Word: imax
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...late '20s, when talking pictures replaced the silents, theaters converted to sound within two years. But the coming of sound was immediately and immensely popular. Today, although films shown on the giant IMAX screens make money and although computer-made animated features have been spanking the butts of traditional cartoons, there's no conclusive evidence that the billions it would cost to go digital would be repaid by a box-office surge. "Our research shows that the audience generally isn't going to pay more and isn't going to go more," Hall says. "So there's no financial model...
That's one future of movies--IMAX-size extravaganzas you can see only in a movie house. It's a throwback to the Cinerama and CinemaScope the studios used against the first home-viewing medium...
...cavernous conference room of the IMAX headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., Hanks doesn't look like a man consumed by the moon. He looks like a man getting over a cold--coughing, sipping hot tea and racing to get through the last few weeks of postproduction before heading to Europe to begin shooting his next superproject, The Da Vinci Code...
...walking in one-sixth G to maneuvering around another grimy, unshaven, bulky-spacesuit-wearing man in a lunar-module interior no bigger than two telephone booths. Hanks and Cowen then went heavy on the handheld, point-of-view shots and layered on the 3-D. The result is an IMAX movie writ even larger than most. With intercuts of archival footage, Hanks' narration and commentary by contemporary kids, it is a glorious tutorial on all things lunar...
Hanks has good reason to feel worn out. To re-create a flight to the moon, Playtone and IMAX filled a Los Angeles soundstage with Styrofoam, concrete and pulverized roofing tiles--the simulated lunar surface--and borrowed exact replicas of a lunar module and lunar rover from the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. They stitched together spacesuits from the boots up, rolled in a 240-lb. 3-D IMAX camera, in addition to the cameras director of photography Sean Phillips built himself, and rigged the entire set with a harness system to simulate the one-sixth-gravity bunny...