Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 19, 1991 TAG: 9102190085
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: SPRINGDALE, UTAH LENGTH: Long
Tourists come to remote towns like this on the edge of the great American national parks, view a magnificent film about the park on a giant wrap-around movie screen, stay overnight in an adjoining motel and then leave without having to set foot in or damage the park itself.
Although it is hard to say exactly how many people might do this, the company is planning to build such a project here amid the deep canyons and steep red sandstone cliffs and spires of Zion National Park and at many other parks and monuments around the country.
"It is conceivable that whole bus loads can come to Springdale, have the Zion experience and be in Las Vegas that night - it blows my mind," said Louise Excell, a native of this Southwest Utah hamlet through which more than 1.5 million visitors pass every year to enter the Zion National Park.
"They won't have to sweat or get their heart rate above armchair level," she added. "There's a market for this. It may be possible again some day to bicycle up Zion Canyon without being run off the road by a tour bus."
Excell is a leader of a local faction opposing the project, not because of the movie theater concept but rather its proposed location on an 11.2-acre meadow right in front of the main entrance to the park.
Critics say the planned theater, motel and retail complex would be too imposing and should be placed closer to the center of this tiny town so that campers and visitors inside the park are not confronted directly with commercial activity.
The company mounting the project is World Odyssey of Los Altos, Calif., co-owned by Kieth Merrill, a filmmaker who won an Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1974 for "The Great American Cowboy," which he produced and directed, and David Mariani, a real estate developer.
They are adapting a film technology known as Imax, which uses a screen 50 feet high and 70 feet wide to give viewers the feeling of almost being in the scene. It is familiar to millions who have seen the film "To Fly" at the Smithsonian Institution.
It will be a startling addition to tiny Springdale, which has no parking meters, telephones with four-digit local dialing and not a single movie house in town.
The idea, Merrill said, is to "extend and expand" the park experience with a technology that can "suspend the audience in place and time and take them back through history."
Although environmentalists do not know whether to applaud or complain about the concept, Merrill argued that it offered benefits both to visitors and to fragile parks.
"About 80 percent of the visitors at national parks have no opportunity to run the rivers or hike the canyons or camp in a wilderness area," he said, adding that many are too old or handicapped.
"And part of our motive is to alleviate pressure on the parks themselves by creating an experience that precludes an undue number of people from trampling all over the wildflowers."
World Odyssey has built similar projects in Tusayan, Ariz., near the rugged and inaccessible Grand Canyon National Park, and near the Alamo and Niagara Falls. The Grand Canyon theater attracts 600,000 visitors a year at $6 each.
"These projects play a real positive role to aid the national park in its charter, which is to provide an interpretive experience for visitors," Merrill said.
The company has plans for theaters near Yellowstone and Great Smokey Mountains national parks. These projects have stirred no particular disputes.
But the plans here for a 350-seat theater, 80 motel rooms and 275 parking places has been a different story. Nearly everybody in this chronically depressed region, where tourism is the main industry, welcomes the project and the jobs and income it will bring. But not so its location, backing directly on the park's Watchman campground and abutting the entrance station.
"Our concern is the location, the visual impact," said Larry Wiese, assistant superintendent of the park.
The issue has forced Springdale, with 300 population, to come to grips with the kind of development it wants.
Many skeptics of the project, like Excell; Marcel Rodriguez, a retired telephone company engineer; Larry McKowen, owner of Flanigan's Inn; and Mark Austin, a contractor who is president of the Zion Canyon Alliance, fear that Springdale will start to acquire the garishness of Gatlinburg, Tenn., outside the Great Smokey park, and West Yellowstone, Mont.
Opposition has been stirred by the National Parks and Conservation Association, a private watchdog group, whose Salt Lake City representative, Terri Martin, has issued press releases denouncing the plan.
World Odyssey has managed to disarm much of the opposition by agreeing with its critics and redesigning the project so it is less visible from the adjoining highway.
Townspeople say the backers of the site include the gruff rough-hewn mayor, Robert Ralston, a retired dock worker, who would say only that he still was considering the proposal. It would require approval of the town council, which he controls.
Many business owners also support the site, including Terry West, a developer who owns the Indian Village, a complex of gift shops, a motel and a restaurant about a mile south of the park entrance.
Opponents have been trying to persuade the company to accept an alternative site, about a mile away and well off the main road. The Park Service has encouraged the company to accept this alternative, saying it would be willing use the same site for its planned transportation hub from which shuttle buses would carry visitors into the park.
The company has been examining this possibility, but it has several problems, including difficulties in assembling land from different owners. Either way, even opponents concede, the movies finally are coming to Springdale.
by CNB