[Scuderia_Turini]

Hello Brian and Jason,
I have this sad image of Jim Russell clearing his office and putting relics of his life in a bin. I suppose it comes to us all though.
"Grand Prix" is a highly regarded movie although somewhat overshadowed by "Le Mans" (due solely to the Steve McQueen aspect in my opinion).  
Anyone who has an interest in F1 can immediately relate the drivers and team members to the real world and that gives the movie a good base to work with. Graham Hill's cameo role is legendary. 

Jason, your presentation of the contact strips is really excellent. No clutter and enough detail to remind/inform any readers who are genuinely interested. 

Leo  :clap:

[JasonB]

Thanks Leo.

I wouldn't be too sad about Jim, he seems to have done well for himself. He was a succesful racing driver, he opened a succesful racing driver school, he got to work on Grand Prix, he had a car dealership, and he lived to the ripe old age of 98.

As Brian has said there are a lot of photos in his collection, I'd say getting on for 10,000. There are of course a lot of repeats, some that have faded, and some that weren't great. But I'll probably add a few more at some point. In fact I'd like to add a page on some of the technology, like the car firing cannon, the modified Ford GT 40 camera car, the remote pan and tilt cameras they fitted to the cars, and even the Cinerama system which the film used.

One of the interesting things about the contact sheets is the difference in quality between sheets developed by labs in each different country.

The sheets developed in Italy are meticulously produced. The negatives all line up perfectly, and are square with the edges of the photographic paper. They are all really well developed, with very few dust or scratch marks, and even now after more than 50 years they still retain all the clarity and contrast that you'd wish for.

The sheets devoped in France however, were faded, dirty, and haphazard, and they took a fair amount of work to clean up.

I don't know why their should be such a difference, but I couldn't help but admire the attention to detail of the Italian labs.

[Gordon Steadman]

I know how long it can take to 'clean up' old prints. It must have taken you a while. I've been going through 75 years of family photos. Photoshop has been a busy bee!

[JasonB]

Well the Monza photos were a doddle, but the Clermont Ferrand photos took a while.

I guess we should just be grateful that we have tools like Photoshop. It would be a serious task to restore all those old photos by traditional means.

[dvd3500]

Excellent work!
I have loved this movie for years. I remember renting it on VHS and wondering what it would be like on a big screen.

I suffered through a "pan and scan" version and enjoyed the widescreen version on 4:3 TV!

The Blu ray on my 47" TV is the closest I will get to the real cinema experience though...
[url=https://slotracer.online/community/newreply.php?tid=267][/url]

[JasonB]

Thanks.

Just imagine watching it in full widescreen Cinerama.

[dvd3500]

I am disappointed enough with life as it is without being reminded of being too young to have seen this!  

Seriously though I am thinking of trying to get the largest screen I can for a private viewing....

[CMOTD]

I saw it in the cinema when it was released but, if you lived outside a big city then the local cinema was still fairly primitive at that time. Small provincial ones like ours hadn't really been updated since the days of the silent movie with fairly small screens and lousy sound systems. Today's televisions probably give a better viewing experience than I received in my local flea pit in the 60s.

[Gordon Steadman]

Thanks.

Just imagine watching it in full widescreen Cinerama.

Do they still do that? Haven't been to see a film for more years than I can remember. I saw it in Cinerama when it first came out though and impressive it was.

[JasonB]

Ah well, that's a story in itself, which I've only found out about through researching this project.

There were several versions of Cinerama. The first was introduced in 1952. It was hugely complex, requiring three 35mm film cameras shooting in unison during filming to achieve the full widescreen, and similarly three projectors to show the film. The projection screen was also complex, having a 146 degree arc curve, and being made up of hundreds of thin vertical strips, all of which directly faced the audience rather than the centre of the arc of the screen.

Understandably, there weren't a vast amount of films made in this format, and very few cinemas to show them. Nowadays there are only three cinemas in the world which can show true Cinerama, one of them in Bradford.

But by the 1960s another version of Cinerama was introduced which used a much larger negative size to achieve the same detail, quality, and widescreen effect, but it only required one camera to film with, one projector to show it, and one flat screen to watch it.

Fortunately, Grand Prix was filmed in this format, which I think means that any cinema with a 70mm Cinerama compatible projector could show the film. It also means that the transfer to digital media retains a very high quality, which I think you can still see in the videos.

So, do they still do it? Well, yes and no. I doubt that a 50 year old film holds much interest for a younger audience, and those of us who are older will likely have seen it already, so I doubt your local cinema will be showing it. But they must still have projectors capable of it, because the Hateful Eight, Tarantino's 2015 film was produced and released in the same format.

So there you go.