#Cinescope 3 strip full

As On the Waterfront, the 1.85:1 black-and-white production won eight Academy Awards and provided staggering box office returns for distributor Columbia Pictures. Famously, Zanuck pulled the plug on Waterfront, a grimy Elia Kazan-Budd Schulberg production, because it was too вЂintimateвЂ™ for FoxвЂ™s new system. Lumpen subjects were out, or contorted into the highest entertainment. Henceforth, every Fox production would be in color, widescreen, and stereophonic sound-a вЂClass AвЂ™ spectacle no matter what. The blockbuster mentality truly begins here.Д¬inemaScope made this transition literal. Everything cost more money and the marginal returns on smaller films were increasingly unattractive. Double bills were on the wane and studios were weary of the tiered production system that brought forth many pictures of diverse length, budget, and audience appeal. ZanuckвЂ™s memo provided the final thrust of an unspoken industry-wide reaction to the declining audiences of the post-War era. We have a new entertainment medium and we want to exploit it for all it is worth. But in the present market we want to show the things on CinemaScope that we cannot show nearly as effectively on standard 35mm film. The day will undoubtedly come when all pictures in this category will probably be made in CinemaScope.

#Cinescope 3 strip full

This does not mean that every picture should have so-called epic proportions but it does mean that at least for the first 18 months of CinemaScope production that we select subjects that contain elements which enable us to take full advantage of scope, size, and physical actionвЂ¦.ДЇor the time being intimate comedies or small scale, domestic stories should be put aside and no further monies expended on their development. It is our conviction that almost any story can be told more effectively in Cinemascope than in any other medium but it is also our conviction that every picture that goes into production in CinemaScope should contain subject matter which utilizes to the fullest extent the full possibilities of this medium. Zanuck sent a memo to the studioвЂ™s producers and executives:Д®ffective now we will abandon further work on any new treatment or screenplay that does not take full advantage of the new dimension of CinemaScope. The next month, production chief Darryl F. The exhibitors would need proof of the wisdom of their investment and size itself wasnвЂ™t enough. So much was riding on this gamble that the studio need not just provide CinemaScope product, but assure that its subsequent releases showed the system to its best advantage. In February 1953, Fox announced that all new features would be shot and released in CinemaScope. Such a wholesale overhaul of projection equipment (which had remained more or less unchanged for two decades since the conversion to sound) required a tremendous degree of confidence on the part of exhibitors that Cinemascope product would be steady and permanent. By mid-1954, 3-D would be phased out, Cinerama would remain confined to a few exclusive-run houses, and widescreen exhibition became predominant everywhere-all in less than eighteen months with nary a warning shot.Д¬onversion to CinemaScope, while cheap compared to Cinerama, still entailed a considerable outlay: new lenses and aperture plates to achieve full-width anamorphic projection, new sprocket wheels to accommodate FoxвЂ™s slightly smaller perforations, penthouse attachments to play back the four-channel magnetic soundtracks, and a curved Miracle Mirror screen to simulate the pronounced depth of Cinerama. Fox hosted industry previews of The Robe in CinemaScope several months before its theatrical premiere, spurring all the rival studios to announce some kind of widescreen answer to FoxвЂ™s system before the bow of the Biblical epic. Compare this to 1953, when four-strip Cinerama, polarized dual-strip 3-D, and single-strip widescreen projection all sought to revolutionize the industry, to the considerable consternation and uncertainty of exhibitors, producers, union craftsmen, and everyone else involved.

Though todayвЂ™s conversion to digital cinema has yielded inevitable upheavals in the structure of distribution and exhibition, the transition has proved fairly orderly and run according to plan.

The shape of the screen was the engine that drove everything else and, in some cases, dictated the content before the cameras.Д¬inemaScope: Scope, Size, and Physical Action Put another way: although we tend now to think of aspect ratios as somewhat perfunctory aesthetic choices made during the preproduction process, the equation was almost exactly reversed at the dawn of the widescreen era. Would some films not exist at all but for their aspect ratios?