"Sure it takes more film per minute," says
Squire, "but when we do a take, the whole
countryside is covered. There's no extra
shooting to cover details. We shot the whole
La Scala opera in two days-got the entire
stage on film as close up as you could ask.
You could see the perspiration on the
singers' lips. It would have taken six
Hollywood crews at least a month to do a
standard movie that caught all the details we
got. Can you imagine how much film they'd
have to shoot?"
Nobody denies the size and intricacy of the
camera. It's big and complicated. With its
padded aluminum blimp to drown motor
noise, it measures about a yard square and
weighs close to 200 pounds. But Squire, who
has circled the globe eight times and trundled
standard cameras into jungles to shoot films
for Frank Buck, operates the Cinerama
camera on all kinds of perches. The camera
has ridden in a helicopter, lashed to an open
hatch. On the bow of a speedboat, it was
catapulted through a wall of blazing gasoline.
To get a close-up of a girl in a canoe, the
boys chopped a canoe in half, rigged an
outboard platform between the sawed-off
end and the bow of a camera boat and the
camera rode at water level.
According to Squire, there's no place a
regular camera can go that the Cinerama box
can't go, too. But he treats it mighty
carefully because it's the only one in
existence. There is another one in the
making but if anything happens to this one
meanwhile, there will be no more Cinerama
pictures for a while.
The Cinerama potential is big. Whole
Broadway shows photographed and shipped
around to bring the finest talent in show
business to every small town; militarytraining films that give a recruit the feeling
of things he'll face before he faces them;
travelogues that will not just show people
what a foreign country is like but "take"
them there and "put" them in the middle of
it.
One movie expert put it this way:
"Cinerama is going to dump the whole world
in the lap of the people-and vice versa."
End | 
