50 years ago in Expo history: Secrets of IMAX film at U.S. Pavilion revealed by co-director

The IMAX movie at Expo ’74’s U.S. Pavilion was one of the fair’s spectacular attractions, and in an interview film co-director Graeme Ferguson explained how they achieved it.

For the most thrilling sequence of “Man Belongs to the Earth” – a flight through the Grand Canyon piloted by Fritz Meyer – a special camera was mounted on the nose of a plane as it swooped and swerved into the canyon’s depths.

The film was sped up by 5 or 10% to make it more exhilarating.

A shot of people in a canoe in Monterey Bay, California, feeding a sea otter was not staged – the camera crew just happened along at exactly the right time. A scene showing smog in Denver originally was supposed to be a shot of smog in Los Angeles, but the directors wanted to make the point that smog was everywhere.

Also, the famous lines spoken in the film by Chief Dan George were not written for him. They were written by him. From 100 years ago: George Wickham was fishing at dusk from a boat at Deer Lake when he overshot his cast. His spinner landed on the shore.

Then he saw a “blurred flash of wings and then a determined pull on the stranded spinner.” When he reeled it in, “a bedraggled and soggy horned owl hove into view, both feet firmly clamped on the spinner and fighting every inch of the way.”

The owl’s feet were lacerated, so Wickham took it to the Manito Park Zoo for rehabilitation.