Cinerama: When the screen made you go, 'Woooo!'

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — David Strohmaier still gets excited recalling a 1957 family trip to St. Louis he took at the age of 7, a trip that would change his life because of a movie he saw there.

He persuaded his parents to see a newfangled process dubbed Cinerama, little knowing that 40 years later he would make a documentary about the three-projector, curved-screen, wide-format phenomenon.

"So we went and saw 'Seven Wonders of the World' and it totally blew everybody's mind away," he says. "I remember we were holding onto our seats, because when there would be an aerial scene and the camera would tilt as it went above a mountain top, you would hear the audience go, 'Wooooo!' Unlike anything I could experience at my local movie theater."

These days, Strohmaier makes his living as a film editor, in part because of that vivid experience in St. Louis. "Perhaps that's where the genesis of it was, because I started looking at movies differently after that, as being something extra special."

In 1997, he made the leap to filmmaker, recording the history of this legendary film format in a documentary called "Cinerama Adventure."

"It began as more of a curiosity thing," he says by phone from California. "I wanted to relive a childhood memory. I figured I'd make a little half-hour documentary and sell it to PBS for 29 cents and will have done something for history."

But the more Strohmaier researched Cinerama, the more he realized what a part of Americana it was. The process has its roots in an aircraft simulator training system that the government developed for World War II. That is an eye-opening part of the Cinerama story that Strohmaier needed to tell and illustrate, but he worried about obtaining government cooperation to show this once classified equipment.

"It wasn't that difficult," he found. "In one case, it was the National Archives who has footage that they shot of it. Then we found a newsreel from 1947, so we knew it had been declassified by then. So then we figured we weren't going to even ask the government for permission, and the National Archives sent us the stuff anyway."

As excited as Strohmaier was about Cinerama's story, his attempts to secure funding from the usual foundation sources met with indifference. "They shrugged their shoulders," he says. "No one was interested," saying "this is not a socially redeeming thing. You've not saving some African tribe that's dying of AIDS, so it's not a worthy project."