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CinemaScope
From Encyclopedia PRO
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 the lens system that CinemaScope employed was quickly made obsolete by technological developments, the anamorphic presentation of films that CinemaScope initiated in the 1950s has continued to this day.
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History
Origins
A French professor named Henri Chrétien developed and patented a new film process that he called Anamorphoscope in the late 1920's, and 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. A premiere of Chrétien's new process in New York greatly impressed the major Hollywood film studio's of the time, eager to win back lost audiences from television's lure. It was 20th Century Fox who won the rights of Anamorphoscope, but the format needed much development before it would be ready to use. The first batch of lenses that Chrétien had built were quickly transported back to Hollywood where they were further analysed and the basis of CinemaScope formed. Pre-Production of major Fox production The Robe was halted so that the project could be appropriately changed to cater for what Fox President Spyros Skouras saw as the future of film making. 20th Century Fox's famous advertising slogan, Movies are Better than Ever, gained credibility with the ground breaking 1953 film The Robe and with the introduction of CinemaScope, the movie industry was able to re-assert itself as particularly distinct from its newly invented competitor -- television. [1] [2]
Early implementations
The lavish star-driven comedy How To Marry A Millionaire was the first film to be shot in CinemaScope, although The Robe was released to audiences earlier. Fox used its most powerful people to promote CinemaScope and with the success of The Robe and How To Marry A Millionaire, the process became hot property in Hollywood. Fox sold the process to many of the major film studios including Columbia, Universal, MGM and Walt Disney Pictures who created one of the best examples of early Cinemascope productions with the live action epic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. However, initial uncertainty meant that a number of films were shot simultaneously with anamorphic and regular lenses. Despite being successful, early take-up of Cinemascope was slow — only the major films were made in the format, 10 to 30% of total output during typical years in the 1950s and 1960s.
Rival processes
Technical issues
Decline
Panavision, who had initially made their fortune manufacturing anamorphic adapters for CinemaScope theaters, innovated on the technology of CinemaScope by including a dual rotating element which was controlled by the focus ring in order to keep the plane of focus at a constant anamorphic power of 2x. After screening a demo reel comparing the two systems, many US studios adopted the Panavision anamorphic lenses instead. The Panavision technique was considered more attractive to the industry at large since it was both more affordable than CinemaScope and were not licensed 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.
Modern references
While the lens system has been retired for decades, 20th Century 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 anamorphic prints are often referred to, erroneously, as "'Scope" prints.