The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 119

THURSDAYCALENDAR June 18, 1981 Cos Angeles Slimes Part VI MOVIE HOUSE: A TRIP TO INFINITY Second of two articles examining the present state of the motion picture theater and how its future will be shaped by new technologies. By DAVID CROOK, Times Staff Writer Park and in nine other cities, described his "Odyssey" as a radio play with "more or less abstract visuals." Dryer's Van Nuys headquarters looks like a futurist's toy store. A hologram a three-dimensional picture made by a laser in the reception room depicts the Space Shuttle orbiting earth. The walls are covered with futuristic drawings and animation cells. "The content (of movies) will have to change to match the form," Dryer said.

"The medium demands a more abstract presentation. I believe that's the way entertainment at least on a large scale is head- is surrounded with speakers. It's the same thing we experienced as children in a planetarium. It's like a window to infinity." It's not an altogether new idea. Omnimax domed theaters such as those in the newly built addition to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and Imax screens like that in the popular National Air and Space Museum in Washington have been in operation since the mid-'70s.

In these new theaters, half of the magic will be provided by the movie house itself. "Being in the facility yourself is like an amusement," said Armstrong. "The whole concept of our theater is like a spaceship. It's plan to build their first such theater in Los Angeles next year. Still only a blueprint, an Enviro-vision theater would feature specially designed seats that can be positioned in any angle.

A viewer could sit up, lie down or turn completely around. Using the film "Altered States" as an example of the type of motion picture that could be dis- an external theatergoing public is to increase the degree of sensory stimulation." The competition for movie audiences is coming from cable television, video cassettes and discs, projection TV systems, direct-to-home satellite broadcasting and other electronic wonders of the video age. Faced with that, the traditional mo vie theater looks, to 'Being in the facility is like an amusement. The concept of our theater is like a spaceship. It's designed to transport you An Imperial guard crouches behind your seat.

Luke Sky-walker runs out on the wing of the Millenium Falcon. The guard rises and fires his laser gun. Sky-walker dodges the beam and rolls to the deck. He shoots back. The blue-green shaft of light from his rifle flashes just inches above your head.

The guard is hit. There's an explosion. The auditorium quakes. Sky-walker dives back into the closing hatch of the ship as its engines roar. The Falcon blasts off into the calm, black void of the cosmos.

Some future episode of "Star Wars" might look something like that a multidimensional, mul-tisensory extravaganza of 360-de-gree sound and action engulfing the moviegoer in a synthetic theatrical environment as different from the traditional movie house as Kansas is from Oz. A new breed of producers and theater owners is working outside conventional moviemaking today to introduce radically new technologies to the art of theaterical exhibition. They are attempting to redesign the movie house and to redefine the "theatrical experience" the sensory and intellectual stimulation a person receives from the act of going out to a movie. "Unquestionably, some time in the future what we know as a movie house wont exist," argued producer-architect Jerome Armstrong in the sparse white conference room of his Quantum Leap Inc. offices in Venice.

"The secret to maintaining MOVIE REVIEW -1 3 This is one man's version of the theater of the future a $4-miUion Pyradome designed for Laser Images Inc. 'SUPERMAN II': A HUMAN TOUCH TO THE INVINCIBLE played in his movie house of the future, Armstrong said the movie would open as a rectangular projection roughly twice the size of a traditional movie-house screen. "When the film reaches a fantasy sequence KABOOM!" Armstrong continued. "We blow the whole thing out to the surface of the entire hemisphere. The entire dome earlier performance as Superman.

designed to transport you." Such theaters of the future are also designed for different types of film presentations. The movie house of tomorrow may be showing films relying greatly on the aural and visual impact of special effects and abstract, highly stylized blendings of images and traditional storylines. Some futurists see tomorrow's films looking like advanced versions of Disney's classic "Fantasia" or Stanley Kubrick's journey beyond Jupiter in "2001: A Space Odyssey." Angelenos will get a first glimpse of this new style of film this summer when Laser Images Inc. is expected to premiere "Crystal Odyssey" at the Griffith Observatory. Ivan Dryer, president of Laser Images, which already presents Laserium light shows at Griffith ing in the wind down Metropolis' cement canyons in the film's big effects set-piece.

A crisp, lucid recapping of the earlier major plot-elements and best joke fill the screen under the credits: Superman from infancy to Supremacy. (There's one tilt: Since this film is without Marlon Brando the Superbaby's influences seem entirely maternal.) Then we plunge straight into action: At the Daily Planet Jackie Cooper plays with his front page headline, a nuclear bomb threat at the Eiffel Tower, like an anagram game. Bien sur Lois has already hopped the first Concorde for Paris. There she is gamely distracting herself with a spelling quiz, from the terrors of her perch, riding beneath the Tower's outside elevator. "Pullit.

prize. I don't think it tips off too much of the plot complications to reveal that the world is not allowed to incinerate at this point, roughly 25 minutes into the action. Nor to say that the aftershock waves from the blast in INSIDE TV By LEE MARGULIES, Times Staff Writer series as "Think About," "All About You "Measure Metric," "I Can Read" and "Let's Draw." Because the programs were designed to teach rather than simply to entertain, KCET and officials NETWORKS AIDED BY FCC RULING By DAVID CROOK, Times Staff Writer The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Tuesday handed the three commercial networks a powerful tool to use in their efforts to provide programming for the new technologies of video cassettes, discs and cable TV. The commission ruled 6-0 that the networks have the right to negotiate for non-broadcast rights to the programs they air on traditional television. ed.

'2001' was probably the first feature since 'Fantasia' to allow the audience to make up their own story. It was truly an abstract, subjective experience a precursor of what is going to take place in these new film environments." Dryer's theater of the future is a planned $4 -million Pyradome a 90-foot domed screen built inside a pyramid. The theater is designed for 500-550 people lying in specially designed seats that will direct their view to the center of the dome. Again, the moviegoer will be completely surrounded by the abstract presentation. Radical theatrical designs like Armstrong's and Dryer's are the advance forces of the revolution in Please see MOVIE HOUSE, Page 4 space free the three super-villains, the gray-faced, pink-eyed Terence Stamp as General Zod, Sarah Douglas as the feline, artfully costumed Ursa, and Jack O'Halloran as the silent giant Non.

They smash out of one of the best of the first film's effects: the flat, whirling mirrored space prison in the Phantom Zone. The script is largely the work of David Newman and Leslie Newman from Mario Puzo's material with Tom Mankiewicz as creative consultant. What may account for the sequel's blacker humor and its richer content was its change of director, Richard Lester replacing Richard Donner at some point during production, imperceptible to the viewer. Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder give their roles careful delineation, and they have the support of a delightful script. The writers have kept the comic -strip action, the Eiffel Tower opening, the Super-villains' arrival on Earth, the Please see 'SUPERMAN II, Page 3 STUDENTS from the office of the Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools have prepared a 56-page study guide for parents to give them suggestions about how to follow up on each show with games, exercises and other activities.

Please see INSIDE TV, Page 10 The FCC ruled on a petition brought last November by CBS Inc. asking for a clarification of the 1970 "financial interest" rule that barred the networks from participating in the broadcast syndication business. Under that rule, the networks were not allowed to acquire the rights to sell programs made for them by independent producers. Networks also were barred from having a financial or ownership interest in independently made shows which most prime-time entertainment programs are. (Prior to 1970, the networks were allowed to hold such rights.

At the time, producers claimed the networks used undue power to force them to sell syndication rights as a Please see FCC RULING, Page 2 many, about as promising as a Detroit gas guzzler. Home video systems now offer 13-foot Cinemascope-style screens and six-track Dolby stereo sound-more sophisticated technology than in use at most of the small-screened "multiplex" theaters that have become the mainstays of the exhibition business since the late '60s. love-duet in space. That soaring dream flight had rhythms like a Strauss waltz, or like the swooping aerials telling the exchange of letters in "Jules and Jim," a gliding intoxication suffused with love. Sensibly enough, there's no attempt to duplicate that here it's untoppa-ble.

This film's fun comes from character, dialogue and performance, not effects. There are, of course, enough effects to fill a dozen Saturday matinee serials but they aren't necessarily the film's deliciousness. Superman's wry slight-of-eye as he creates duplicates of himself at his icy spired dome has more invention than the dozenth automobile blow- Rawlins as Cordelia, in Bay City opera on a more modest and adventurous level in the spring. That, according to long-established tradition, is enough. On the eve of his retirement as general director of the San Francisco Opera, however, Kurt Herbert Adler wanted to try something new.

Something big and fancy. Something to make Baghdad on the Bay a credible competitor for Salzburg or Munich or Edinburgh, if not Seattle. Ergo, San Francisco now has its own Summer Festival 28 performances of five operas in suitably international trappings. Adler could, of course, have played his first and last San Francisco summer safe. He could SUMMER CHOICES FOR If people can have theaters in their homes, how then can traditional theaters survive? The answer is as old as Technicolor: Give the people something they can't get anywhere else.

Armstrong and his partner, Alan Kozlowski, call their answer Envirovision, a 360-degree hemispherical projection system. They Christopher Reeve matches his production of Reimann's have concentrated on "Carmens" and "Bohemes," could have lured the masses with Pavarottis and Ca-balles, or, at the very least, unreasonable facsimiles thereof. But that is not, never has been, his way. To inaugurate the 1981 festivities, the maestro-impresario turned to the formidable, agonizing complexities of "Lear," a very Germanic setting of Shakespeare by a very progressive composer named Aribert Reimann. Fantastically staged by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, "Lear" was the hit of the 1978 Munich Festival.

Wisely, Adler imported key elements of the Munich production for the American pre-Please see 'LEAR, Page 5 By SHEILA BENSON, Times Film Critic Superman with the taste of his own blood in his mouth? Superman hitchhiking to his top-of-the-world domain? Superman on the hard end of a haymaker? What goes on here? The most interesting "Superman" yet. Having done everything possible matching Superman against locomotives, speeding bullets and the San Andreas Fault, a quorum of the original film makers has cannily chosen to go inward with its hero. In "Superman II" (citywide Friday) he must confront his invincibility, a far more intriguing question. The first film's most memorable moments were visceral: the giddy eroticism of the Superman-Lois RON SCHERL Thomas Stewart as Lear, Emily IN SAN FRANCISCO REIMANN'S 'LEAR' IN U.S. PREMIERE By MARTIN BERNHEIMER, Times Music Critic SAN FRANCISCO-Summer-time has never been operatime in San Francisco.

Local devotees of the lyric muse, apparent creatures of habit, can be trusted to support opera on a grandiose and glamorous scale in the fall and If your children are going to while away the summer watching television, the two Los Angeles public television stations are out to make it as productive as possible. Both are offering special summer daytime schedules designed for school-age viewers. In fact, KLCS Channel 58, the station operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District, is offering a summer school alternative. High school students over 15 will be able to earn five units of credit by watching two six-week telecourses "Design for Driving," which covers drivers' education, and "Personal Guidance," which is intended to help students make decisions about their personal life, education and career. The two courses will air back-to-back in a one-hour package that will be broadcast weekdays beginning July 1.

For the students' convenience, each day's installments will be shown at 8 a.m., 9 a.m., 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. Both courses must be completed to get credit. The television material is supplemented with workbook exercises that the student does at home, with assistance available by telephone from a school counselor. The student goes to a campus only twice during the six-week period, to take a midterm and a final examination.

For more information about the program and how to enroll, call KLCS at 625-6960. Meanwhile, KCET Channel 28 isn't offering courses for credit but it will be carrying a full slate of educational programs for children from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. between July 6 and July 31. These include such INSIDE CALENDAR FILM: "Spoiled Children" by Kevin Thomas.

Page 8. JAZZ: Art Pepper by Leonard Feather. Page 8. POP: John Cale by Don Waller. Page 8.

STAGE: Stage Notes by Sylvie Drake. Page 6. TELEVISION: Today's programming. Page 10, 11. Cecil Smith.

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