A system of wide-screen cinematography, based on Henri Chrétien's invention of 1927 and adopted by 20th Century Fox in 1953. An anamorphic lens on the camera produces a laterally compressed image on 35 mm film, which is expanded on projection by a similar optical system. A squeeze factor of 2:1 horizontally is used, resulting in a screened picture of aspect ratio (width:height) 2·35:1.
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. Although CinemaScope was shortly made obsolete by new technological developments, the anamorphic presentation of films initiated by CinemaScope in the 1950s has continued to this day.
History
Origins
A French professor named Henri Chrétien developed and patented a new film process that he called Anamorphoscope in the late 1920s. It was this process that would later form the basis for CinemaScope.
Fox's pre-production of The Robe was halted so that the film could be changed to CinemaScope, what Fox President Spyros Skouras envisioned as the future of film making.
Early implementations
The comedy How To Marry A Millionaire was the first film to be shot in CinemaScope. Despite some early successes, the adoption of CinemaScope was slow and only major blockbusters were made in the format — 10 to 30% of total output during typical years in the 1950s and 1960s.
Rival processes
The fundamental technique that CinemaScope was built on was not patentable because the anamorphoscope had been known for centuries.
In response to the demands for a higher fidelity spherical widescreen process, Paramount created the visually superior process of shooting horizontally on the 35 mm film reel called VistaVision, and then printing down to 35 mm.
RKO used the Superscope process in which the standard 35 mm image was cropped in post-production to create a widescreen image.
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. 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.
Technical difficulties
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 2.39:1.
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. Issues with the lenses made it difficult to use CinemaScope lenses to photograph animation. Nevertheless, many animated short films and a few features were filmed in CinemaScope during the 1950s, including Disney's Lady and the Tramp.
Decline
Panavision, who initially made their fortune manufacturing anamorphic adapters for CinemaScope theaters, innovated the CinemaScope by including a dual rotating element which was controlled by a focus ring in order to keep the plane of focus at a constant anamorphic power of 2x. The Panavision technique was considered more attractive to the industry because it was more affordable than CinemaScope and was not owned/licensed-out 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).
Modern references
While the lens system has been retired for decades, 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. CinemaScope's association with anamorphic projection is still so embedded in mass consciousness that all anamorphic prints are often referred to, generically - many times erroneously - as "'Scope" prints.
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