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Dave Strohmaier, 51, is a film and television editor who lives in the San Fernando Valley, along with most of the other people who do Hollywood's hard labor. One night four years ago, in what he describes with hindsight as a midlife crisis, he had a brainstorm: even though he had no previous experience, he would direct and produce a documentary on Cinerama, which he had seen as a kid growing up in the Midwest in the 50s. He retained an abiding affection for the system and didn't understand why no one else, even most film historians, remembered or cared. This was the wrong he set out to right. He told his wife he thought the documentary would cost them $35,000 or so. More than 50 interviews and $108,000 later, he's still at it, his wife is still driving a 1983 station wagon, and there's no guarantee that the finished film will ever see the light of day, though judging from a rough cut he showed me it will be superb, full of humor, drama, and genuine pathos, a surprisingly human tale. As was the case with Lowell Thomas, Strohmaier's faith in Cinerama's power to fascinate does not wane. "What's so amazing about Cinerama," he says, "is that the movies weren't all that good but everyone's so passionate about it."

John Harvey is the name of the man who tore his house apart to build a Cinerama screening room. It turns out this is not an altogether uncommon occurrence. There is a fellow in England who also put up a Cinerama screen in his living room, though he doesn't have any projectors. There is an Australian whose garage doubles as a Cinerama projection booth; his screen is in his backyard.

But John Harvey was the first. He is 64, and would look a little bit like Walt Disney if Walt Disney had dressed like a shop teacher. Harvey has spent his professional life in the hardware end of the movie-exhibition businss and has the good-humored but no-nonsense demeanor of someone who, in essence, tinkers for a living. He sometimes seems to harbor an underlying impatience with the world, which may come from years and years of having to answer variation of the question: For God's sake, Cinerama - why?

Harvey was already a budding projectionist when, at the age of 16, his family drove the 49 miles from their home in Dayton to see This Is Cinerama at the Capitol Theatre in Cincinnati. "I never saw anything so impressive," he says simply, a man not given to verbal rhapsody. He went back to see This Is Cinerama again and again, intrigued as much by the staggering complexities of the three-projector system, which to his mind had a kind of watchwork beauty, as by the film itself.

In 1963, Cinerama finally made it to third-tier citites such as Dayton with the release of How the West Was Won, the first Cinerama feature with movie stars and one which Harvey, by then a working professional, had the honor of projecting. "All these things were happening," he says, meaning things Cineramic, "and I was in the middle of it." Unfortunately, this would prove to be the dawn before the darkness.

From the beginning there were questions about Cinerama's long-term viability. As the New York Herald Tribune cautioned in its otherwise rave review of This Is Cinerama, "This device has yet to show whether it can deal as acutely with people as with mountain ranges, whether it has pliability as well as size and can adapt to intimacy as well as grandeur." Mike Todd Jr., who shot some of the sequences for This Is Cinerama, remembers his father's habitual complaint about the medium, "Sometime, someway, you're going to want to do a love story, and the seams are going to get in the way of the guy saying, 'I love you.'"

The seams: Waller had never found a perfect way to blend the images of the three projectors. Where the "panels" met there were overlaps, dividing the screen in thirds with a distracting flicker or "wiggle" along the joint lines. Another Cineramic peculiarity that filmmakers had to compensate for was the extreme wide angle of the camera's three lenses, which was necessary in order to capture a contiguous image. The lenses were great for shooting the Grand Canyon, but more problematic when trained on people. Due to the unusual optics, closeups - the bread and the butter of feature-film making - were both difficult to shoot and ill-advised in Cinerama. There is, for instance, a scene featureing Debbie Reynolds in How the West Was Won in which her nose looks like Jake LaMotta's.

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