Radio City Music Hall 70mm Film Presentations

The Radio City Music Hall front view with neon letters. From the streets around Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Radio City Music Hall was conceived as part of the Rockefeller Center real estate complex in New York City during the height of the depression in the late Twenties. It opened on December 27, 1932 and is one of the largest theatres in the world, seating about 5900 people. (The seating varies from attraction to attraction depending on the amount of space needed for sound and light consoles and whether or not "pit seating" or seating in the orchestra pit area is employed). When it opened it was to be overseen by Samuel L. Rothafel (or "Roxy"), who had operated a number of theatres in New York, including the one that bore his name.

• Go to gallery Radio City Music Hall, New York City, USA

The Hall was to present large vaudeville shows and its sister theatre, the smaller New Roxy, was to combine vaudeville and motion pictures. Unfortunately, the opening night attraction ran so long, the fear arose that running stage attractions alone would result in financial failure.

So on January 11, 1933 the Hall ran its first feature film, "The Bitter Tea of General Yen", directed by Frank Capra and starring Barbara Stanwyck, along with a stage show produced by the Roxy organization. The movie/stage show policy would last for almost forty-six years, until 1979, when the theatre stopped showing films on a regular basis and instead became a concert venue and a setting for a variety of telecasts such as the Grammy and MTV awards presentations. Today Radio City Productions which operates and leases the house is owned by Cablevision, which also operates Madison Square Garden and owns a variety of sports teams, cable channels such as American Movie Classics and Bravo, widely carried on U.S. cable television systems (some of which they also own).

The Hall still serves as a premiere house, and was the site of the World Premiere of Disney's "The Lion King" as well as an initial run of the film with a Disney-produced stage show. Other recent premieres have included the re-make of "101 Dalmatians" and "GoldenEye" as well as the re-make of "Miracle on 34th Street". In the case of "The Lion King", "101 Dalmatians" and "Miracle on 34th Street", 70mm prints were made for Music Hall presentation.
 

Side view of the 5900 seats. Projection portholes are in upper left corner.  

The Hall was relatively late in installing 70mm projection equipment because of the necessity of accommodating the stage show that accompanied the film. The Music Hall show always ran between two and three hours including the stage show, which varied in length depending on the length of the feature. Since the initial 70mm attractions were all roadshow presentations, it was felt that they were too long to be played at the Hall.

By the time MGM wanted to play "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" at the Hall in 70mm in 1964, roadshows were waning in popularity and some were predicting the demise of the 70mm format. So "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" ran in 35mm. Then in 1970 Ross Hunter, the producer of "Airport" insisted that film be shown at the Hall in 70mm. It was decided to install three 70/35mm Simplex projectors and the associated sound equipment. The selection of the Simplex projectors was made because the Hall already had four Simplex X-L projectors in the booth, and most of the parts were interchangeable.
 

The Hall Chief Projectionist Bob Endres, Dennis Furbush and Thomas Hauerslev.

In addition, the special aperture plates used to mask projected images to fit scenery of the stage shows could be used in the 35/70 machines. Since the Hall always had three projectors set up to run the feature, an extra 35mm machine was installed at that time, bringing the total projectors in the booth to five. The two 35mm-only machines were used for coming attractions, short subjects and the previously mentioned "film effects" or scenic film projections used in the stage show. The Hall was to run two other 70mm features that year -- "Darling Lili" with Julie Andrews and "Scrooge" with Albert Finney.

Since 1970 approximately twenty-two titles have had 70mm presentation at the Hall, either as part of the movie/stage show policy or as premieres and special presentations, and a 70mm print is used as the opening film sequence in the current edition of the Hall's annual Christmas Show. Ironically, by 1975 it was decided that it might be possible to re-run some of the initial roadshow 70mm releases and combine them with the Music Hall stage show, so the 70mm prints of "Gone With The Wind", "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Doctor Zhivago" and "The Sound of Music" were all presented as reissues.