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THE STORY BEHIND

THE SYSTEM

By Mike Trickett

History Flat Wide Screen
The introduction of television and its rapid With the public’s
take-up in the early 1950s (in the USA) started growing awareness of
to make inroads into the well oiled and highly bigger screens and
profitable Hollywood Film Industry. wider images, other
studios started using
Hollywood fought back with something the a "flat" widescreen
1950s Television Industry couldn’t offer – Big process. This simply
Screen Movies. meant that, in
production, the image
First came Cinerama in September 1952. This was framed in such a
process consisted of three strips of 35 mm film way that no important
projected side-by-side onto a giant, curved part of the picture was
screen, augmented by seven channels of in the top or bottom
stereophonic sound. This process required major eighth of the frame.
changes to a theatre’s layout and was only By using a smaller
shown in a relatively small number of theatres sized aperture plate in
around the world. In Australia, the Plaza theatres the projector and a
in Sydney and Melbourne were the only venues. shorter focal length
lens, a normal Eight perforation horizontal format VistaVision
In February of 1953, 20th Century-Fox Academy Ratio film
announced that they would soon be introducing could be “cropped” top and bottom to produce Prior to this time, most films were either
their new wide-screen process called an aspect ratio of 1.66:1. By the end of 1953, black and white, or were filmed with the
CinemaScope. This process used an anamorphic more than half of the theatres in America had cumbersome three strip Technicolor
lens, a specially designed lens, which on the installed wide screens. cameras. The availability of satisfactory
camera, compressed the image in the horizontal mono pack colour film (predominately
plane by a factor of two. A similar lens was However, there were drawbacks. Because a Eastman Kodak) had become available
used in projection to correct the squeeze and the smaller portion of the image was being used and around the early 1950s - without it,
resultant image was seen in its normal magnification was increased, excessive grain CinemaScope and other widescreen
proportions, with an aspect ratio 2.35:1* and poor focus plagued early widescreen processes would not have been viable.
presentations.
VistaVision
Below: The Mitchell VistaVision camera, christened the elephant ear camera Not to be left behind in the race for “bigger
and better”, and not wanting to utilise their
competitor's process (or pay royalties),
Paramount Pictures devised their own
system. Paramount did not use an
anamorphic process like CinemaScope, but
increased the image quality of their camera
originals by orienting the 35 mm negative
film horizontally in the camera gate and
exposing an area of film twice that of of a
regular frame.

This resulted in an eight perforation per
frame camera original, the same format that
had been used for 35 mm still photography
for a number of years.

When the eight perforation, horizontal
negative image was rotated and printed
down to a normal sized 35 mm projection
print, it produced a finer-grained, sharper
image.
In most cases, the usual “Print by
Technicolor” applied. Technicolor had
introduced a system whereby the single film
negative was “split” into three separation

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