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To The Moon and Beyond is a special motion picture produced for and shown at the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair. It depicted traveling from Earth out to an overall view of the universe and back again, zooming down to the atomic scale. It was filmed in a Cinerama process using a camera with a single fisheye lens and projected onto a dome screen.
The film was made in a format called "The New CINERAMA - 360 Process" It was shown in a 96-foot-high "Moon Dome" that was part of Transportation and Travel building (Pavilion No. 123) in the Transportation section of the Fair and was presented by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. The film was narrated by Rod Serling. [1]
The film was created using Cinerama 360° - a process that recorded on 70mm film at 18 fps using a fish-eye wide angle lens. [2] It was projected in a domed theater using a similar wide angle projector. The film was made by Graphic Films Corporation, a company run by former Disney animator Lester Novros who had been making technical films for NASA, the US Air Force, and various aerospace clients. [3]
Stanley Kubrick saw the film at the Fair and was so impressed by its special effects and accurate depiction of scientifically based material that he hired Graphic Films as a design consultant on a film he already had in pre-production, 2001: A Space Odyssey . [3] Graphic Films' Lester Novros, Con Pederson, and background artist Douglas Trumbull would air-mail research based concept sketches and notes covering the mechanics and physics of space travel to Kubrick in England during pre-production. They would go on to create storyboards for a portion of the space flight sequences seen in the film. [3] Trumbull would eventually leave Graphic Films to become a special effects supervisor on 2001. [3] [4]
HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series. First appearing in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL is a sentient artificial general intelligence computer that controls the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft and interacts with the ship's astronaut crew. While part of HAL's hardware is shown toward the end of the film, he is mostly depicted as a camera lens containing a red and yellow dot, with such units located throughout the ship. HAL 9000 is voiced by Douglas Rain in the two feature film adaptations of the Space Odyssey series. HAL speaks in a soft, calm voice and a conversational manner, in contrast to the crewmen, David Bowman and Frank Poole.
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and photographer. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his films were nearly all adaptations of novels or short stories, spanning a number of genres and gaining recognition for their intense attention to detail, innovative cinematography, extensive set design, and dark humor.
Special effects are illusions or visual tricks used in the theatre, film, television, video game, amusement park and simulator industries to simulate the imagined events in a story or virtual world. It is sometimes abbreviated as SFX, but this may also refer to sound effects.
Cinerama is a widescreen process that originally projected images simultaneously from three synchronized 35mm projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen, subtending 146-degrees of arc. The trademarked process was marketed by the Cinerama corporation. It was the first of several novel processes introduced during the 1950s when the movie industry was reacting to competition from television. Cinerama was presented to the public as a theatrical event, with reserved seating and printed programs, and audience members often dressed in their best attire for the evening.
The Cinerama Dome is a movie theater located at 6360 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. Designed to exhibit widescreen Cinerama films, it opened November 7, 1963. The original developer was William R. Forman, founder of Pacific Theatres. The Cinerama Dome continued as a leading first-run theater, most recently as part of the ArcLight Hollywood complex, until it closed temporarily in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic in California. The ArcLight chain closed permanently in April 2021, with the theater never having reopened. In June 2022, it was announced that there were plans to reopen it and the former ArcLight Hollywood under a new name, Cinerama Hollywood.
Silent Running is a 1972 American environmental-themed science fiction film. It is the directorial debut of Douglas Trumbull, and stars Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, and Jesse Vint.
Dark Side of the Moon is a French mockumentary by director William Karel. It originally aired on the Franco-German television network Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune.
Douglas Hunt Trumbull was an American film director and visual effects supervisor, who pioneered innovative methods in special effects. He created scenes for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner and The Tree of Life, and directed the movies Silent Running and Brainstorm.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke. It was developed concurrently with Stanley Kubrick's film version and published after the release of the film. Clarke and Kubrick worked on the book together, but eventually only Clarke ended up as the official author. The story is based in part on various short stories by Clarke, including "The Sentinel". By 1992, the novel had sold three million copies worldwide. An elaboration of Clarke and Kubrick's collaborative work on this project was made in the 1972 book The Lost Worlds of 2001.
The Hollywood Theatre is a historic movie theater in northeast Portland, Oregon built in 1926. It is a central historical landmark of the Hollywood District, which is named after the theatre itself. The theatre is located at 4122 NE Sandy Blvd, and is operated by a non-profit organization. The Hollywood Theatre was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 and is considered to be a gem of Northeast Portland's historic culture and tradition. It is the only theater in Oregon showing movies in 70mm film.
Super Panavision 70 is the marketing brand name used to identify movies photographed with Panavision 70 mm spherical optics between 1959 and 1983. It has since been replaced by Panavision System 65.
The Seattle Cinerama Theatre is a landmark movie theater in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, United States. The theater opened in 1963 and was renovated in the 1990s after its acquisition by Paul Allen. The Cinerama was closed in May 2020. At the time of its 2020 closure, it was one of only three movie theaters in the world capable of showing three-panel Cinerama films. In 2023, the theater was purchased by the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) and reopened on December 14, 2023 as SIFF Cinema Downtown due to trademark issues with the "Cinerama" name.
Lester Novros was an American artist, animator, and teacher.
The United States Spacecraft Discovery One is a fictional spaceship featured in the first two novels of the Space Odyssey series by Arthur C. Clarke and in the films 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) directed by Stanley Kubrick and 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) directed by Peter Hyams. The ship is a nuclear-powered interplanetary spaceship, crewed by two men and controlled by the AI on-board computer HAL 9000. The ship is destroyed in the second novel and makes no further appearances.
Since its premiere in 1968, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey has been analysed and interpreted by numerous people, ranging from professional movie critics to amateur writers and science fiction fans. The director of the film, Stanley Kubrick, and the writer, Arthur C. Clarke, wanted to leave the film open to philosophical and allegorical interpretation, purposely presenting the final sequences of the film without the underlying thread being apparent; a concept illustrated by the final shot of the film, which contains the image of the embryonic "Starchild". Nonetheless, in July 2018, Kubrick's interpretation of the ending scene was presented after being newly found in an early interview.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, and it was inspired by multiple short stories by Clarke, including "The Sentinel" (1951). Clarke also published a novelisation of the film, in part written concurrently with the screenplay, after the film's release. 2001: A Space Odyssey stars Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, and Douglas Rain and follows a voyage by astronauts, scientists, and the sentient supercomputer HAL 9000 to Jupiter to investigate an alien monolith.
The 1968 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey featured numerous fictional future technologies, which have proven prescient in light of subsequent developments around the world. Before the film's production began, director Stanley Kubrick sought technical advice from over fifty organizations, and a number of them submitted their ideas to Kubrick of what kind of products might be seen in a movie set in the year 2001. The film is also praised for its accurate portrayal of spaceflight and vacuum.
Road to the Stars is a 1957 Soviet biographical film by Pavel Klushantsev. Combining elements of science educational films and speculative science fiction, the film was groundbreaking for its use of special effects to depict life in space.
Piers Bizony is a science journalist, space historian, author, and exhibition organiser. Bizony specialises in the topics of outer space, special effects, and technology. He has written articles for The Independent, BBC Focus and Wired. His 1997 book The Rivers of Mars was shortlisted for the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award. His book 2001: Filming the Future is an authoritative reference about Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. His 2017 book Moonshots was inspired by Michael Light's 1999 book Full Moon.