The film began on a conventional squarish screen with a deliberately plodding, black-and-white prologue in which Thomas offered a 12-minute lecture on the history of the moving image ("...and out of that scientific study came a toy they called the zoetrope..."). Finally, with audience members probably wishing there had been multiplexes in those days so they could leave and sneak into a Jane Russell picture, Thomas got to the point: "The pictures you are now going to see have no plot, they have no stars... Ladies and gentlemen, this is Cinerama!" It was a brilliant stroke of showmanship. As the curtains slowly parted to reveal the rest of the huge, engulfing screen, the film cut to what has been called the most famous point-of-view shot in history, taken by the bulky, three-eyed camera as it was lashed to the front seat of a roller coaster.

This was virtual reality 1950s-style. Audience members, their fields of vision nearly filled by the image, felt as if they too were rushing down the track. People would scream, rock back and forth in their seats, and, if we are to believe press accounts of the day (no doubt informed by ballyhoo), leave the theater at intermission to buy Dramamine. This, anyway, was what the people in the good seats would do; if you were too far back or off to the side, the immersion effect didn't really work. But even though the rest of the film was an ungainly combination of demo reel and travelogue - highlights included a transcendently boring serenade by the Vienna Boys' Choir, a visit to a hokey water-ski show in Florida, and a climactic aerial tour of America's scenic wonders, accompanied on the soundtrack by the Salt Lake City Tabernacle Choir (that last sequence reportedly brought tears to President Eisenhower's eyes) - and even though it would play at a total of only 14 expensively converted theaters during its initial two-year run in the U.S., This is Cinerama, by The Hollywood Reporter's accounting, was the highest-grossing film released in 1950. It bettered the likes of High Noon, Singin' in the Rain, and The Quiet Man. Being among the new media of its day, Cinerama also spawned a hot stock issue until - this too will sound familiar - people began to look at the numbers and wonder whether anyone could actually profit from the capital-intensive system

Nevertheless, in an era when audiences were abandoning movie theaters for the novelty of television, Hollywood was desperate for gimmicks. The 3-D craze began two months after This is Cinerama's premiere with the release of Bwana Devil. While that fad would die out within a year, This is Cinerama would change movies forever - "the greatest invention since talking pictures," as the ads not all that preposterously claimed. It wasn't just that wide-screen became an industry standard, or that This is Cinerama launched an era of oversize, overstuffed superspectaculars that would give us Ben-Hur, Spartacus, and Lawrence of Arabia (as well as Barabbas and Cleopatra). Cinerama restored a visceralness to moviegoing that had been largely missing since the nickelodeon, where novice film audiences would flinch at the sight of waves or a man pointing a gun at the camera. As the film historian John Belton argues in his definitive Widescreen Cinema, there is also a direct link between Cinerama and the "roller-coaster ride" movies of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and their many disciples, between the opening shot of This Is Cinerama and Luke Skywalker's dizzying joyride through the canyons of the Death Star. If, say, you ducked during the cannonball decapitation scene in last summer's The Patriot, you too have felt a distant reverberation of the jolt experienced by David Sarnoff and William Paley at the 1952 premiere.

But, as is often the case with revolutions, Cinerama would be deposed in turn, supplanted by cheaper and less clumsy wide-screen processes - Twentieth Century Fox's CinemaScope, Paramount's VistaVision, and the independently owned Todd-AO (dreamed up by Mike Todd after he split with Cinerama). All of these were single-projector, or "one strip," processes, and thus didn't demand as much from either filmmakers or theater owners.* In the end, only seven "three strip" Cinerama movies would ever be shot, or eight if you count a film that was shot in the rival but compatible Cinemiracle process, later bought out by Cinerama, Inc. Eight and a half if you count a 10-minute ad shot in Cinerama by the French car company Renault in 1959. By the mid-60s, for all intents and purposes, the process was dead; by the 70s, even the bones had disappeared. Prints were scarce, the unique equipment needed to show them even scarcer - Cinerama had indeed perished from the face of the earth. You simply couldn't see it, a sad end for a medium that had reshaped the movies.

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