| | “Old fashioned” 70mm promotion An account of a unique 70mm Promotion Tour, and other important Marketing Initiatives. | Read more at in70mm.com The 70mm Newsletter
| Written by: Johan C. M. Wolthuis, International 70mm Publishers | Date: 19.09.2007 | 22 years since the "7OMM Promotion Tour". Johan and Thomas with a vintage edition of "The 7OMM Newsletter". 2016 Picture by Orla Nielsen
In October 1994, I invited Thomas Hauerslev to make a 70mm Promotion Tour with me to Los Angeles and San Francisco . This trip was sponsored by the Kinepolis Group in Belgium. For this tour we made a Special Edition of the 70mm Newsletter in large format to give away to the people we were supposed to meet. For this special edition Thomas wrote a very inspiring introduction article called “Why 70mm?”.
We met a lot of nice people working in the film industry and had a lot of interesting talks. They all agreed that 70mm was a beautiful medium, but the tour showed no visible results.
In 1996 a large format “70mm Promotion” book was published and presented to a lot of film companies in the States. And in April 1999 our second full color 70mm promotion book (“normal size”) was launched, with the extremely long title: “Film Presentation for the 21st Century: 70mm Super Definition Cinema”. This book had its official presentation in the Todd-AO studios in Hollywood and was accompanied by some 70mm film clips. A lot of important people got a copy of this book on that occasion, but again nobody took any action resulting in a new 70mm film!
After a few years I started trying to publish another book called “The Cinerama Story” but halfway it turned out that there was not enough money and I could not find any sponsors. So this book has never been published, despite all the work I had done. And a disappointment for all the people who had sent me a lot of information! But I will take good care of all these stuff.
In the meantime I had written different articles for the British magazine Cinema Technology such as reports on the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, the new Kinepolis in Madrid, the opening of the new Seattle Cinerama, the Tuschinski cinema in Amsterdam, Le Chateau du Cinema near Lille in France and many more.
An then in March 2005 during the Widescreen Weekend in Bradford visitors were asked to sign a petition in another attempt to revive the unique 65/70mm film format. This petition has been sent to more than 30 film companies, famous producers, also to Variety, Hollywood Reporter, etc. in the United States, accompanied by the signatures of more then 200 people and information on 70mm presentation. But again no response, we received only one short answer from Oliver Stone: He agreed that 70mm was a beautiful medium, but the decision (money) makers had other thoughts.
And that was for the time being my last contribution to 70mm Promotion. | More in 70mm reading:
65/70mm Workshop
What 7OMM is to Johan Wolthuis
Johan Says Goodbye as Editor of The 70mm Newsletter
The 70mm Promotion Tour 1994 Part #1
The 70mm Promotion Tour 1994, part #2
Widescreen History - A New book about wide screen from International 70mm Publishers
2013 Academy Member Johan Wolthuis (The Netherlands)
The Golden Elephant Award
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