Page 10 - 2014-09

60 years old

this month

Mike Trickett
History the projector and wider lens, a normal Acade-
my Ratio film could be “cropped” top and
he introduction of television and its rapid bottom to produce an aspect ratio of 1.66:1. By
Ttake-up in the early 1950s (in the USA) the end of 1953, more than half of the theatres
started to make inroads into the well oiled and in America had installed wide screens.
highly profitable Hollywood Film Industry.
Hollywood fought back with something the However, there were drawbacks: because a
1950s TVs couldn’t offer - Big Screen Movies.
smaller portion of the image was being used
First came Cinerama in September 1952. This and magnification was increased, excessive
process consisted of three strips of 35mm film grain and soft images plagued early widescreen
projected side-by-side onto a giant, curved presentations.
screen, augmented by seven channels of stereo-
phonic sound. This process required major VistaVision
changes to a theatre’s layout and was only Not to be left behind in the race for “bigger and
shown in a relativly small number of theatres better”, and not wanting to utilise their
arounf the world. compeditor’s process (or pay royalties),
Paramount Pictures devised their own system.
In February of 1953, 20th Century-Fox Paramount did not use an anamorphic
announced that they would soon be introducing processes like CinemaScope but refined the
their wide-screen process called quality of their flat widescreen system by
CinemaScope. This process used an anamor- orienting the 35mm negative horizontally in the
phic lens, a specially designed lens,
which on the camera, compressed the
image in the horizontal plane by a factor
of two. A similar lens was used in
projection to correct the squeeze and the
resultant image was seen in its normal
proportions, with an aspect ration
2.35:1*

Flat Wide Screen
With the public’s growing awareness of
bigger screens and wider images, other
studios started using a "flat" widescreen
process. This simply meant they framed
the image composition such that no
important part of the picture was in the
top and bottom eighth of the frame. By The Mitchell VistaVision Camera
using a smaller sized aperture plate in

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