Super Technirama 70(1959–1985)

[This essay is a continuation of Technirama.] 

Although trade advertisements for Technirama had from its inception promised “Standard or road-show prints all from the same negative”, none of the early films made in the process was released on a roadshow basis. The sole confirmed public presentation of a Technirama film in its native double-frame, horizontal-feed 35mm format was the premiere run of The Monte Carlo Story (1956) at the Reposi theater in Turin, Italy, which does not seem to have had any successors, with one possible exception. It was not until late 1958 that a spinoff process, Technirama 70, was first mentioned in the trade press as an exhibition format utilizing 70mm positive prints and six-track magnetic stereophonic sound. The inaugural title released in this process (still billed on screen simply as Technirama) was Walt Disney’s $6 million animated feature Sleeping Beauty (1959). In the US, the 75-minute film was exhibited on a “grind” basis (continuous performances, unreserved seats), but with roadshow-level ticket prices scaled up to $2.40 to help Disney recover the huge production cost, though the film still lost money on first release. Overseas, Sleeping Beauty played some “hard-ticket” roadshow engagements (separate performances, reserved seats), for example at the Astoria Charing Cross Road in London’s West End.

The first live-action Technirama film released in 70mm, Solomon and Sheba (1959), was launched more widely (though not universally) as a “true” hard-ticket roadshow, with marketing materials announcing another new process name, Super Technirama 70, though the on-screen titles again credited only Technirama. The commercial viability of the format having been established by the moderate success of Solomon and Sheba, it was subsequently employed on several other roadshow pictures, including Spartacus (1960), Barabbas (1961) and four produced by Samuel Bronston from his base in Spain, albeit with international financing: King of Kings, El Cid (both 1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963), and Circus World (aka The Magnificent Showman, 1964). The last of these was initially exhibited in Cinerama theaters, which had switched to single-strip projection from a variety of 70mm formats to fill their deeply curved screens. According to Grant Lobban, the prints used for Cinerama exhibition were “rectified” to fit the screens by retaining the anamorphic squeeze at the outer edges of the negative frame, which appeared undistorted when projected due to the deeper curvature of the screen at its sides (Lobban, 2000). Four more Super Technirama 70 films were also presented “in Cinerama”: La Fayette (1962), The Golden Head (1964), Custer of the West (1967) and a promotional short, Shellarama (1965). From circa 1961, most films photographed in Technirama were announced for release in Super Technirama 70, but there is some doubt over how many actually were exhibited in 70mm, or how widely. Definite 70mm sightings can be confirmed for Un, deux, trois, quatre! (aka Black Tights, 1960), Zulu and The Long Ships (both 1964). Other Technirama films may have been shown in 70mm exclusively in continental Europe, Latin America, South Africa, Australasia, or Japan, markets where large-format screenings were more commonplace than in the US and UK.

Following Custer of the West and another western produced in Europe, Clint the Lonely Nevadan (aka Clint the Stranger, 1967), Super Technirama 70 seemed to disappear as surely as did its 35mm counterpart, squeezed out by the widespread adoption of Panavision and by the availability from 1963 of 70mm blow-up prints from standard anamorphic 35mm negatives. But in the 1980s it made a partial comeback through two more Disney features. A Technirama negative was used during post-production for the computer-animated portions of Tron (1982), the live-action scenes being shot in Super Panavision, and for the whole of the traditionally animated feature The Black Cauldron (1985), which was extensively released in 70mm prints. The latter film proved even more of a commercial disappointment than Sleeping Beauty 26 years earlier, and the process was thereafter retired permanently. So obsolete had the technology become within just a few years that when Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz came to restore Spartacus for rerelease in 1991, they were unable to locate equipment to print onto 70mm from the Technirama protection masters (the negative having faded beyond the point of usability). Harris commented: “I really don’t want to deal with Technirama again. It’s a bastard of a process, as if VistaVision and CinemaScope got together for an evening of incredible pleasure and their child was Technirama, the worst of the two processes” (Kelleher, 1991).