Page 1 of Old films - in widescreen or not?

I don`t wish to sound thick, but..

The missus wanted The Wizard of Oz (honestly!) so upon seeing the special edition in Asda for £6 I picked it up.

I looked at the back when I got home and saw that it is in 1.33 aspect.

This is also the case with the Bambi special edition.

Now, old films are a rarity in our collection, so I don`t have much other evidence to go on, but did old films really get made in this way? Surely their cinema release was widescreen in some form or other.. :/ If so, why aren`t the DVD released in the same format?

I`m thinking that most films pre 1950`s - Cinemascope and all that - were in a 4:3 aspect or something like but I`m not sure.
Calling Captain Oates....

Correct. Those films were made in the "academy" frame, which is 4.3.

This item was edited on Thursday, 5th October 2006, 02:09

Pin back your lugholes - one cinematic history lesson coming up. :D I can bore for England on this topic....

Rule of thumb - Pre 1953 4:3 (1.33:1)

In the beginning there was the cinema screen and it was 4 units by 3 units and everybody saw that it was good. It was so good that everybody agreed on a universal standard for movie film and they called it the "Academy" Frame. All the great movies of the 20s, 30s and 40s were made in the format, from Wizard of Oz to Casablanca, from Gone With The Wind to The Crimson Pirate. The only change to the format came when optical sound was added to movie film and the frame was revised to 1.37:1.

Then in 1953, Hollywood, stung by dropping theatre attendances because folks were staying home and watching the telly, started experimenting with gimmicks to draw back the audiences. Even though television was in black-and-white, colour seemed to be little of a draw (and had been available since the 1930s). 3-D gave people a headache and required special glasses. Then the head of Twentieth Century Fox was introduced to a panoramic filming process. It offered a vast, almost wrap-around image and was perfect for spectacle movies. Fox adopted the process exclusively and called it CinemaScope and made a movie called The Robe using it. It was a smash hit. CinemaScope used a special cylindrical lens to photograph and project the image which squeezed the image horizontally to record a wider (2.35:1) image on the standard format film.

Other studios jumped on the bandwagon, either reverse-engineering CinemaScope to develop their own "Scope" format or developing alternate technologies such as the horizontally-running VistaVision which recorded a larger 1.85:1 image across the area normally occupied by two Academy frames.

For some reason, 1.85:1 became a favoured shape for a "wide" picture, and enterprising studios realised that simply by using a more magnifying lens, an Academy Frame could be projected on a wider screen to fill it horizontally while discarding picture information in the unused areas top and bottom of the frame. The Academy Frame was revised to include an area known as "1.85 Title Safe" which meant within that box, any title or image was guaranteed to appear on the screen. It became the standard way to make movies up to the present day.

CinemaScope and its clones gradually converged into the format we now call Panavision, and settled at a slightly revised 2.40:1 (although it`s still referred to as 2.35:1 by the industry on DVD packaging).

VistaVision became the format of choice for special effects cinematographers in the 1970s, and the handful of 70mm super formats that came out are museum exhibits by and large.

Aspect Ratios from 1953 to the present day are something of a minefield and are a topic that can cause heated arguments around Home Theatre enthusiasts. However, the rule of thumb I came up with at the start of this posting holds true. Pre 1953 - 4:3.

Any questions? :D

Oo - oo afterthought - in the 1960s, some silly sod at MGM decided to do a re-release of Gone With The Wind but blown up to 70mm and with nearly half the image missing top and bottom. Not only that, but they did the blow-up from the worst, most faded master material they could find. The release is used by movie restoration enthusiasts to scare their children at bedtime. :B

J Mark Oates

This item was edited on Thursday, 5th October 2006, 01:37

Quote:
which squeezed the image horizontally to record a wider (2.35:1) image on the standard format film.
Anamorphic.
Quote:
Any questions?
Treatise on Cinerama, 3 lens and 1 lens versions. :)

I think that just about covered it! Cheers
( :B )

;)

I had seen Gone With the Wind in widescreen which was why I was expecting other films of that era to be the same..

Well, well.. you learn something every day.. etc.

Just to add my tuppence worth, I worked at the cinema in the 60s & the 4.3 format was called widescreen. When we put a lens in we took it from the box marked `Widescreen` & if it was in Cinemascope or one of the variations we said `Scope` or Anamorphic. Some films like Tom & Jerry although made in `Widescreen 4.3` could be shown in Cinemascope because they filled up the whole of the frame. At our cinema our `Scope` lens was a long lens that shone into a box that had two curved mirrors in & out came `Cinemascope`. The worse type of movie was B/W cinemascope because stretching the Arc lamps showed slight `Bluey` colorisation over the screen, this was hidden in Colour. On TV today it looks OK. My fellow projectionists worked in several cinemas over the country, East Anglia, Devon Gloucestershire & the term for 4.3 (Widescreen was universal).

Todays The Day. Tomorrow can wait...

In the sixties, projectionists knew how to present a movie - unlike the manager-projectionists these days who only know how to lace up a projector and then sod off to check the concession receipts.

Sixties and widescreen are the key words, by the way. In an older (pre-fifties) cinema, you`d probably have the same projector that was installed when the place was built. When they updated to widescreen (post-`53), they`d swap out the old 4:3 lens for a wider-throw lens (labelled widescreen) and there would have been a mask in the projector to stop light from the upper and lower regions of the frame spilling beyond the edges of the screen. Subsequent to 1953, most cinemas either wouldn`t have shown genuine 4:3 movies or projected them widescreen. Interestingly, Europe (including the UK) had an intermediate widescreen format of 1.66:1 which the Carry Ons, the first couple of Bonds, the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marples and some of Kubricks pictures were shot in.

Fascinating point about B/W CinemaScope, Paull. Was that using proper carbon arcs, or had they introduced the Xenon arcs by then? I remeber visiting my local Odeon projection booth in the 1970s and they were still on a monster set of carbon arcs. Then there was a refit to turn the theatre into a three-screener (losing about 250 seats capacity from the front stalls) and the new projectors had cake-stand feeders instead of reels and Xenon arcs.

J Mark Oates

Was that using proper carbon arcs, or had they introduced the Xenon arcs by then? I remeber visiting my local Odeon projection booth in the 1970s and they were still on a monster set of carbon arcs.

We used carbon arcs. The Xenon lamps were only fitted in the mid 70s to our cinema, (by then I had left) but I used to visit my old chums. My mate said the Xenon lamps had to be handled very carefully as they could explode & cause you a lot of damage. I started at the Cinema in 1962 & I keep in touch on a regular basis to 3 of the guys. I`m in Bournemouth, another is in Bognor, another is in Barry (South Wales) & the other is near Grimsby. We all LOVED working at the cinema, it was the best job I ever had but the pay was very low. My starting wage was £3-00 a week. An LP was £1.50 & a single was 6s 3p.

Todays The Day. Tomorrow can wait...

Quote:
Xenon lamps had to be handled very carefully as they could explode & cause you a lot of damage

I remember the projectionist at the Odeon saying they had to be allowed to cool completely before you handled them. The arc itself was like a large egg-shape made of glass inside a square-sided glass jar with an enormous brass electrode at either end. Looked absolutely terrifying, like something out of Frankenstein`s lab. :D

IIRC, the carbon arcs took some skill to operate - trimming them correctly so they didn`t burn out too quickly. And the weird noises they made.

J Mark Oates