Ladies and Gentlemen: This is Cinerama. With these words, on September 30, 1952, the heavy red curtains in New York's Broadway Theatre opened on a panoramic, Technicolor image of the Rockaways Playland Atom-Smasher Roller Coaster. The cinematic transformation heralded by this giddy ride was, however, neither as sudden nor as straightforward as it seemed. Widescreen Cinema leads readers through the twists and turns and decades it took for film to change its shape and, along the way, shows how this fitful process reflects the vagaries of cultural history.
Widescreen Cinema
