, but worth watching: Wikipedia notes their significance in
pioneering "action cameras," mounting 16mm cinema cameras to
skateboards and surfboards, but I would say that their cinematography
was innovative in more ways than just one. The 1970 "Catch the Joy,"
about sandrails, has some incredible shots that I struggle to
explain. There's at least one where they definitely cut the shot just
a couple of frames before a drifting sandrail flung their camera all
the way down the dune.
For some reason, I would speculate due to their reputation for
exciting cinematography, the National Air and Space Museum chose
MacGillivray and Freeman for "To Fly!". While not the first science
museum IMAX documentary by any means (that was, presumably, "Voyage
to the Outer Planets" given the different subject matter of the
various Expo films), "To Fly!" might be called the first modern one.
It set the pattern that decades of science museum films followed: a
film initially written by science educators, punched up by producers,
and filmed with the very best technology of the time. Fearing that
the film's history content would be dry, they pivoted more towards
entertainment, adding jokes and action sequences. "To Fly!" was a
hit, running in just about every science museum with an IMAX theater,
including Omnimax.
Sadly, Jim Freeman died in a helicopter crash shortly after
production. Nonetheless, MacGillivray Freeman Films went on. Over the
following decades, few IMAX science documentaries were made that
didn't involve them somehow. Besides the films they produced, the
company consulted on action sequences in most of the format's popular
features.
Omnimax projection room at OMSI
I had hoped to present here a thorough history of the films were
actually produced in the Omnimax format. Unfortunately, this has
proven very difficult: the fact that most of them were distributed
only to science museums means that they are very spottily remembered,
and besides, so many of the films that ran in Omnimax theaters were
converted from IMAX presentations that it's hard to tell the two
apart. I'm disappointed that this part of cinema history isn't better
recorded, and I'll continue to put time into the effort. Science
museum documentaries don't get a lot of attention, but many of the
have involved formidable technical efforts.
Consider, for example, the cameras: befitting the large film, IMAX
cameras themselves are very large. When filming "To Fly!",
MacGillivray and Freeman complained that the technically very basic
80 pound cameras required a lot of maintenance, were complex to
operate, and wouldn't fit into the "action cam" mounting positions
they were used to. The cameras were so expensive, and so rare, that
they had to be far more conservative than their usual approach out of
fear of damaging a camera they would not be able to replace. It turns
out that they had it easy. Later IMAX science documentaries would be
filmed in space ("The Dream is Alive" among others) and deep
underwater ("Deep Sea 3D" among others). These IMAX cameras, modified
for simpler operation and housed for such difficult environments,
weighed over 1,000 pounds. Astronauts had to be trained to operate
the cameras; mission specialists on Hubble service missions had
wrangling a 70-pound handheld IMAX camera around the cabin and
developing its film in a darkroom bag among their duties. There was a
lot of film to handle: as a rule of thumb, one mile of IMAX film is
good for eight and a half minutes.
I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and so we will make things a bit more
approachable by focusing on one example: The Omnimax theater of the
Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, which opened as part of the
museum's new waterfront location in 1992. This 330-seat boasted a
10,000 sq ft dome and 15 kW of sound. The premier feature was "Ring
of Fire," a volcano documentary originally commissioned by the Fleet,
the Fort Worth Museum of Science and Industry, and the Science Museum
of Minnesota. By the 1990s, the later era of Omnimax, the dome format
was all but abandoned as a commercial concept. There were, an
announcement article notes, around 90 total IMAX theaters (including
Omnimax) and 80 Omnimax films (including those converted from IMAX)
in '92. Considering the heavy bias towards science museums among
these theaters, it was very common for the films to be funded by
consortia of those museums.
Considering the high cost of filming in IMAX, a lot of the
documentaries had a sort of "mashup" feel. They would combine footage
taken in different times and places, often originally for other
projects, into a new narrative. "Ring of Fire" was no exception,
consisting of a series of sections that were sometimes more loosely
connected to the theme. The 1982 Loma Prieta earthquake was a focus,
and the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, and lava flows in Hawaii. Perhaps
one of the reasons it's hard to catalog IMAX films is this mashup
quality, many of the titles carried at science museums were something
along the lines of "another ocean one." I don't mean this as a
criticism, many of the IMAX documentaries were excellent, but they
were necessarily composed from painstakingly gathered fragments and
had to cover wide topics.
Given that I have an announcement feature piece in front of me, let's
also use the example of OMSI to discuss the technical aspects. OMSI's
projector cost about $2 million and weighted about two tons. To avoid
dust damaging the expensive prints, the "projection room" under the
seating was a positive-pressure cleanroom. This was especially
important since the paucity of Omnimax content meant that many films
ran regularly for years. The 15 kW water-cooled lamp required
replacement at 800 to 1,000 hours, but unfortunately, the price is
not noted.
By the 1990s, Omnimax had become a rare enough system that the
projection technology was a major part of the appeal. OMSI's
installation, like most later Omnimax theaters, had the audience
queue below the seating, separated from the projection room by a
glass wall. The high cost of these theaters meant that they operated
on high turnovers, so patrons would wait in line to enter immediately
after the previous showing had exited. While they waited, they could
watch the projectionist prepare the next show while a museum docent
explained the equipment.
I have written before about multi-channel audio formats, and Omnimax
gives us some more to consider. The conventional audio format for
much of Omnimax's life was six-channel: left rear, left screen,
center screen, right screen, right rear, and top. Each channel had an
independent bass cabinet (in one theater, a "caravan-sized" enclosure
with eight JBL 2245H 46cm woofers), and a crossover network fed the
lowest end of all six channels to a "sub-bass" array at screen
bottom. The original Fleet installation also had sub-bass speakers
located beneath the audience seating, although that doesn't seem to
have become common.
IMAX titles of the '70s and '80s delivered audio on eight-track
magnetic tape, with the additional tracks used for synchronization to
the film. By the '90s, IMAX had switched to distributing digital
audio on three CDs (one for each two channels). OMSI's theater was
equipped for both, and the announcement amusingly notes the
availability of cassette decks. A semi-custom audio processor made
for IMAX, the Sonics TAC-86, managed synchronization with film
playback and applied equalization curves individually calibrated to
the theater.
IMAX domes used perforated aluminum screens (also the norm in later
planetaria), so the speakers were placed behind the screen in the
scaffold-like superstructure that supported it. When I was young,
OMSI used to start presentations with a demo program that explained
the large size of IMAX film before illuminating work lights behind
the screen to make the speakers visible. Much of this was the work of
the surprisingly sophisticated show control system employed by
Omnimax theaters, a descendent of the PDP-15 originally installed in
the Fleet.
Despite Omnimax's almost complete consignment to science museums,
there were some efforts it bringing commercial films. Titles like
Disney's "Fantasia" and "Star Wars: Episode III" were distributed to
Omnimax theaters via optical reprojection, sometimes even from 35mm
originals. Unfortunately, the quality of these adaptations was rarely
satisfactory, and the short runtimes (and marketing and exclusivity
deals) typical of major commercial releases did not always work well
with science museum schedules. Still, the cost of converting an
existing film to dome format is pretty low, so the practice continues
today. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," for example, ran on at least
one science museum dome. This trickle of blockbusters was not enough
to make commercial Omnimax theaters viable.
Caesars Palace closed, and then demolished, their Omnimax theater in
2000. The turn of the 21st century was very much the beginning of the
end for the dome theater. IMAX was moving away from their film system
and towards digital projection, but digital projection systems
suitable for large domes were still a nascent technology and
extremely expensive. The end of aggressive support from IMAX meant
that filming costs became impractical for documentaries, so while
some significant IMAX science museum films were made in the 2000s,
the volume definitely began to lull and the overall industry moved
away from IMAX in general and Omnimax especially.
It's surprising how unforeseen this was, at least to some. A
ten-screen commercial theater in Duluth opened an Omnimax theater in
1996! Perhaps due to the sunk cost, it ran until 2010, not a bad
closing date for an Omnimax theater. Science museums, with their
relatively tight budgets and less competitive nature, did tend to
hold over existing Omnimax installations well past their prime.
Unfortunately, many didn't: OMSI, for example, closed its Omnimax
theater in 2013 for replacement with a conventional digital theater
that has a large screen but is not IMAX branded.
Fortunately, some operators hung onto their increasingly costly
Omnimax domes long enough for modernization to become practical. The
IMAX Corporation abandoned the Omnimax name as more of the theaters
closed, but continued to support "IMAX Dome" with the introduction of
a digital laser projector with spherical optics. There are only ten
examples of this system. Others, including Omnimax's flagship at the
Fleet Science Center, have been replaced by custom dome projection
systems built by competitors like Sony.
Few Omnimax projectors remain. The Fleet, to their credit, installed
the modern laser projectors in front of the projector well so that
the original film projector could remain in place. It's still
functional and used for reprisals of Omnimax-era documentaries. IMAX
projectors in general are a dying breed, a number of them have been
preserved but their complex, specialized design and the end of vendor
support means that it may become infeasible to keep them operating.
We are, of course, well into the digital era. While far from
inexpensive, digital projection systems are now able to match the
quality of Omnimax projection. The newest dome theaters, like the
Sphere, dispense with projection entirely. Instead, they use LED
display panels capable of far brighter and more vivid images than
projection, and with none of the complexity of water-cooled arc
lamps.
Still, something has been lost. There was once a parallel theater
industry, a world with none of the glamor of Hollywood but for whom
James Cameron hauled a camera to the depths of the ocean and Leonardo
DiCaprio narrated repairs to the Hubble. In a good few dozen science
museums, two-ton behemoths rose from beneath the seats, the zenith of
film projection technology. After decades of documentaries, I think
people forgot how remarkable these theaters were.
Science museums stopped promoting them as aggressively, and much of
the showmanship faded away. Sometime in the 2000s, OMSI stopped
running the pre-show demonstration, instead starting the film
directly. They stopped explaining the projectionist's work in
preparing the show, and as they shifted their schedule towards direct
repetition of one feature, there was less for the projectionist to do
anyway. It became just another museum theater, so it's no wonder that
they replaced it with just another museum theater: a generic
big-screen setup with the exceptionally dull name of "Empirical
Theater."
From time to time, there have been whispers of a resurgence of 70mm
film. Oppenheimer, for example, was distributed to a small number of
theaters in this giant of film formats: 53 reels, 11 miles, 600
pounds of film. Even conventional IMAX is too costly for the modern
theater industry, though. Omnimax has fallen completely by the
wayside, with the few remaining dome operators doomed to recycling
the same films with a sprinkling of newer reformatted features. It is
hard to imagine a collective of science museums sending another film
camera to space.
Omnimax poses a preservation challenge in more ways than one. Besides
the lack of documentation on Omnimax theaters and films, there are
precious few photographs of Omnimax theaters and even fewer videos of
their presentations. Of course, the historian suffers where Madison
Square Garden hopes to succeed: the dome theater is perhaps the
ultimate in location-based entertainment. Photos and videos,
represented on a flat screen, cannot reproduce the experience of the
Omnimax theater. The 180 horizontal degrees of screen, the sound that
was always a little too loud, in no small part to mask the sound of
the projector that made its own racket in the middle of the seating.
You had to be there.
Omnimax projector at St. Louis Science Center
IMAGES: Omnimax projection room at OMSI, Flickr user truk. Omnimax
dome with work lights on at MSI Chicago, Wikimedia Commons user
GualdimG. Omnimax projector at St. Louis Science Center, Flickr user
pasa47.
[1] I don't have extensive information on pricing, but I know that in
the 1960s an "economy" Spitz came in over $30,000 (~10x that much
today).
[2] Pink Floyd's landmark album Dark Side of The Moon debuted in a
release event held at the London Planetarium. This connection between
Pink Floyd and planetaria, apparently much disliked by the band
itself, has persisted to the present day. Several generations of Pink
Floyd laser shows have been licensed by science museums around the
world, and must represent by far the largest success of
fixed-installation laser projection.
[3] Are you starting to detect a theme with these Expos? the World's
Fairs, including in their various forms as Expos, were long one of
the main markets for niche film formats. Any given weird projection
format you run into, there's a decent chance that it was originally
developed for some short film for an Expo. Keep in mind that it's the
nature of niche projection formats that they cannot easily be shown
in conventional theaters, so they end up coupled to these crowd
events where a custom venue can be built.
[4] The Smithsonian Institution started looking for an exciting new
theater in 1970. As an example of the various niche film formats at
the time, the Smithsonian considered a dome (presumably Omnimax),
Cinerama (a three-projector ultrawide system), and Circle-Vision 360
(known mostly for the few surviving Expo films at Disney World's
EPCOT) before settling on IMAX. The Smithsonian theater, first
planned for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History before being
integrated into the new National Air and Space Museum, was
tremendously influential on the broader world of science museum
films. That is perhaps an understatement, it is sometimes credited
with popularizing IMAX in general, and the newspaper coverage the new
theater received throughout North America lends credence to the idea.
It is interesting, then, to imagine how different our world would be
if they had chosen Circle-Vision. "Captain America: Brave New World"
in Cinemark 360.
sincerely,
j. b. crawford
me@computer.rip
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