RCA o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-03-22 published
John Creighton
DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS,
Engineer: (1924-2006)
Unsung hero of Canada's Imax success story knew how to make the
big-screen technology work
By M.J. STONE,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Montreal -- He was the man in the engine room of the good ship
Imax.
John
Creighton
DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS was an engineering guru, a genius
at tinkering who was the brains behind making the Imax corporation's
giant-screen technology work as well as it did. Years before,
he was the wizard who helped keep Expo 67's Labyrinth film project
going. And when it was all over, Mr.
DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS went back to his
first love -- the humble train.
In the meantime, his other passion remained electronics. As a
teenager during the Depression, Mr.
DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS's future in telecommunications
was foreshadowed when he plied his talent for radio repair in
the small town of Sutton in Quebec's Eastern Townships. Neighbours
and customers paid 25 cents to have their wonky Radiolas,
RCA
Victors and Silvertones tinkered back into working order.
At 18, poor eyesight disqualified him from serving in any of
the Canadian armed forces during the Second World War. At the
suggestion of doctors who advised he spend less time in libraries
with his head buried in books, he worked for a year with the
Canadian Pacific Railroad and then enrolled at McGill University.
It was while earning his degree in science that he met his wife,
Althea McCOY, a likeminded student who became his life-long collaborator.
They were both involved in the McGill drama department. Mr.
DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS
was in charge of lighting and his future wife was the costume
co-ordinator. Their initial collaboration at the McGill Red and
White Revue revealed a symbiotic relationship that would often
find the couple working side by side."The smartest thing I ever
did was to marry him," said writer and archivist Althea
DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS.
"Creighton was my favourite proof reader and copy editor."
The couple married in 1948 and the following year he departed
for a career in the Quebec wilderness repairing radio transmitters
for Canadian Marconi. He later travelled to England, sent by
Marconi, to study the emerging world of television.
When the couple returned to Canada, Mr.
DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS began demonstrating
the principles of television at trade fairs. With both of them
operating a camera, the duo wowed Toronto audiences at the Canadian
National
Exhibition in 1950. Althea
DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS recalled how aiming
the camera at the crowds delighted visitors, who, through closed-circuit
monitors, discovered themselves on television for the first time.
Commercial television was still a few years away and she lays
claim that the experience at the Canadian National Exhibition
made her Canada's first female operator of a television camera.
Mr. DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS's cutting-edge knowledge of the new medium resulted
in work as a consultant with the Canadian Broadcasting Company
when it first went on the air in 1952. Later, he returned to
Canadian
Marconi as the engineering manager for Montreal's
CFCF
radio and in 1961, he supervised the construction of a television
transmission tower. Erected at the top of Mount Royal, it broadcast
the first television signals when
CFCF-television at last went
on the air.
Regarded as a technical genius, Mr.
DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS was the go-to person
hired by the National Film Board of Canada to orchestrate the
Labyrinth project for the 1967 world's fair in Montreal. A multiscreen
film, In the Labyrinth, was a smash hit at Expo and is considered
the precursor to today's large-format films. Using a complicated
projection system with three synchronized viewing chambers, it
featured stereo sound and a mirrored maze.
Colin Low, the National Film Board of Canada's former head of
animation, said that Mr.
DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS possessed the right mix of flexibility
and vigour necessary to handle the madness that In the Labyrinth
inspired. "A lot of things, we had never tried before. Creighton
was intrigued by it. He made it work. Labyrinth was one of the
starting points for Imax technology."
Imax was a revolution in the movie industry. What made it arrestingly
different was the sheer size and crispness of the projected image,
combined with resonant, multitrack sound systems. No matter what
the subject, watching can be viscerally intense -- a fact that
directors have exploited with roller-coaster intensity ever since
the first Imax title, North of Superior, lit up the media. The
format uses the largest film frame in movie history, 10 times
the size of conventional 35-mm film. The screens, too, were oversized,
as tall as eight storeys.
The system was the brainchild of five Canadian visionaries who
toiled for more than a quarter of a century to make Imax Corp.
a household word in entertainment. Graeme
FERGUSON,
Robert
KERR,
Roman KROITOR,
Bill
SHAW and Bill
BREUKELMAN founded Imax and
pioneered the giant-screen, large-format film medium before selling
the technology in 1994 to a group of American investors for about
$100-million (U.S.).
All the same, few knew the system better than Mr.
DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS. In
1981, Mr. DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS found himself in France supervising the installation
of a new generation of Imax screens. His final Imax project was
to co-ordinate the installation of the company's theatre at the
Museum of Civilization.
In retirement, he returned to the much less complicated technology
of locomotives, and the tracks they travelled down. His interest
also left its mark on his marriage, for his wife possessed railway
roots of her own ("My father worked for the Canadian National
Railway," she said), and together they co-wrote Canadian Railway
Records: A Guide for Genealogists, a resource for families with
rail connections going back about 150 years.
The DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS manual, composed for family historians, offers tips
and resources for recovering historical records of family members
via ticket sales and the vast network of railway payrolls, journals,
magazines and subsidiary companies. In the introduction, the
couple wrote, "this book has been a joint effort but we each
have our own areas of expertise. Creighton wrote much of the
material on the railway way of life, working conditions and so
on. Althea did the archival work checking documents and bibliographical
data and wrote about libraries and archives so, inevitably, on
occasion we wrote in the first person singular and at other times
in the first person plural."
Mr. DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS also added a consumer warning: "The railway offers
such a variety of intriguing information and experience that
there is some aspect that will intrigue almost everyone." In
other words, railways are highly addictive and can absorb all
your free time and available money.
John Creighton
DOUGLAS/DOUGLASS was born on August 15, 1924, in Cowansville,
Quebec He died of a congestive heart failure on February 6, 2006
in Ottawa. He is survived by his wife.
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