Page 19 - Cinerama_booklet

actual combat, with an electronic ''beep" sounding in his head-

set whenever he scored a direct hit. By the time the war ended
the Waller Trainer hod become one of the standard training
devices of both Army and Navy air forces.

With a new ally in the person of Hazard Reeves, a brilliant
electronic engineer who developed the stereophonic sound system
that Cinerama employs, Woller moved his quarters from the
Rockefeller carriage house to a huge indoor tennis court in Oyster

Boy, Long Island, where he began the critical task of perfecting
his process for public exhibition. The number of lenses (and pro-
jectors) was reduced to three, covering a field 146° by 55°, or

about 80 per cent . the full range of human vision, and a new
screen, cylindrical rather than spherical in section, was developed.
Meanwhile Woller was busy making test sequences in the new

medium and showing them to his friends to test public reaction to
the process. One of his early shots was the roller-coaster ride at
Rockowoys' Ployland which, remade in color, provides the breath-

taking opening sequence of "This Is Cinerama." Another, de-
signed to dramatize the high-fidelity realism of Hazard Reeves;
sound system, was a performance of the Long Island Choral
Society singing Handel's "Messiah." It is retained, just as it was

photographed, in "This Is Cinerama," and at every performance
of the picture some members of the audience still instinctively turn

around in their seats when the voices of the choir are heard in the
rear of the auditorium, before they make their way down the
aisles and their appearance on the screen.
Many distinguished visitors, including the heads of virtually

every major motion picture company, mode the pilgrimage out
to Oyster Boy to see "Woller's wonder" during this time and,
although they were unanimous in their praise, no one offered any

help in bringing it to the public. Then one day Lowell Thomas
dropped in to see his old friend Hazard Reeves and was invited
out to look at Cinerama. One glance told him that, in his own