This Calgary Cinerama aficionado is bringing back long-lost films

Calgarian Tom March was 16 when he watched his first Cinerama movie — and he's been hooked ever since. 

Now 76, March first saw The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm at the Eglinton theatre in Toronto. 

"I came out of there, entranced. I was shaking my head, saying, 'now what are they gonna do? They've done it all,'" he said. 

"The sound was all around you. The picture was wrapped around you, full colour. Never saw that before — Technicolor." 

March is a Cinerama aficionado — it's a 1950s technology that immersed audiences in film with a curved screen and surround sound.

Restorationists, March among them, are working to digitize Cinerama films to preserve their place in history. 

Over time, Cinerama theatres disappeared as the films were expensive to make and many theatres didn't have the capacity to run three projectors and seven speakers. 

That meant decades later The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was all but lost, March said.

But he wanted to change that. 

"Over the internet, I encountered Cinerama fans around the world," he said. 

That's how he met Dave Strohmaier, a former film editor from Idaho. Together they spent nearly two years cleaning up film negatives from the movie.

Warner Brothers and Cinerama provided the digital scan of the negatives — and the two men went to work, removing dirt and scratches and stabilizing the film. 

"We did this as a project, a hobby just to restore Grimm and bring it back to the public," March said. 

That ended with a premiere of the restored film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Warner Brothers later released the film on Blu-ray.