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"Squeezed" Movies Challenge 3-Ds
is a technological novelty, and tackle the job
of telling super-realistic film stories.
That is what Twentieth Century-Fox has
set out to do in a $4,000,000 wide-screen
version of Lloyd C. Douglas' best selling
religious novel, The Robe, scheduled for
release late this September. This epic of the
young Roman legate who wins Christ's
blood-stained mantle under the central cross
on Golgotha would be a tough assignment
for any director, using tried and proven
standard-screen techniques. To make full
use of wide screen, it becomes a monumental
challenge.
Movies on an 80-Foot Screen
Not long ago I saw the results of the first
two months of Cinemascope shooting. On a
metalized screen which arced some 80 feet
across New York City's huge Roxy theater
stage, Golgotha came to life again in all its
quiet horror. Dark scuds moved sullenly
across the sky, and tufts of grass bowed to a
wind that swept in fitful gusts from right to
left.
They tell me that nearly a thousand
workers laid 100,000 board feet of lumber
under the 55 tons of dirt used to create that
hill; that they blended 300 sacks of casting
plaster, 150 bags of cement, 100 sacks of
hardwood plaster, 60 tons of sand and 10
bales of fiber to form the bleached
outcroppings of rock that fell away to a
gigantic backdrop painting of Jerusalem
which stretched 650 feet across my line of
vision.
Enough Light for 1,200 Homes
They say that the 291 blazing lights which
illuminated this $55,000 wide-screen setting
drew 35,000 amps - enough to turn on all the
bulbs in 1,200 five-room houses, and that the
heat produced by this blaze of
incandescence would have been intolerable
if 1,000 tons of ice hadn't been melted daily
in the big air conditioning units which blew
60,000 cubic feet of cooled air, every minute,
across the studio floor.
(Continued)
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