"It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" Gets The Criterion Treatment

Great news! Thanks to a tip by Mike Schlesinger (a major player of the U.S. version of Godzilla 2000), it has been announced that Stanley Kramer's It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World will be receiving the Criterion Collection treatment.

The movie will be released January 21, 2014 as a set of 5 Blu-ray and DVD discs.

The synopsis:

Stanley Kramer followed his Oscar-winning Judgment at Nuremberg with this sobering investigation of American greed. Ah, who are we kidding? It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, about a group of strangers fighting tooth and nail over buried treasure, is the most grandly harebrained movie ever made, a pileup of slapstick and borscht-belt-y one-liners performed by a nonpareil cast, including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, Jonathan Winters, and a boatload of other playing-to-the-rafters comedy legends. For sheer scale of silliness, Kramer’s wildly uncharacteristic film is unlike any other, an exhilarating epic of tomfoolery.

The movie was released in November 1963. The Pacific Cinerama Dome in Hollywood was just completed that year and It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World premiered there at the Dome's grand opening night on November 7, 1963. I was lucky to be able to see it at the Dome during its engagement with my Cub Scout Pack, my parents and grandfather.

It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was not shown in the 3-camera Cinerama process, but shown in 1-camera 70mm Ultra Panavision.

For more info, go here. 

Cinerama Memory Jog

Stuart Galbraith IV has an interesting article on Cinerama movies over at his blog which jarred loose some memories of my own.

In case you're not aware, Cinerama is a filming and projection process involving three cameras/projectors to make a gigantic widescreen movie-viewing experience.  The illustration below shows how Cinerama movies are projected in a theater.

Above, Cinerama screening process.

I was fortunate enough to be living in Los Angeles in the 1960s when Hollywood was making Cinerama-format movies.

In 1962, I went with my Cub Scout pack to the Hollywood Warner Theater to see The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm in Cinerama.  The next year, I went with my pack to see How The West Was Won at the same theater in Cinerama.  While Grimm was impressive,  How The West Was Won absolutely was breathtaking in Cinerama.

Also in 1963, a new theater designed to show Cinerama movies was opened in Hollywood: Pacific's Cinerama Dome on Sunset Blvd.  The inaugural movie for the Cinerama Dome was Stanley Kramer's It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.  Although it was advertised as being in Cinerama, it was actually in Ultra Panavision 70 (close, but no cigar).  I attended (again with my Cub Scout pack) one of the screenings at the Dome.

Around about that time, Pacific Theaters put up a huge Cinerama screen at the Century Drive-In Theater (now long-gone) in Inglewood, California.  Unfortunately, as the drive-in was right under the jet approach to Los Angeles International Airport and not much (if any) Cinerama movies were being made, the plan to provide the "ultimate drive-in movie experience" was a bust.

2001: A Space Odyssey was touted as being in Cinerama, but it was basically the same process used for It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.  I saw 2001 at the Hollywood Warner Theater during its initial release in 1968.

Generally, 70mm Panavision has replaced Cinerama.  It would be interesting to see a new Cinerama movie using the three projector process with today's technology.