I remember Dave Young (formerly of the NFT/MOMI) telling me that this was an old wives' tale, and explaining the reasons as follows. Rank had wanted to import Vic 8s en masse since the late 60s as they were impressed by its comparatively low running costs compared to those of British projectors available at the time. However, the government at the time imposed punitive import taxes on industrial plant and machine tools which was also available from UK manufacturers. The 35mm only version of the Vic 8 would thus have been taxed to hell, and so Rank imported the 35/70 model, which escaped the tax on the grounds that no 70mm projectors were being made in the UK. Dave believed that the idea of a G-K 70mm mech was somehow caught up in this project - possibly Rank made noises about putting money into developing one in order to sidestep any political flak which might result from importing equipment on such a large scale.

I've never seen nor come across anyone who has seen any actual plans, prototypes or anything more solid than a rumour about any G-K (or for that matter, any British) 70mm projector mechanism. If one did exist (even on a drawing board), then I'd be fascinated to hear about it.

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I am bringing this thread back to the top, and I have copied below the text of my original e-mail. If Dick, or anyone else can provide any further information on the Kalee Vistavision projectors, I would be very interested to hear from them.

Copy of original e-mail to Dick starts here, and runs to the end of this post.

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Hi Dick,

I have just read two posts from you on the Film-tech film handlers forum which I found very interesting. I cannot reply to the forum, I sent a registration request a week ago, but have not yet had a reply.

in those posts you said:

>In Bradford we have parts of 2 of the four Vistavision projectors that >were built by Kalee in the UK. The remaining parts are currently
>residing in Switzerland but we are trying our best to recover them.

and:

>As I said in my earlier post Kalee only produced 4 Vistavision
>projectors. All 4 were as far as I know installed in London's West
>End. After the removal of the projectors from the cinemas 2 were sent
>to Pinewood Studios and 2 went to a local technical college.

>At some point someone in France bought two of them and stored them
>with Cinemateriel in Paris.

>At that time some of the parts went on to Switzerland and we collected
>the remaining bits from paris in 1992 while seeking out parts for
>ourCinerama installation.

>As far as I heard the demise of Kalee as a manufacturer was due more
>to the attempt to build a 70mm projector which never went into
>production. I am sure Jim Schulz can clear this up.

This is all very interesting. I see that you are from Bradford, and that you later mention the Cinerama installation. I therefore assume that you are in some way involved with the NMPF&T / Pictureville. you say that 'we' have parts of two of the projectors in Bradford. I take it that the 'we' is the Museum; is this the case? May I ask what parts you had, and do you still have them? Do you have any photographs of these parts, or would it be possible for me to see the actual parts, if you still have them? I am very interested in these machines.

You also say that you were trying to recover the remaining parts of the machines, were you successful in this? I had heard that at least one projector still existed, but Dion Hanson's 'Fantastic Formats' booklet states "In England Rank-Kalee developed a horizontal projector, the only known installation being at the Odeon Leicester Square for 'Battle Of The River Plate', unfortunately none of these appear to have survived".

You say in your second post that "All 4 were as far as I know installed in London's West End". Do you know where these installations were? I know that one pair was installed at the Odeon, there are photographs of these to be found in various places, with Mk.1 BTH SUPAs in the background. I have read that the other installation in the uk was at the PLAZA, but that these were Century machines from America, not the Kalee ones. Do you know if this is correct, I have never found any photographs of this installation.

Is it possible that the Odeon was the only cinema to have the Kalee machines, and that the other pair were supplied new to Pinewood, and never were installed in a public cinema? Do you know how long the machines remained at Pinewood, or indeed, if they are still there. I know that they had a large triple head rear projection system there, which I believe could run 8 perf plates, and ,of course, Vista cameras have been used in recent times for original photography for special effects shots, so Pinewood would have had a need for Vista projectors long after they became redundant in normal cinemas.

You also say that the other pair went to a local technical college. Was this the then Wandsworth Tech. (Now South Thames College)? When I left school in 1974, I attended this institution for four years, training to be an audio visual technician with the I.L.E.A., which I remained until 1990, when I moved to my present post as an I.T. technician at Croydon College. I remember one day being suprised to see some 35mm slides with an optical track on the top edge, I was not aware of the existance of Vistavision at this time. I was shown a short roll of print, from which the slides had been cut, and was told that the projectors had been taken to the College when they were removed from the cinema, I don't think that they said which cinema this was, but that they were no longer there.

The main hall of the old building had, until fairy recently at that time, several 35mm machines installed, but these had all been removed, and the hall had been taken over by builders. When the builders moved out, just a single Elf 3000 16mm xenon machine was installed, two more firsts for me, the first time I had seen 16mm used on a large screen, and the first xenon I had seen.

There were two staff I remember who taught projection, by this time just 16mm on portable machines, but we had to learn, and be tested on, all the models that the ILEA had in use at that time, their names were, if I remember correctly, Ted Church and Harry Court. Ted was quite old at the time, and Harry had been ill, so I don't know if either of these gentlemen is still alive, but they had stories going back to sound on disk days.

Wandsworth Tech seems to have received a lot of interesting equipment in the past, sadly, most of it was got rid of shortly before I went there, there was a strange system for projecting telewision by filming a monitor screen, and then processing and projecting the film, used for the coronation, I think, some photographs of parts of it were still there. Sounds rather like Bairds Intermediate film system in reverse!

Anyway, back to Vistavision. Did you attend the event a Grip House Studios a few years ago at which some VV was shown? this was done using a modern projector, using a reel of the old 'Battle of the River Plate' print. I think this must have been from the print which ran at the Odeon. The print was very badly faded, almost no colour left, but it still looked impressive. No soundhead was fitted to the projector, but the track was Magenta VD, similar to that found on some old Disney 16mm prints. This is interesting, because I have heard that this was the only film shown in this country, but I remember that the film I saw at college had a duo-bilateral VA track, and therefore would seem to have been from a different film.

It is now possible again to hear Perspecta tracks; a number of the new cards exist, I have one myself, and last month I went to the Loew's Jersey Theater, (www.loewsjersey.org), to hear 'Forbidden Planet' plus various shorts and clips, using the original integrator installed there. If the picture and track negatives exist in reasonable condition, making a new VV print with its original track on modern low fade stock should not be technically difficult, I didn't say that it wouldn't be expensive, but I would be prepared to make a contribution to the cost, and I'm sure others would also, how many people would it take at say £100 each? would it be possible to get a contribution from the BFI, or the lab doing the work? Original projectors may still exist, modern ones certainly do, and fitting an optical soundhead should not be too difficult. Perspecta integrators, both new and old, exist. It would be nice to see a good print shown in its iriginal form.

A number of other systems have now gone out of use, four track mag cinemascope, for example. Are a few good prints, and the equipment to run them being preserved, so that demonstrations can be given in the future. Even recent systems are now extinct, the CDS and LC Concepts digital sound systems for example. Are these being preserved somewhere? I hope so.

The possible Kalee 70mm machine is also intresting. I used to be a member of the Projected Picture Trust, I am about to re-join A couple of weeks ago I went to see their new display at Bletchley Park. There was an advertisment on display for the new Rank-Kalee 70mm machine; it wasn't a Kalee machine at all, it was a Victoria X, like the Ex. Odeon Leicester Square one standing a few metres away. Was there ever a real Kalee 70mm machine, or even plans for one? With Kalee by then in the hands of Rank, who had clearly decided that new projectors should come from Italy, was it all over for Kalee, other than by name, before a 70mm design was made?

This mail has been much longer than I intended, if you think that anything I have written may be of interest to others on the Film-tech forum, please feel free to post it there.

Best wishes,

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When Robert Harris' restoration of Vertigo came out in 1998 I was really hoping that many more Vista films would be rereleased using his technique of printing the frames of horizontal negative onto a new 70mm vertical 5-perf master element. Vertigo looked stunning to me, even in the sequences which were optically printed through filters to correct dye fading. This is a particular issue for us Brits given that the Rank Organisation adopted VistaVision as a production format for a short while in the late '50s: I'd love to see films such as Simon and Laura and The Battle of the River Plate in the Vista ratio and with the full definition of the 8-perf frame, but needless to say I've only ever been able to see them in pan-and-scan.

Maybe someone could come up with a new VistaVision projector that advances the film pneumatically rather than mechanically, like IMAX, and then archivists might be persuaded to produce Vista prints again. Until that happens, then IMHO 70mm is about the only way we're likely to get an idea of what VistaVision was capable of.

As an aside, I've always found it interesting that VistaVision was the only widescreen process that Alfred Hitchcock used (for The Trouble with Harry, North by Northwest and Vertigo), despite the fact that the peak of his career coincided with the launch of CinemaScope and Cinerama. Maybe there's a paper in this for the Bradford widescreen conference next year...

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Larry

I am sorry I don't seem to have received your recent e-mail about the Kalee VV machines. I will just add a few brief comments

Firstly it was Jim Schultz that told me that the four machines were all installed in the West End. I really need to get back in touch with him to grill him for more information.

I believe that you are right in your assumption that the college mentioned was Wandsworth Tech.

As far as to the parts in our possession we have the mech block, gate parts and some sprockets (but not the intermittent ) from one machine , two soundheads ,bases beams and lamphouses and various other bits and pieces.

I believe that they used a standard Kaleee 21 intermittent with double sized sprockets.

Sadly it appears that the parts that went to Switzerland have been lost. the story of how they got there is a long one and best discussed over several Guinnesses.

Leo, I wouldn't have thought that an IMAX type intermittant would be needed for 8-35. Normal intermittant sprocket systems manage 8-70, pulling the same length of film with twice the mass. If necessary, a slower pull across, (is that the correct term?), would be easy to do with an electronic intermittant drive, at the expense of some loss of light. A polyester print shouldn't have any problems doing this, I'm not sure about what would happen if you wanted to run faster than 24 fps though.

Meanwhile, Larry wrote:
"Kinoton makes both VistaVision and so-called Reverse VistaVision projectors."

I seem to remember that the IMAX ridefilm projector which has a conventional intermittent runs at 48fps.

Yes, I agree with this, a considerable number of titles were filmed in Vistavision, and Technirama, but there have been few 70mm restorations, 'Vertigo' and 'Spartacus' are the only ones which I can think of at the moment. More would certainly be welcome.

Have 70mm restorations ever been made of the two Cinemascope-55 titles?

"Recreating a VV cinema would certainly be worth doing as a technical curiosity in a venue such as Dick's museum, but even if you produced a working VV setup for release print projection the ball would once again be in the archivist's court as (s)he would have to provide the prints. If there is a complete set of picture and sound elements for a given feature in a good enough condition to be continuous contacted printed then no problem - you could do them on any 35mm printer. But anything that needs optical and/or step printing would require VV-specific lab equipment, and what lab would be willing to invest in that just for one or two prints?"

Surely, the equipment already exists; in the Widescreen Museum there are some frames from Vista wprint material made during the restoration of 'Vertigo', and quite recently, Vista has been used for special effects work in various films, step contact and optical printers must have been needed for this work.

Do you know how the 'Vertigo' restoration was done? The frames in the museum indicate that some new Vista material was produced, I know that some of the work involved several generations, at what point in the process was the conversion to 5-65 made.

The only pictures of these machines which I have seen are the well-known ones taken in the box at the Odeon Leicester Square, and some Kalee promotional material, I can't remember if this was a photograph, or a drawing. Many of the parts do seem to be similar to the 21. There are still quite a few 21s around, would it be possible to obtain some parts from this source, and, if so, how much would still be needed to put together a working machine? Any idea what it might cost to make these parts? Given that these were just about the last Kalee design, and that the Kershaw factory was only a few miles from the NMPFT, it would be nice to see one of them restored there.

I came to see the Cinerama setup a few days after it opened, they were still having a few teething problems at the time, and I also came to HTWWW at the Widescreen Weekend, I can't remember if it was in 2000, or 2001.

I am planning to come up again, I cannot make the August show, I have to work that day, but I think I can do September. When I was there the first time the auditorium was only about half full, so there as no problem getting a ticket; is this still the case, or would I need to book in advance now? If advance booking necessary, how do I do it, do you take telephone bookings, or would I need to do it by post?