4 NEW SCREENS WORTH $5 MILLION TO IWERKS : THEATERS WILL PROJECT OVERSIZE IMAGES.Byline: Deborah Adamson Daily News Staff Writer Iwerks Entertainment Iwerks Entertainment was founded in 1985 by Stan Kinsey and Don Iwerks, two former Disney Executives, and became well known through 1996 as a leading developer of special venue and virtual reality theaters throughout the world. Inc. in Burbank, a maker of simulation thrill rides and large-screen theaters, said Thursday that it signed four deals worth more than $5 million to install its special screens. The screens will be going up in the Ontario Mills Ontario Mills is a large enclosed outlet mall located in Ontario, California; it is one of the primary tourist attractions in the Inland Empire. Mall in Ontario, Calif.; the Hearst Castle
Hearst Castle was the palatial estate of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. in San Simeon San Simeon Former estate of William Randolph Hearst in southern California. It was built on a vast private estate of 245,000 acres (99,000 hectares), developed in the 1860s by Hearst's father. ; a planetarium planetarium, optical device used to project a representation of the heavens onto a domed ceiling; the term also designates the building that houses such a device. A modern planetarium consists of as many as 150 motor-driven projectors mounted on an axis. in Nagasaki, Japan, in collaboration with Minolta; and the tourist area of Bandung, Indonesia. ``This is a very important deal,'' said Bill Battison, executive vice president of marketing and sales at Iwerks. ``We have chosen to make the giant-screen market one of our real focus areas.'' The mall will get a curved screen almost three times the height of a regular movie screen and much wider. The rest will get slightly smaller screens. The deals are ``very meaningful for the company,'' said Lewis Alton, managing partner at L.H. Alton & Co., an investment banking firm in San Francisco San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden . ``It manifests their ability to compete effectively against their major competitor, Imax.'' The Hearst Castle theater will open in August. The Ontario screen will be completed by early 1997. The screen in Indonesia will open in November and in Japan by early next year. With the four new screens, Iwerks will have installed a total of 46 screens worldwide. CAPTION(S): Photo Photo: (Color) The screens, two in California, will resembl e the one in Utah's Zion National Theatre. |
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