Vitarama was a system for achieving panoramic film projection on a curved screen. Spearheaded by the inventor Fred Waller, it emerged amid the flurry of experimentation that took place between the 1920s and early 1940s with technologies that promised to enhance cinematic realism by more accurately replicating human sensory experience. This experimentation included work on photographic color, and synchronized and stereophonic sound, as well as systems for widescreen and stereoscopic exhibition. And it overlapped with developments in adjacent forms of art, media and technology such as, painting, architecture, radio, television, telephony and recorded sound (Belton, 1992; Crafton, 1997; Street & Yumibe, 2019; Rogers, 2019; Dienstfrey, 2024). Although the Vitarama process itself was employed only experimentally, it formed the basis for subsequent projection systems with greater reach –including the Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer of the early 1940s and the Cinerama system that catalyzed the extensive embrace of widescreen cinema a decade later.

Waller first experimented with wide-angle views when working in Paramount’s special effects department in the mid-1920s, noting that “wide-angle pictures seemed to be more third dimensional than standard pictures” (Waller, 1993: p. 289). Years later, in 1937, he was approached by the architect Ralph Walker to help design the petroleum industry’s exhibit for the New York World’s Fair. Walker envisioned “a huge room, spherical in shape, on the walls of which would be thrown a constant stream of moving pictures from an entire battery of projectors” (Walker, 1953: p. 114). Waller had become convinced that stimulating a viewer’s peripheral vision was crucial to creating the illusion of depth in cinema – even more important than stereoscopy. With a conventional flat screen, however, doing so would require the projection area to expand beyond feasible proportions. Walker’s idea for a spherical projection surface supplied what Waller considered the key to making wide-angle projection a reality (Waller, 1993: pp. 289–90). Although this was a watershed discovery for Waller, Walker’s plan for an immersive projection space, and even a curved screen surface, echoed longstanding practices at world’s fairs as well as ideas that had been circulating in the avant-garde (Belton, 1992: pp. 85–9; Belton, 2004: p. 277; Rogers, 2019: pp. 135–9).

On September 14, 1937, Waller and Walker filed a patent for a motion picture theater that would accommodate projection onto a section of a sphere, with the aim to produce “the effect or illusion that the spectator is actually in and surrounded by the environment depicted” (Waller & Walker, 1937). The patent proposed achieving this with multiple projectors, which were to operate in conjunction with multi-track sound. Waller built a rig to yoke together and synchronize eleven 16mm cameras that he used to make test films, which included shots of people circulating around his home, as well as moving shots from his car. He also built a corresponding projection apparatus, which was initially installed in his home barn in Huntington, NY. David O. Selznick learned about this system in late 1937, during pre-production on Gone with the Wind (1939), and considered – but eventually gave up on – the prospect of using it to film and exhibit that film’s “burning of Atlanta” scene (Belton, 1992: p. 100; Rogers, 2019: pp. 58–62). Waller held demonstrations of the system both in his barn and in a rented office at 101 Park Avenue in New York City. After a research scientist from Eastman Kodak, John Capstaff, attended one of these and pointed out that reflection on the screen was degrading the image, Waller developed a new approach to screen construction, filing a second patent on June 14, 1938. Laurance Rockefeller, son of John D. Rockefeller Jr., attended a demonstration in late 1938 and had his interest piqued. The Vitarama Corporation was formed on November 3, 1938, “to develop the process”, with Waller, Laurance Rockefeller and Walker’s architectural firm signing on as stockholders (Waller, 1993: pp. 290–1: p. 291; Walker, 1953: p. 116).

Although Vitarama was not ultimately used for the petroleum exhibit, Waller did other related work for the New York World’s Fair. This included designing “a panoramic arrangement” of eleven projections of Kodachrome slides on a massive 187 ft x 22 ft (57m x 6.7m) curved and faceted screen for the Eastman Kodak exhibit as well as directing the “living mural” projected on the dome of the Perisphere (Waller, 1993: p. 291; Seldes & Garrison, 1939; Tuttle, 1940: p. 265; Walker, 1953: p. 116; Candee, 1954: p. 642). He also continued to develop Vitarama in a carriage house provided by Rockefeller on West 55th Street in New York City, with the intention of beginning production for a theatrical release to premiere at the Center Theatre in Rockefeller Center. After World War II erupted in Europe, however, he put the project on hold. In mid-1940 an old friend and expert in ballistics, who had seen some of the early demonstrations, approached Waller with the idea of converting Vitarama into a system to train machine gunners. Waller turned his attention to developing what became known as the Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer (Waller 1946; Waller 1953; Waller 1993; Taylor 2013). After the war, Time Inc. hired him to develop equipment for showing slides on five-panel screens as a way of promoting Life Magazine – equipment that was subsequently borrowed by the U.S. State Department and used for propaganda in Germany and Japan. In November of 1946, with financing from entities and people including Time Inc., Rockefeller, and sound engineer Hazard Reeves, Waller formed the Cinerama Corporation in order, as he put it, to “promote the theatrical end of Vitarama” (Waller 1953, 126; Waller 1993; Reeves 1999). Cinerama, Inc. initially licensed the Vitarama design, and the Vitarama Corporation continued to develop and file patents for related technologies until Cinerama, Inc. acquired it in 1955 (“Cinerama Inc. Acquires Vitarama (Patents) From Fred Waller Estate”).