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Column for July 15, 2004
Fifty years ago, the motion picture industry was in transition. Television
was eating into the movie theater business. Flint got its first good TV signal
in 1950 when WJIM-TV (now WLNS) channel 6 in Lansing went on the air. Not
all TV was successful. In 1953, Flint’s first TV station, WTAC-TV on
UHF channel 16, went on the air. But it went off the air permanently less
than a year later because too few TV sets were equipped to receive UHF channels
at that time. (The former WTAC-TV studios would become the WJRT channel 12
studios in 1958.) Fifty years ago this year in 1954, WNEM-TV channel 5 went
on the air and originally had studios located in Flint at Bishop Airport.
The
motion picture industry tried different ways to get people back to the theaters,
some of which had already started closing as they couldn’t compete with
TV. 3-D movies (requiring the use of 3-D glasses) were short-lived. Making
the screen size larger and wider was tried first with Cinerama which used
a very wide screen and three projectors running simultaneously. A couple
of Detroit theaters, the Music Hall and the Summit were equipped for Cinerama.
A more practical method of showing wide screen movies was CinemaScope which
used special lenses which squeezed the filmed image onto regular 35mm film,
then unsqueezed it at the projector for showing on a wide curved screen.
All the theaters needed to show CinemaScope films were a new screen and the
CinemaScope lenses for the projectors. So CinemaScope became the most widely
used of the early wide-screen film formats. To find out more about the technical
aspects of wide-screen movies, check out
http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/lobby.htm
The first CinemaScope film was "The Robe" starring Richard Burton and Jean
Simmons, released in 1953. That film got its Flint premiere on Thanksgiving
Day, November 26, 1953 at the Capitol Theatre. Regular flat-projected 35mm
movies were and are still being made, but now they were being photographed
with the action and screen credits in the middle of the screen so the top
and bottom could be masked off on the wide screen. If you look at the well-used
intermission film on this page, you can see the top and bottom of the image
is fine, but the middle part had become scorched and faded from too many
screenings with the hot projector light. 
Modification of indoor theaters for wide-screen movies was a simple process.
Drive-in theaters were another matter as they needed an architect and a
contractor to make the huge drive-in theater screen tower wider. Some drive-in
theater owners constructed ‘wings’ which were built the same way
as the original screen tower. The original Dort DI in Flint was a good example
as was the US-23. Others chose to add simpler extensions to the screen tower
which were much thinner than the original tower. The worst example was with
the Starlite DI in Bay City. Some drive-ins, including the Ypsi-Ann DI which
was located between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, chose to build a new screen
tower in front of the old one. The winter of 1954/55 was a busy time for
Flint area drive-in theater owners as all four drive-in theaters in business
at that time were building wings on their screen towers to show wide screen
movies. The Dort DI closed for the season and to allow for remodeling on
November 21, 1954. It reopened on March 18, 1955 with "Flint’s largest
motion picture screen" with the CinemaScope film "Broken Lance" starring
Spencer Tracy. The co-owned West Side DI opened with its "giant wide screen"
on April 7, 1955 and also introduced a new larger refreshment building featuring
heated rest rooms and "Flint’s only ‘indoor seat’ drive in
theater." The North Flint and US-23 Drive-Ins both opened on April 1, 1955.
The North Flint DI opened with its wings built creating a 100' wide screen.
The US-23 opened boasting a 5,520 sq. ft. screen which was the largest in
the Flint area and got its first CinemaScope film two days later with "Knights
of The Round Table" starring Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner and Mel Ferrer.
As you take a look at the before and after pictures of drive-in theater screen
towers as they looked before and after they were retrofitted for wide-screen
movies, note how the drive-ins looked near the end. Even though the Dort
DI in Flint had a short life span as it was demolished in 1963, the screen
tower was certainly well-built. I cringe that the thought of taking in a
film on the original screen of the Starlite DI in Bay City as that screen
looked as if it was falling apart near the end. The US-23 Twin DI’s
original screen tower may have had the back of the screen lacking in maintenance,
but the business side on the front of the tower was in top shape where it
mattered when you wanted to see a movie. That made the arson fire which destroyed
the US 23 Twin DI’s 115 ft. wide screen tower early in 1997 all the
more tragic. On the positive side, the Cherry Bowl DI in Honor still looks
magnificent and the original screen tower with the CinemaScope wings on the
Getty 1-4 DI in Muskegon Heights has had maintenance done recently so it
looks like that screen is here to stay. We also have the Ford-Wyoming 1-5
DI’s original art deco screen tower. One former DI site which still
has its screen tower is the auto salvage yard which used to house the 131
DI in Plainwell. The screen shows where the original tower starts and the
wings begin. The Cherry Bowl, the Ford-Wyoming and the Getty (formerly the
NK) are the only operating drive-ins in Michigan which still have their
pre-CinemaScope screen towers
which
were all retrofitted with wings for wide-screen movies. The title of this
month’s column was inspired by the Stan Freberg song "Wide-Screen Mama
Blues" from 50 years ago.
My next column will be a tribute to a once familiar regional brand of gasoline
which is fast disappearing from the Michigan landscape. The picture of a
newly opened Admiral station on Ballenger Highway in Flint is a hint as until
May of this year, it sold the brand of gas I’ll be paying tribute to
next month.
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