Cinemascope

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Cinemascope, or more strictly 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. The addition of soundtracks, however, meant that the actual aspect ratio was initially 2.55, and then shortly thereafter standardized at 2.35. Strictly speaking, CinemaScope is purely a camera lens system, although it originally had unique print specifications as well; while the lens system was quickly made obsolete by better technological developments, the anamorphic presentation of films is largely the same as it was by the end of the 1950's.

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History

It was developed by 20th Century Fox to supplant the complex, multi-projector Cinerama process which was a surprise hit when first introduced in 1952. Cinemascope was the brainchild of Spyros Skouras during his tenure as chairman of the Twentieth Century Fox, where he worked to rescue the faltering movie industry from television's lure. 20th Century Fox's famous advertising slogan, Movies are Better than Ever, gained credibility in 1953 when Fox Studios introduced Cinemascope in the studio's groundbreaking feature film The Robe. The introduction of Cinemascope, the movie industry was able to re-assert itself as particularly distinct from its newly invented competitor -- television. [1] [2]

The actual anamorphic process, initially called Anamorphoscope, was developed by Henri Chrétien around 1927 using lenses he called hypergonar. Chrétien had been attempting to sell his process to Hollywood since the 1930s but with little interest, until the advent of Cinerama. Another factor was the rise of television, which was broadcast in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. CinemaScope's wider image was claimed to be more impressive and spectacular.

The hypergonar lens patents were acquired by 20th Century Fox in 1952 and the system was renamed "Fox CinemaScope." The advantage over Cinerama, which required three projectors, was that all the system needed was an additional lens unit fitted to the front of ordinary cameras and projectors. It was first demonstrated in 1953 and the first CinemaScope film distributed was The Robe (September 1953). Another CinemaScope film, How to Marry a Millionaire (also in 1953), actually completed shooting first, despite starting after The Robe, but was not first to market. The technology was licensed by Fox to MGM and Disney and shortly afterwards to Columbia, Universal and Warner. However, initial uncertainty meant that a number of films were shot simultaneously with anamorphic and regular lenses. Also only the 'biggest' films were made in CinemaScope — 10 to 30% of the total produced during typical years in the 1950s and 1960s.

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 2.35:1. Often cinemas 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.

The basic anamorphic process was not patentable since the anamorphoscope had been known for centuries. And anamorphism 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. Paramount created the visually superior process of shooting horizontally on the 35mm film reel, called VistaVision which failed because of the difficulty of presenting it in normal theatres. RKO used the Superscope process in which the standard 35mm 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 35mm cameras modified for two perforations per frame instead of the regular four and later converted into an anamorphic print. It was mostly used in Europe, especially with lower budget films, where it was a quite popular. 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, 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. CinemaScope itself was called Regalscope when used by the Fox adjunct Regal Films for black-and-white features.

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 more compositional freedom from the limitations of the system. Panavision, who had initially made their fortune manufacturing anamorphic adapters for CinemaScope theaters, innovated on the technology 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. Panavision was considered more attractive to the industry at large since they were 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.

It should also be noted that 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. It is difficult to use CinemaScope lenses to photograph animation, because the CinemaScope lenses' anamorphic power begins to drop off at distances less than seven feet away, causing the "mumps" effect discussed above. Nonetheless, many animated short films and a few features were filmed in CinemaScope during the 1950s, including Disney's Lady and the Tramp. Anastasia is also the title of a 1956 film which was, in fact, shot in CinemaScope proper.

Although CinemaScope no longer exists, its association with anamorphic projection is still so embedded in mass consciousness that anamorphic prints are often referred to, erroneously, as "'Scope" prints.

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