by Jennifer Jordan 1   2   3   4   5  “By 26,000 feet we had nicknamed it ‘The Pig’,” David Breashears tells a recent captive audience in the Museum’s Omni Theater, “and I had become Sisyphus pushing it up the mountain.” And a hell of a mountain at that. The Pig is the $186,000 IMAX® MK II Lightweight camera Breashears took to Mount Everest in 1996 to capture the top of the world's unspeakable beauty. He ended up filming a piece of history. Its world premiere scheduled for March 6 at the Museum of Science, Everest is the result of two years of planning, hundreds of rolls of film, and 29,028 feet of mountain. “I don’t know anyone else who could have made an IMAX film on Mount Everest,” says Jon Krakauer, a climber and journalist who was also on the mountain in 1996 and came home to author the best-selling Into Thin Air, “and the crime is the film will only be 45 minutes long.” But what a 45 minutes. “Watching the movie is the next best thing to being there,” says Sandy Hill, another climber on the mountain in 1996 who saw Everest at a New York test screening, “but without the cold and danger. It made me remember how much fun an Everest expedition can be.” Hill may have forgotten about the fun in 1996, because when Breashears was filming on Everest and she and hundreds of others were climbing it, disaster struck-and Breashears stopped filming and started helping the survivors of the most fatal day in Everest history. Greg MacGillivray of MacGillivray Freeman Films first approached Breashears in June of 1994 with a crazy idea: to take the over-sized format IMAX camera to the highest point on Earth, where life dies from oxygen deprivation, and those who dare to enter its so-called Death Zone above 25,000 feet, do so with a narrow window of life-sustaining time to tag the summit and run like hell for their lives. Insane enough in itself, but IMAX technology is three times the size of 70mm, ten times the size of 35mm, projecting images big enough to fill your peripheral vision and for a whale to appear life-size. IMAX has its roots in EXPO ’67 and can now seen on 150 giant screens in 22 countries. “Just as the wide screen of Cinemascope was perfect for the landscapes of John Ford’s westerns of the 1950s,” MacGillivray says, “the more vertical (as opposed to horizontal) IMAX screen is perfect for Everest.” And Breashears was perfect for IMAX. more...
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