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Allen Daviau

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Avalon (1990)

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Thumbnails 3/24/16

Albert Brooks on "Defending Your Life"; Profile of Frank Sinatra Jr.; Comic Con on the couch; Sean J.S. Jourdan on "Teddy Boy"; Sterling Hayden's towering screen presence.

Features

Thumbnails 5/7/15

The Marvel-Industrial Complex; Chatting with Helen Hunt; Top Ten Spielberg Summer Movies; Aboard Frankenheimer's "Train"; Farewell to David Letterman.

Roger Ebert

That's not the IMAX I grew up with

It started for me with a letter from a Los Angeles filmmaker named Mike Williamson, who contacted me March 7 in outrage about a bait-and-switch involving IMAX. He paid an extra fee to see a movie in Burbank, and wrote the company in protest: "As soon as I walked in the theatre, I was disgusted. This was not an IMAX screen. Simply extending a traditional multiplex screen to touch the sides and floor does not constitute an IMAX experience. An IMAX screen is gargantuan. It is like looking at the side of a large building, and it runs vertically in a pronounced way. It is not a traditional movie screen shape....This screen was pathetic by IMAX standards."

If you will click to enlarge the graphic below, you will see that Williamson has a point. The illustration comes from Jeff Leins of newsinfilm.com, based on one with a useful article by James Hyder, editor of the LFexaminer, devoted to this issue. But documentation isn't really necessary. Most of us know what an IMAX screen looks like, and we instinctively know one wouldn't fit inside our local multiplex. What "IMAX" means in such situations is that the company has taken over the largest screen in the complex, removed a few of the front rows of seats, and moved a somewhat larger screen that much closer to the audience. The picture is not projected through large format 70mm film, but with dual "high end" digital projectors. Every digital projector ever introduced was "high end" at the time.

Roger Ebert

Start the revolution without digital

I have seen the future of the cinema, and it is not digital. No matter what you've read, the movie theater of the future will not use digital video projectors, and it will not beam the signal down from satellites. It will use film, and the film will be right there in the theater with you.