Cinerama, the forgotten future of cinema

Back in the early fifties, with the rise of the personal television, Cinerama was created as a new super-widescreen format to keep the people interested in cinema. In The wayward charms of Cinerama, David Bordwell chronicles the rise and fall of Cinerama in painstaking detail. The new format required three projectors working in tandem to throw out a huge image over a 146-degree arc. Cinerama was supposed to be the future of cinema, but the complex and unique challenges involved in producing movies for the format eventually led to its demise.