CinemaScope

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A Fox logo used to promote the CinemaScope process.

CinemaScope was a widescreen movie format used from 1953 to 1967. Anamorphic lenses allowed the process to project film up to a 2.66:1 aspect ratio, twice as wide as the conventional format of 1.33:1. Although CinemaScope was shortly made obsolete by new technological developments, the anamorphic presentation of films initiated by CinemaScope in the 1950s has continued to this day.

1 History
2 See also
3 External references

[edit] History

[edit] Origins

Henri Chrétien demonstrates his Anarmorphoscope lenses.

A French professor named Henri Chrétien developed and patented a new film process that he called Anamorphoscope in the late 1920s. It was this process that would later form the basis for CinemaScope. Chrétien's process was based on lenses that employed an optical "trick" which produced an image twice as wide as that produced with conventional lenses.[1] In New York, a premiere of Chrétien's new process impressed the major Hollywood film studios of the time, who were eager to win back lost audiences from television’s allure.[2]

Twentieth Century Fox won the rights of the Anamorphoscope. However, the format needed more development before it would be ready to use. The first of Chrétien's lenses were quickly transported to Hollywood where they were further analyzed. From this analysis the basis of CinemaScope was formed.

Fox's pre-production of The Robe was halted so that the film could be changed to CinemaScope, what Fox President Spyros Skouras envisioned as the future of film making. Twenieth Century Fox's famous advertising slogan, “Movies are Better than Ever”, gained credibility with the ground breaking 1953 film The Robe . With the introduction of CinemaScope, the movie industry was able to re-assert its distinction from its new competitor—television.[3]

[edit] Early implementations

A promotional picture advertising The Robe and CinemaScope. The small box in the center represents a regular-width screen.

The comedy How To Marry A Millionaire was the first film to be shot in CinemaScope. However, The Robe was released first. Fox utilized its influential people to promote CinemaScope. With the success of The Robe and How To Marry A Millionaire, the process became a hot property in Hollywood. Fox sold the process to many of the major film studios including Columbia, Universal, MGM and Walt Disney Productions. Disney created one of the best-regarded examples of early CinemaScope productions with the live-action epic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.[4] However, due to initial uncertainty a number of films were shot simultaneously with anamorphic and regular lenses. Despite some early successes, the adoption of CinemaScope was slow and only major blockbusters were made in the format — 10 to 30% of total output during typical years in the 1950s and 1960s.

[edit] Rival processes

Paramount Pictures created its own visually superior VistaVision technique as a rival to CinemaScope

The fundamental technique that CinemaScope was built on was not patentable because the anamorphoscope had been known for centuries. Anamorphosis had been used in visual media such as Hans Holbein's painting, The Ambassadors (1533), as early as the sixteenth century. Some studios sought to develop their own systems rather than pay Fox.

In response to the demands for a higher fidelity spherical widescreen process, Paramount created the visually superior process of shooting horizontally on the 35 mm film reel called VistaVision, and then printing down to 35 mm. Thus, a finer grained negative was introduced, and consequently less grainy prints. VistaVision died out in the late 1950s, with the introduction of finer grained film stocks.

RKO used the Superscope process in which the standard 35 mm image was cropped in post-production to create a widescreen image.

Another process called Techniscope was developed by Technicolor Inc. in the early 1960s, using normal 35 mm cameras modified for two perforations per frame instead of the regular four and later converted into an anamorphic print. Techniscope was mostly used in Europe, especially with lower budget films.

Many European countries and/or studios used standard anamorphic process for their widescreen films, simply a clone of CinemaScope, renamed to avoid the copyrights of Fox. Some of these are Euroscope, Franscope, and Naturama (used by Republic Pictures). In 1952-53 Warner Brothers also planned to develop an identical anamorphic process called Warnerscope, but after the premiere of CinemaScope they decided to simply buy it from Fox instead.

[edit] Technical difficulties

A CinemaScope 35 mm camera film frame showing a circle. It has been squeezed by a ratio of 2:1 by an anamorphic lens.

Although CinemaScope was capable of producing a 2.66:1 image, the addition of stereo information could reduce this to 2.55:1. A change in the base 35 mm film aperture eventually reduced CinemaScope to 2.39:1. Often theaters with smaller screens would further crop the format to make it fit.

A general problem with expanding the image meant that there could be visible graininess and brightness problems. To combat this, larger formats were developed: initially an unsuccessful 55 mm, and later the 65/70 mm format. The initial problems with grain and brightness were eventually reduced thanks to improvements in film stock and lenses.

CinemaScope lenses had a problem known as "the mumps": the anamorphic power was decreased when objects approached close to the camera, which meant that closeups would slightly over-stretch an actor's face. This problem was avoided at first by composing wider shots, but as anamorphic technology lost its novelty, directors and cinematographers sought compositional freedom from these limitations. Issues with the lenses made it difficult to use CinemaScope lenses to photograph animation. Nevertheless, many animated short films and a few features were filmed in CinemaScope during the 1950s, including Disney's Lady and the Tramp.

[edit] Decline

Panavision, who initially made their fortune manufacturing anamorphic adapters for CinemaScope theaters, innovated the CinemaScope by including a dual rotating element which was controlled by a focus ring in order to keep the plane of focus at a constant anamorphic ratio of 2x. After screening a demo reel comparing the two systems, many US studios adopted the Panavision anamorphic lenses. The Panavision technique was considered more attractive to the industry because it was more affordable than CinemaScope and was not owned/licensed-out by a rival studio. By the mid-1960s even Fox had begun to abandon CinemaScope for Panavision (famously at the demand of Frank Sinatra for Von Ryan's Express). Fox eventually capitulated completely to third-party lenses by 1967.

[edit] Modern references

While the lens system has been retired for decades, Fox has used the trademark in recent years on at least three films - Down with Love, which was shot with Panavision optics but used the credit as a throwback to the films it references, and the Don Bluth films Anastasia and Titan A.E. at Bluth's insistence. Nonetheless, these films are not true CinemaScope as they use modern lenses. CinemaScope's association with anamorphic projection is still so embedded in mass consciousness that all anamorphic prints are often referred to, generically - many times erroneously - as "'Scope" prints.