By today's "making of" standards, THE MAKING OF HOW THE WEST WAS WON is a little too brief and not as polished as comparable offerings produced in this century. However, for its time--the late 1900s--this "extra" churned out to be packaged with the initial DVD offering of HTWWW has quite a bit of useful info. It begins with a history of the quaint "Cinerama" process. This was sort of a poor man's version of IMAX. The cumbersome process involved filming scenes with three cameras and then playing the resulting movie on a "deeply-curved screen with a 146-degree angle-of-vision," on three synchronized projectors. It was a outgrowth of the simulator used to train WWII bombardiers. Cinerama was a desperate attempt to offer people something they could not see on TV, which had siphoned off about half the WWII era audiences by the mid-1950s. HTWWW was one of only two Cinerama films shot using the three-camera system, as competing versions of wide-screen were much simpler and cheaper to use. (HTWWW featured more than 2,780 animals requiring 203 wranglers, as well as a human cast of 12,000 people!--all of which can be done incredibly cheaper on CGI today, allowing the salaries for those 12,203 jobs to be concentrated toward a single actor, such as Brad Pitt or Jennifer Lawrence.) Narrator Bill Toutant says all this and more in the first 5:26 of this 15:29-long short, so I had to watch this part twice. The rest of this extra is devoted to the on-set "home movies" and narration of lead stuntman Loren Janes.
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