Display of Cinerama ephemera, Cinerama Dome, Hollywood, California, September 28, 2012.
Search for Paradise will screen at the ArcLight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, California on Thursday, October 4 at 12:30 p.m. PDT on the concluding day of the Cinerama festival that began on September 28. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to see this film scored by Dimitri Tiomkin.
Tickets: Search for Paradise
The screening on Saturday, September 29, was well attended and revelatory. Olivia Tiomkin Douglas was in the theater audience and acknowledged prior to the screening. Dimitri Tiomkin’s stunning music was presented in dynamic 6-track stereo. In addition to the three films carrying the left, center, and right portions of the picture, there is a fourth film that carries the six sound tracks. (In industry standard 35mm analog film the optical or magnetic tracks carrying the audio take up a relatively small portion of the width of the film when compared to the picture portion.) The uncompressed audio in this pre-Dolby recording filled every corner of the large theater. Musicians drawn from the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and NBC Symphony Orchestra were called on to record the score at Carnegie Hall in New York under the baton of Tiomkin. Orchestrator Patrick Russ marveled at wonderful bits and larger pieces of the music score that can only be heard by viewing the film. Russ and Paul Henning arranged music from Search for Paradise for a London Symphony Orchestra concert last fall. The Search for Paradise music from that concert is available on CD and to download.
PURCHASE CD (from Amazon.com): Tiomkin: The Greatest Film Scores
DOWNLOAD (from Amazon.com): Dimitri Tiomkin – The Greatest Film Scores
DOWNLOAD (from iTunes): Dimitri Tiomkin: The Greatest Film Scores
Search for Paradise postcard
Henning compared the film to a time capsule, as it offers a view of a world that no longer exists. In addition to the wonderful travelogue footage, the film documents the pageantry and a parade for the 1956 coronation of the King of Nepal. Stealing the show, however, was the deliriously frantic raft ride down the Indus River complemented by exuberant action music composed by Tiomkin. Closing out the film is a marvelous montage of American air superiority featuring low-flying supersonic jets and other displays of American military aerial might in the post-World War II era.
The break down reel (our previous post incorrectly referred to this as a short subject) with film’s producer Lowell Thomas interviewing Dimitri Tiomkin was a smash hit. Olivia Tiomkin was thrilled to see this rare footage of Dimitri. Olivia recalled that Dimitri was terrified of speaking in his unrefined English to Thomas, the radio broadcaster and journalist with a golden voice.
Cinerama Festival program
In its day, the three-projector Cinerama system was prone to experience technical difficulties during screenings so each Cinerama film was accompanied by a special reel around ten minutes in length that the projectionist could have up at a moment’s notice. Intended to amuse and distract the audience the break down reel bought time for the projectionists to trouble shoot the problem. For Saturday’s screening of Search there were no mechanical problems so the break down reel was shown at the conclusion of the film. Seeing and hearing Tiomkin speak about his music was a fitting end to the program.
The original film print of Search was courtesy of John H. Mitchell, New South Wales, Australia. The Cinerama Dome theater lobby contains Cinerama ephemera and equipment and the ArcLight gift shop is selling clothing, glassware, programs, and postcards.