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CinemaScope It Arrived 50 Years Ago This Year |
 Christians Richard Burton and Jean Simmons, left, face the tyrant Caligula (Jay Robinson), Empero;r of Rome, in the climax of THE ROBE (1953), the first film in CinemaScope. |
Fox won the race to lock up
the widescreen market
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Still one of the greatest thrills of my life was the time I harangued my Mom and Dad into driving up to San Francisco in 1953, so we could pay inflated prices to stand in line at the Bay Area's greatest movie palace, the Fox Theatre on Market Street, to see 20th Century-Fox's biblical epic, "The Robe," the first film in CinemaScope.
The Fox Theatre disappeared decades ago, its plush seats and ornate fittings stripped away and sold to half a dozen lesser venues, as the age of the strip mall multi-plex finally arrived. But half a century later the legacy of "The Robe" lingers on.
It was the first feature film in CinemaScope--a box office smash that started the rush to widescreen movies that quickly and thoroughly revolutionized the movie industry.
By the time CinemaScope was retired for good--the final film bearing that trade name was the 1967 Doris Day picture "Caprice"--all the Hollywood studios had switched away from the slightly rectangular-shaped "standard" screen image of the previous 60 years to adopt some variation of CinemaScope, a screen image more than twice as wide as it was high.
I still vividly remember the original thrill of watching "The Robe" for the first time. When the curtains parted at the Fox, the audience saw a spectacularly wide image --of another set of red velvet curtains. Those cinematic curtains then slowly opened, drawing the sellout crowd of several thousand moviegoers back into the time of Christ and the saga of Marcellus Gallio, the Roman soldier who was changed forever when he came to possess the robe of the crucified Christian martyr, Jesus of Nazareth.
At the time, I probably was one of the few teenagers in the crowd who realized those curtains also were opening up on a whole new world of movie entertainment. I knew because I was the only kid in my junior high school who read the weekly edition of Variety, the show business newspaper, which had been chronicling the Hollywood rush to widescreen for more than a year.
There were two big reasons why Hollywood was ripe for the biggest technical revolution since the coming of talking pictures in 1927. One was the terrible dropoff in attendance at theaters because the new medium of television was keeping people home in their living rooms. The other was a show business phenomenon called Cinerama.
In 1952, a projection system that engineer Fred Waller had been working on since the late 1920s finally was presented to the public in the form of a grand scale travel documentary called "This is Cinerama." In order to show a Cinerama film, you had to completely overhaul a movie theater, tearing out dozens of seats on the ground floor to make room for three projection booths. You had to tear out the existing screen, so you could install a new one that stretched nearly to the roof of the theater and curved around onto the sidewalls of the auditorium. And you had to make room for dozens of stereophonic sound speakers all over the theater.
But the result for viewers was stunning: They were surrounded by a giant image, which occupied 180 degrees of their line of sight, and they were embraced by sounds that seemed to be coming from everywhere in the theater. This so overwhelmed viewers that some literally squirmed during the diabolical opening sequence of the film.
I remember what that experience was like. I saw "This is Cinerama" in 1953 at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco, once the block-long lines finally subsided. The film began with Lowell Thomas narrating a black and white documentary about the history of movies, starting with "The Great Train Robbery" of 1903. We watched it on a "window" in the middle of the vast array of curtains that covered the Cinerama screen. That "window" represented the standard size movie image we all were used to from 50 years of moviegoing.
Finally, Thomas told us movies had come a long way and we were about to see just how far. "Ladies and gentleman," he said, "This is Cinerama!"
At that point, the curtains started rolling back, the sound rose up until we became oblivious to any other sounds around us. Suddenly we realized where we were: At the very top of a roller coaster, looking down the rails to oblivion below--in living color. Then the roller coaster began to move. It felt like your seat was tilting, about to spill you down a chute. And then you were rushing down the rails. The thrill was visceral--literally. Your stomach rose up to your mouth. You were IN that roller coaster and there was nowhere else to go. You were going to have to ride it out!
From then on, you were hanging on for dear life. For a couple of hours. It was bad enough to be flying along close to the ground over the desert in a fast-moving plane, but when the ground gave way and you realized you were rocketing over the mouth of the Grand Canyon, you literally felt like the bottom had fallen out of the theater and you were in free fall.
The minute Hollywood studio executives saw the crowds streaming to the theaters showing "This is Cinerama," they knew what they had to do. This was something the movies could give an audience--something that tiny, black and white TV sets never could match. And it was far better than the gimmicky 3-D process that the studios all were using that year in another desperate campaign to lure moviegoers away from their TV sets. Crowds already were tiring of 3-D movies because you had to wear flimsy paper glasses with Polaroid lenses in order to see the 3-D effect.
As the ads for the first CinemaScope picture boasted, this sort of widescreen film was "the modern miracle you see without glasses!"
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the drawing of Victor Mature (far right) seems a real likeness. drawn up before Richard Burton was cast and while Jean Peters was still set to play Diana. (The pregnant Peters was replaced by Jean Simmons.) |
In Hollywood, the studios were racing to find a widescreen system that didn't require remodelling every movie theater in America. They also were praying for a widescreen system that didn't have the distracting "jiggling seams" of Cinerama. (The "seams" were where the three projected Cinerama images interfaced with each other on the screen.) They also hoped to find somebody who already had enough camera lenses available, so the studio could put several pictures into production before any rival studios found their own widescreen process.
At once, 20th Century-Fox jumped into the lead. Executives at Fox remembered that the original Fox studio had experimented with widescreen movies at the same time the Warner Bros. were revolutionizing the industry with their Vitaphone talking pictures, which got a phenomenal jump on everyone else when "The Jazz Singer" was released in 1927.
Fox had always smarted over that Vitaphone thing. Their original studio boss, William Fox, had been experimenting with sound years before the Warners got into it. His engineers had come up with a process that put a soundtrack right on the film that was run through the movie projector. But cautious investors fumbled the ball and the Warners got there first with Vitaphone, a clumsy system that involved synchronizing phonograph records with the projected images.
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inventor of CinemaScope |
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Just a year after "The Jazz Singer," Fox's Movietone process was introduced, starting the era of "all-talking" pictures. The Fox system was quickly recognized as the superior process--and the Warner Bros. switched over to sound on film, along with every other studio in Hollywood. Fox didn't want the same thing to happen all over again.
Many studios had attempted widescreen. In 1927, French filmmaker Abel Gance premiered his epic "Napoleon," which used a three-camera Cinerama-style process called Polyvision to create a "triptych" effect, showing three panels of visuals on a large screen during the biggest battle sequence. Paramount had used widescreen segments in two silent epics--the 1926 "Old Ironsides" and the 1927 "Wings," the World War I aviation film that won the first Best Picture Academy Award.
But the most ambitious of the studios was Fox. It produced a full-length musical feature film in 1929 called "Happy Days," which was filmed in a 65mm process called Grandeur. The following year, Fox filmed the epic western "The Big Trail," in which John Wayne played his first leading role, in the Grandeur process. Also in 1930, United Artists released an "old, dark house" mystery/horror film, "The Bat Whispers," in another 65mm process called Magnifilm.
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movies as early as 1929 with the Grandeur version of "Happy Days." |
None of these films was successful enough to start a 1930s rush to widescreen. Theater chains already were drained of nearly all their resources by having to re-equip for talking pictures. Then the stock market crash of 1929 ushered in The Great Depression. In those days, the biggest movie studios still owned the biggest chains of theaters, but the economic climate was so bad they couldn't risk pushing their competing widescreen systems at the public, gambling on their own system to prevail.
If any of the full-length widescreen films had been a major hit with the public, it might have been a different story. But the critics generally didn't like "The Big Trail" and others--and neither did the public. Ironically, only a handful of people got to see the films in their widescreen versions, which were limited to big cities only. When the films stumbled out into general release, they all were in standard 35mm versions.
But Fox Pres. Spyros Skouras and his 1950s colleagues remembered remembered the Grandeur experiment with 65mm. They set out to find some of the original cameras, hoping they could be rehabilitated and converted to the most promising system out there in 1953--an "anamorphic" process developed since by French engineer Henri Chretien, who for years had been pushing a widescreen system that nobody had been interested in until 1953.
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from left, Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable. It was a smash hit. |
It seemed ideal to 20th Century-Fox. Chretien's process used a special "anamorphic" lens that compressed a wide image into a standard 35mm frame, then used a similar lens on the projector to "unsqueeze" the image, filling a screen that was about 2.5 times wider than it was tall. Old rival Jack Warner also knew of Chretien's invention and set out to snag it for Warner Bros. Legend has it that Fox beat Warner Bros. to Chretien by only a few hours, signing up worldwide exclusive rights to the process, except in France. Fox also bought up all Chretien's lenses, then made a deal with Bausch and Lomb to quickly start grinding out new lenses.
Warner Bros. surely was ticked at losing the race with Fox, but wisely made a quick deal with Fox to license the use of the process Fox now called CinemaScope. (Somebody else in the video business already owned that brand name, so Fox had to buy the rights immediately.) Quickly jumping on board were MGM, Universal, Disney and all the other major studios except Paramount.
Fox knew it was crucial to launch CinemaScope with a monumental film that would take full advantage of the enormous screen. They chose a project that had already started filming: "The Robe," based on Lloyd C. Douglas' best-selling novel. Re-started as a CinemaScope picture, it turned out to be a very wise choice. The film became a colossal hit, earned rave reviews and was nominated for Best Picture in the 1953 Academy Awards. (It lost to a standard-sized black and white picture, Columbia's "From Here to Eternity.")
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been released to the home video market in a widescreen version. |
Fox used the other Chretien lenses it was able to acquire to also start production on two more films: "How To Marry A Millionaire," a stylish comedy featuring Lauren Bacall and Fox's pinup queen, Betty Grable, along with the new star that would eclipse them both: Marilyn Monroe, and an undersea adventure among sponge divers, "Beneath the 12 Mile Reef," starring Fox's reigning young hunk, Robert Wagner. A fourth CinemaScope film also made it to theaters in 1953: "King of the Khyber Rifles," a period adventure film starring Tyrone Power.
MGM also slipped in under the wire to also release the first non-Fox film in CinemaScope that year: "Knights of the Round Table," starring Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner.
When all five films turned in mighty grosses, Hollywood knew the die had been cast. The public loved CinemaScope and, even though the touted 3-D effect was all hoopla, it was clear that the party was over for the standard-sized screen.
Fox tried to exert control over its license, so that CinemaScope would not be a name associated with schlock movies. It insisted the process could not be used on any black and white movie and should be reserved for only the best Hollywood had to offer Well, that didn't last long. Fox itself started using the system for its cheap black and white "programmers" like "Back From the Dead" (1957), made by its Regal Pictures subsidiary. The studio got around its own rule by saying those films were made in "Regalscope."
In 1954, more than 40 films were released in CinemaScope. Some were marvelous films, among them Fox's all-black "Carmen Jones" with Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte and Pearl Bailey and "River of No Return" with Robert Mitchum, Rory Calhoun and Marilyn Monroe; Warner Bros.' "The High and the Mighty" with John Wayne and "A Star is Born" with Judy Garland; MGM's "Bad Day at Black Rock" with Spencer Tracy, "Brigadoon" with Gene Kelly and "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" with Jane Powell, and Disney's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." (In 1953, Disney had immediately started work on the first widescreen animated feature, the CinemaScope version of "Lady and the Tramp," which finally was finished in 1955).
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It's own system, VistaVision, showed up in 1954--and was not a huge success. |
Stubbornly, Paramount refused to pay license fees to Fox and instead started developing its own process, VistaVision, which was only slightly wider than the old standard format, but enabled filmmakers to get much crisper, cleaner pictures, which then could be blown up in size without graininess. The studio re-configured the standard 35mm camera, laying the film reels on their sides and running the film through the camera horizontally instead of vertically. This allowed them to expose two frames of film at once, creating a much wider image that then was printed down to standard 35mm size.
In some large cities, Paramount used a modified projection system to run a special "road show" version of its VistaVision film "Strategic Air Command" through the projector sideways, projecting what amounted to a 70mm picture and giving a genuine widescreen effect. However, such public screenings were rare.
Though the first VistaVision film, "White Christmas" with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, was a box office hit, the public didn't get excited about a system that seemed pretty much like the old system. Paramount still resisted using CinemaScope, but finally went widescreen in the 1960s when the new Panavision system succeeded CinemaScope as the industry standard for wide images.
Another studio, the once-great RKO, also balked at CinemaScope and used a derivative process, SuperScope, for several films, including "Underwater!" (1955) with Jane Russell. SuperScope, which was first used in the 1954 United Artists film "Vera Cruz" with Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper, produced an image twice as wide as it was tall (2:1). RKO, the under the disastrous leadership of Howard Hughes, was in no financial shape to compete with the other studios and soon went out of business.
Ultimately, most filmmakers decided the CinemaScope image was fine for spectacular vistas, but too wide for use in film intimate scenes. Director Delmer Daves, who made "Demetrius and the Gladiators," the 1954 sequel to "The Robe," told me he purposely put his actors in the center of all intimate scenes and put large decorative objects like potted plants on the extreme left and right sides. He did that because he knew Fox someday would sell his movie to television, which would have to trim the CinemaScope image to fit the TV screen, which then was even narrower than the old standard-size movie screen.
Daves was right. Since the early 1950s, almost all CinemaScope movies have been shown on television in "pan and scan" versions, which trim the picture from one side or the other when TV prints are made. A typically ghastly result is the famous "I Remember It Well" scene from "Gigi," the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1958. In that scene, Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold are singing to each other across a table. The actors are at the far edges of the screen. That means if you show Chevalier, Gingold has to be cut out of the scene--and vice versa.
Today the movie-purist cable networks telecast CinemaScope movies in "letterbox" versions, which show them at their full width, but by reducing the overall size of the image. That creates black borders at top and bottom and a narrow ribbon of picture across the middle of your TV screen. They only look good if you have a TV set with a screen in the 36-inch size or bigger.
I'm happy to note, however, that we're now in the era of very large home TV screens and the DVD digital video format. For the first time since 1953, we're now able to buy lots of CinemaScope movies on DVD or letterboxed VHS videotape editions that preserve the original look of the system that revolutionized the movie industry.
For example, I now have DVD copies of CinemaScope movies that were only previously available in shabby "pan and scan" videotape versions, running at low speeds to reduce the cost of tape for the distributor. Two excellent examples are "Beneath the 12-Mile Reef" (1953) and "The Conqueror" (1956), which were unwatchable on tape. Both were digitally restored and now look great. Better yet, I paid less than $10 for each film. (Digital restoration doesn't help John Wayne's awful performance as Genghis Khan in "The Conqueror," though.)
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jump on the widescreen bandwagon, using Fox's CinemaScope on the live action feature "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (1954) and in the first widescreen animated feature, "Lady and the Tramp" (1955) |
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Here are some personal favorites among the CinemaScope films now on DVD: "How to Marry A Millionaire," which includes the original "Street Scene" symphony by the studio orchestra, which preceded the start of the movie in its original theatrical bookings; "Brigadoon," which truly looks magical on my 38-inch digital TV; "Carmen Jones," which sizzles just like it did in 1954; "River of No Return," which has those great shooting-the-rapids scenes; "Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957), which really benefits by showing you the whole darn bridge in CinemaScope, and, of course, "The Robe," the spectacle that started it all. (You also can get the widescreen Magnifilm version of "The Bat Whispers" on DVD, along with the standard-sized version on the same disk.)
After the widescreen revolution of 1953, Cinerama faded from view after the public tired of the increasingly boring travel documentaries that followed "This is Cinerama." Eventually, Cinerama developed a one-camera system that didn't quite bring the thrills of the old three-camera system--and began using it for regular movies with big outdoor settings, like "How the West Was Won." Its place in the movie world today is taken by the IMAX theaters scattered around the world.
VistaVision was dropped after the 1963 Debbie Reynolds picture, "My Six Loves." Most people now see VistaVision only in DVD editions of "White Christmas," the revivals of the Hitchcock films he made for Paramount during the VistaVision era, such as "Vertigo"; or on those annual Christmas season telecasts of Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments."
CinemaScope only lasted 14 years, but the impact it had on the movie industry was truly revolutionary. The original CinemaScope films still look great, even after 50 years or so. Now if only they'd get around to putting out DVD editions of those CinemaScope films we no longer can see as they were originally presented: "Broken Lance" with Spencer Tracy, "Desiree" with Marlon Brando, "Garden of Evil" with Gary Cooper, "Night People" with Gregory Peck, "Three Coins in the Fountain" with Dorothy McGuire, "Lucky Me" with Doris Day, "Track of the Cat" with Robert Mitchum, "Bad Day at Black Rock" with Spencer Tracy and on and on into nostalgia infinity.
©2003 by Ron Miller. Photos and ads for "The Robe," "How To Marry A Millionaire" and "Happy Days" are the copyrighted property of Twentieth Century Fox. The "Knights of the Round Table" ad is the copyrighted property of MGM. The VistaVision logo is the copyrighted property of Paramount. The photo of Henri Chretien is from the website of the American Widescreen Museum. We thank these sources for the onetime use of these images as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of CinemaScope.
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