CinemaScope


CinemaScope is a cinematographic technique which used an anamorphic lens to produce widescreen pictures. Crucially, these could be shown in theatres using existing equipment. CinemaScope pictures were produced from 1953 to 1967, and less often after.
When 20th Century Fox began using CinemaScope this marked the beginning of the modern anamorphic format in 2.55:1, almost twice as wide as the previously common Academy format's 1.37:1 ratio. Although the technology behind the CinemaScope lens system was made obsolete by later developments, primarily advanced by Panavision, CinemaScope's anamorphic format has continued to this day. In film-industry jargon, the shortened form, 'Scope, is still widely used by both filmmakers and projectionists, although today it generally refers to any 2.35:1, 2.39:1, 2.40:1, or 2.55:1 presentation or, sometimes, the use of anamorphic lensing or projection in general. Bausch & Lomb won a 1954 Oscar for its development of the CinemaScope lens.

Origins

CinemaScope derives from a film process called Anamorphoscope developed by French inventor Henri Chrétien and patented in 1926. It used lenses that employed an optical technique called Hypergonar to produce an image twice as wide as those that were created with conventional lenses by compressing the image laterally during shooting and dilating it during projection. Chrétien attempted to interest the motion picture industry in his invention but, at that time, the industry was not sufficiently impressed.
By 1950, however, competition from television was causing a serious decline in cinema attendance. To combat this, Cinerama and 3D films were both launched in 1952. This persuaded Spyros Skouras, the head of 20th Century Fox, that technical innovation could buoy filmmaking against the television challenge. Skouras tasked Earl Sponable, head of Fox's research department, with devising a rival projection system that, unlike Cinerama, could be retrofitted to existing theatres at a relatively modest cost. Herbert Brag, Sponable's assistant, remembered Chrétien's hypergonar lens.
The optical company Bausch & Lomb was asked to produce a prototype "anamorphoser" lens. Meanwhile, Sponable tracked down Professor Chrétien, whose patent for the process had expired, so Fox purchased his existing Hypergonars, and the lenses were flown to Fox's studios in Hollywood. Test footage shot with the lenses was screened for Skouras, who gave the go-ahead for development of a widescreen process that would become known as CinemaScope.
20th Century-Fox's pre-production of The Robe, originally committed to Technicolor three-strip origination, was halted so that the film could be changed to a CinemaScope production. The use of the CinemaScope technology became a key feature of the film's marketing campaign. Two other CinemaScope productions were also planned: How to Marry a Millionaire and Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef. So that production of the first CinemaScope films could proceed without delay, shooting started using the best three of Chrétien's Hypergonars, while Bausch & Lomb continued working on their own versions. The introduction of CinemaScope enabled Fox and other studios to respond to the challenge from television by providing a key point of difference.
Chrétien's Hypergonars proved to have significant optical and operational defects, primarily loss-of-squeeze at close camera-to-subject distances, plus the requirement of two camera assistants
Bausch & Lomb, Fox's prime contractor for the production of the lenses, initially produced an improved Chrétien-formula adapter lens design, and subsequently produced a dramatically improved and patented Bausch & Lomb-formula adapter lens design.
Ultimately, Bausch & Lomb formula combined lens designs incorporated both the prime lens and the anamorphic lens in one unit. The combined lenses continue to be used to this day, particularly in special effects units. Other manufacturers' lenses are often preferred for so-called production applications that benefit from significantly lighter weight or lower distortion, or a combination of both characteristics.

List of CinemaScope films

Early implementation

CinemaScope was developed to use a separate film for sound, thus enabling the full silent 1.33:1 aperture to be available for the picture, with a 2:1 anamorphic squeeze applied that would allow an aspect ratio of 2.66:1. When, however, developers found that magnetic stripes could be added to the film to produce a composite picture/sound print, the ratio of the image was reduced to 2.55:1. This reduction was kept to a minimum by reducing the width of the normal KS perforations so that they were nearly square, but of DH height. This was the CinemaScope, or CS, perforation, known colloquially as fox-holes. Later still an optical soundtrack was added, further reducing the aspect ratio to 2.35:1. This change also meant a shift in the optical center of the projected image. All of Fox's CinemaScope films were made using a silent/full aperture for the negatives, as was this studio's practice for all films, whether anamorphic or not.
In order to better hide so-called negative assembly splices, the ratio of the image was later changed by others to 2.39:1. All professional cameras are capable of shooting 2.55:1 or 2.66:1, and 2.35:1 or 2.39:1 or 2.40:1 is simply a hard-matted version of the others.
File:Robe-Cinemascope-Ad.jpg|thumb|right|270px|A promotional poster advertising The Robe and CinemaScope. The small box in the center represents a regular-width screen. The curvature and width of the screen have been greatly exaggerated; it looks more like a Cinerama screen. Unlike Cinerama screens, CinemaScope screens were rectangular, and only 86% wider than standard ratio.
Fox selected The Robe as the first film to start production in CinemaScope, a project chosen because of its epic nature. During its production, How to Marry a Millionaire and Beneath the 12-Mile Reef also went into CinemaScope production. Millionaire finished production first, before The Robe, but because of its importance, The Robe was released first.
20th Century-Fox used its influential people to promote CinemaScope. With the success of The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire, the process enjoyed success in Hollywood. Fox licensed the process to many of the major American film studios.
Walt Disney Productions was one of the first companies to license the CinemaScope process from Fox. Among the features and shorts they filmed with it, they created the live-action epic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, considered one of the best examples of early CinemaScope productions. Walt Disney Productions' Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, which won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject in 1953, was the first cartoon produced in CinemaScope. The first animated feature film to use CinemaScope was Lady and the Tramp, also from Walt Disney Productions.
Due to initial uncertainty about whether the process would be adopted widely, a number of films were shot simultaneously with anamorphic and regular lenses. Despite early success with the process, Fox did not shoot every production by this process. They reserved CinemaScope as a trade name for their A productions, while B productions in black and white were begun in 1956 at Fox under the trade name, RegalScope. The latter used the very same optics as CinemaScope, but, usually, a different camera system.

Audio

officials were keen that the sound of their new widescreen film format should be as impressive as the picture, and that meant it should include true stereophonic sound.
Previously, stereo sound in the commercial cinema had always employed separate sound films; Walt Disney's 1940 release Fantasia, the first film with stereophonic sound, had used Disney's Fantasound system, which utilized a three-channel soundtrack played from separate optical film. Early post-war stereo systems used with Cinerama and some 3-D films had used multichannel audio played from a separate magnetic film. Fox had initially intended to use three-channel stereo from magnetic film for CinemaScope.
However, Hazard E. Reeves' sound company had devised a method of coating 35 mm stock with magnetic stripes and designed a three-channel system based on three stripes, one on each edge of the film outside the perforations, and one between the picture and the perforations in approximately the position of a standard optical soundtrack. Later it was found possible to add a narrower stripe between the picture and perforations on the other side of the film; this fourth track was used for a surround channel, also sometimes known at the time as an effects channel. In order to avoid hiss on the surround/effects channel from distracting the audience the surround speakers were switched on by a 12 kHz tone recorded on the surround track only while wanted surround program material was present.
This four-track magnetic sound system was also used for some non-CinemaScope films; for example Fantasia was re-released in 1956, 1963, and 1969 with the original Fantasound track transferred to four-track magnetic.

Rival processes

CinemaScope itself was a response to early realism processes Cinerama and 3-D. Cinerama was relatively unaffected by CinemaScope, as it was a quality-controlled process that played in select venues, similar to the IMAX films of later years. 3-D was hurt, however, by studio advertising surrounding CinemaScope's promise that it was the "miracle you see without glasses." Technical difficulties in presentation spelled the true end for 3-D, but studio hype was quick to hail it a victory for CinemaScope.
In April 1953, a technique simply now known as wide-screen appeared and was soon adopted as a standard by all flat film productions in the US. In this process, a fully exposed 1.37:1 Academy ratio-area is cropped in the projector to a wide-screen aspect ratio by the use of an aperture plate, also known as a soft matte. Most films shot today use this technique, cropping the top and bottom of a 1.37:1 image to produce one at a ratio of 1.85:1.
Aware of Fox's upcoming CinemaScope productions, Paramount introduced this technique in March's release of Shane with the 1.66:1 aspect ratio, although the film was not shot with this ratio originally in mind. Universal-International followed suit in May with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio for Thunder Bay. By summer of 1953, other major studios Paramount, Universal, MGM, UA, Columbia, Warner Bros., RKO, Republic, Allied Artists, Disney, Belarusfilm, Rank, and even Fox's B-unit contractors, under the banner of Panoramic Productions had switched from filming flat shows in a 1.37:1 format, and used variable flat wide-screen aspect ratios in their filming, which would become the standard of that time.
By this time Chrétien's 1926 patent on the Hypergonar lens had expired while the fundamental technique that CinemaScope utilised 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. Some studios thus sought to develop their own systems rather than pay Fox.
In response to the demands for a higher visual resolution spherical widescreen process, Paramount created an optical process, VistaVision, which shot horizontally on the 35 mm film roll, and then printed down to standard four-perforation vertical 35 mm. Thus, a negative with a finer grain was created and release prints had less grain. The first Paramount film in VistaVision was White Christmas. VistaVision died out for feature production in the late 1950s with the introduction of faster film stocks, but was revived by Industrial Light & Magic in 1975 to create high quality visual effects for Star Wars and ILM's subsequent film projects.
RKO used the Superscope process in which the standard 35 mm image was cropped and then optically squeezed in post-production to create an anamorphic image on film. Today's Super 35 is a variation of this process.
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 low-budget films.
Many European countries and studios used the standard anamorphic process for their wide-screen films, identical in technical specifications to CinemaScope, and renamed to avoid the trademarks of Fox. Some of these include Euroscope, Franscope, and Naturama. In 1953, Warner Bros. also planned to develop an identical anamorphic process called Warnerscope but, after the premiere of CinemaScope, Warner Bros. decided to license it from Fox instead.