The “Cinerama Dome” in Los Angeles has closed. The unique cinema monument is the symbol of a dramatic change in media.
In the German cinema industry, brave silence still sets the tone. The elephant in the room, however, can no longer be overlooked: What if you could finally open it again – but it would simply be too late?
In the USA, where there are hardly any public subsidies for cinemas, movie theaters die without a sound or a sound and without a farewell performance. This is what happened last week when the Pacific Theaters chain announced the abandonment of around 300 screens in Southern California – the home of American film culture. One of these cinemas, the legendary Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, is becoming the symbol of the new box office. The futuristic building was once built as a tantalizing response to an earlier wave of doom.
Hollywood in the 1950s: cinema admissions plummet
When Billy Wilder called his sinister swan song on old Hollywood “Sunset Boulevard” in 1950, the American film industry saw itself on “Twilight Boulevard”: More than seven million televisions were sold in that year alone. The number of admissions to the cinema fell dramatically – between 1946 and 1956 by fifty percent. Nevertheless, a cinema palace opened again on “Sunset Boulevard” in 1963 – the first in Hollywood for 33 years.
The Cinerama Dome, today one of the landmarks of the dream factory, was built in just 16 weeks. The notion that a wrecking ball could destroy this architectural jewel within a few hours is currently not only causing turmoil in the Los Angeles film world.
Already once, in the 1990s, there was a threat of destruction, and it was an uphill battle that at least the dome and its furnishings were saved, even if not the entire ensemble. The building has been a listed building since then, but in California that means only one year postponement to look for a solution with the owner. At that time, the Pacific Theaters chain was given a free parking garage.
A cinema made of 316 hexagonal and pentagonal blocks
Every Hollywood tourist has probably noticed the white hemisphere with which the company Cinerama Inc. wanted to defy the death of the cinema in a revolutionary way – with super wide-screen films, shown on a gigantic curved screen. The architectural packaging was no less revolutionary than the technology: Inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller’s iconic Geodesic Dome, his former colleague Pierre Cabrol designed a modular system that was as economical as it was visually compelling: the cinema was built from 316 hexagonal and pentagonal blocks, each roughly 3.70 meters tall. In total, Cinerama wanted to build six hundred of these spectacular buildings around the world – the cinema was dying faster.
The Cinerama Dome was the last of its kind. As part of the 15-room ArcLight Hollywood complex, it was an integral part of everyday life in the cinema city of Los Angeles. It was always worthwhile to see if a new film was being played there. I remember a screening of David Fincher’s “Gone Girl” when I found it difficult to pay more attention to the somewhat clumsy thriller than to the cinema.
A supporting role in Quentin Tarantino
The famous Cinerama widescreen process, in which three projectors were connected in parallel and each represented a third of the overall picture, had already been replaced by the wide 70mm film when it opened in 1963. But you didn’t have to endure any seams in the picture, as can still be seen today in classics such as “How the West Was Won”. The 70mm process has its fans to this day; Christopher Nolan’s most recent film “Tenet” was in this format. The Corona crisis, however, prevented a suitably large, nationwide cinema show. So Nolan’s work became a warning to the big studios; no further ambitious large-scale productions were subsequently shown in theaters.
In Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood”, the Cinerama Dome itself plays an impressive small role – as the location for the premiere of the film in the film, “Krakatoa, East of Java”. The movie posters were still hanging in the cinema when Tarantino’s film was shown there – a 70mm copy in proper style.
Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles: There is a glimmer of hope
Even if the obituaries in the US press have already been written, it may not be too late for another rescue. In the industry paper “Variety”, the name Netflix was mentioned as a potential buyer who already owns another cinema monument in Hollywood, the Egyptian Theater. But should one hope for salvation from a streaming service of all things? Wasn’t it already announced that the cinema would die out before the Corona as the new competition grew stronger?
It will simply no longer be possible to produce certain films if the necessary number of cinema screens no longer exists. That was around four thousand for big blockbusters in the US before the crisis. The ArcLight started the blockbuster “Black Panther” not only in the Cinerama Dome, but also on all of its other screens.
The devil would be if the Academy Museum in Beverly Hills with Renzo Piano’s magnificent dome opened in September – and his model would be ground to dust after a year. In the long term, however, the bitter truth behind the symbolism can no longer be denied: cinema, the most popular art form of the 20th century, will only survive in the end in the protected cultural temples – and share the fate of opera. That is how it must have been, one will then say. Once upon a time in Hollywood. (Daniel Kothenschulte)
