From the January/June 2000 issue of the Operating Cameraman

The previous installment dealt with the problems encountered in doing visual effects in the various wide screen processes introduced after 1952. Adjustments also had to be made in the editing room and in the laboratories.

CinemaScope called for only one change in the editing room, one which stemmed from the desire of editors to view the image unsqueezed. Fox engineers satisfied this by developing a cylindrical piece of plastic which could be attached to the Moviola picture head. Still used today, it was known as a "bubble."

In Europe, where flatbed editing machines like the KEM and Steenbeck were commonly used, un squeezing optics were introduced into their picture heads. These devices were also used when films photographed in 65mm, Technirama and Techniscope were edited using 35mm anamorphic work prints. Superscope pictures were apparently edited with contact unsqueezed prints.

The Cinerama travelogues were actually edited, scored and dubbed from three-panel contact prints on Moviolas modified for the six-perf pulldown. The center panel would be edited first, then the other panels checked to make certain there were no problems with the overall cut. When MGM got involved, the images from the three negatives were optically reduced and printed side-by-side, squeezed, on a 35mm print.

The 70m version of Oklahoma! and both versions of Around the World in 80 Days were edited with contact 70mm prints on a specially designed Westrex editor, a Rube Goldbergish combination of the worst features of the Moviola upright and the flatbed.

By the time 20th Century-Fox became involved in the process, lenses for reduction printing had been developed and all subsequent 65mm productions were edited using 35mm anamorphic reduction prints.

On some films such as Cleopatra, a matching 70mm work picture was kept conformed to the 35mm version as it was approved. In First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors (University of California Press), John D. Dunning, co-editor of Ben-Hur, states that film was edited in 35mm with direct non squeezed reductions from the 65mm negative. As the images were less than two perfs high, the editors often had to double check the action by comparison with a 70mm print!

Of course, Vista Vision, Technirama, CinemaScope 55 and Camera 65/Ultra Panavision were all developed with the idea of producing higher quality 35mm prints so reduction printers and lenses were part of the design.

Technicolor also had printers that would blow up and stretch images from Techniscope negatives into 4-perf squeezed prints for editing. This led to a problem in conforming the negative to the 35mm cut work picture as the original negative key numbers--latent image numbers printed at every foot along the outer edge of negative and intermediate stocks--were not normally reproduced on the reduction prints as they are on contact prints.

Solution to this problem was found in a technique developed in the early days of optical sound to establish and maintain a sync reference between two or more related pieces of film: inking consecutive numbers at every foot along their edges. Such coding was--and still is--used on synchronized work picture and tracks, three-strip Technicolor negatives and on both daily and release prints of three-panel Cinerama films.

For reduction prints form the larger frame formats, the negative takes to be reduced were assembled into a roll and after printing, a common code representing the negative footage would be inked onto both the negative an d the reduction work picture to be subsequently used as a guide in matching the negative to the edited work print.

Technicolor did have a Vista Vision reduction printer that printed negative key numbers under the appropriate frame of the reduction print and their Techniscope daily printers were designed to blow up and stretch the key numbers as well as the picture.

By the late '60s they had completed design work on a 65-35 edge numbering system using fiber optics which was never implemented because of the decline in 65mm photography.

The COSHARP 65-35 printer developed in the '90s by the Technology Council of the Motion Picture and Television Industries has such a feature. This unique printer is currently being used at CFI, the only American lab regularly processing and printing 65-70mm, for reductions from 8- and 15-perf as well as 5-perf 65mm photography.

Superscope negatives were of course given the splice that was standard for Academy aperture films in 1954. As CinemaScope used the full aperture area, a narrower negative splice was part of its design consideration, with the recommended dimensions for projector aperture plates set to eliminate the visibility of splices during projection.

These dimensions were changed in the early '70s to allow for a slightly thicker splice, resulting in the change in the recommended projection aspect ratio for anamorphic films with an optical track from 2.35:1 to 2.40:1. Otherwise there were no changes in negative cutting and printing 35mm anamorphic films.

Negative cutting was standard for the larger frame negatives, which were often cut into A & B rolls to allow fades and dissolves to be made without going through a dupe stage. With the exception of 35mm prints made by Technicolor in its dye transfer process, all large negative printing was done off the original cut negatives, which were of course protected in advance by separations, including 65mm separations. Technicolor never built an IB printer for any format larger than 35mm.

With horizontal Vista Vision and Technirama, only a small number of prints were struck, not likely more than 10 in the former instance as there were only that many situations set up to project them. These were all color positive prints as not enough were ordered to justify the cost of IB printing. Initially only about 50 70mm prints were made on each release, but as the number of 70mm-equipped theaters grew in the mid-60s, the number of prints struck grew, with Lawrence of Arabia having a record 150 70mm prints made during its original release.

The 70mm prints were often made on optical printers at very slow speeds to incorporate such image corrections as adding a squeeze at the sides to eliminate distortion--when projected on deeply curved Cinerama-type screens. This printing method damaged the negatives' perforations and years later would create major problems for preservationists.

DeLuxe Laboratories made 35mm prints directly from the CinemaScope 55 negatives of Carousel and The King and I while the 70mm prints for the latter's 1961 70mm reissue were made off the original negative by Technicolor.

In 1963 in a joint venture with Technicolor, Panavision developed an optical printer lens that allowed high quality un squeezed 70mm prints to be made from films shot in 35mm anamorphic. Such blowups were made optically off the original cut negatives until 1978 when the increase in orders for them, for better sound not higher quality picture, led to their being made from 35mm printing CRIs and internegatives.

In the '80s, on films like The Empire Strikes Back where upwards of 200 70mm prints were being ordered, a 65mm printing internegative would be made off the master interpositive.

Prints on all the color films released in Superscope were made by Technicolor with the squeeze being introduced during the making of the matrices. Technicolor also made some of the prints on films which subsequently used the technique under such names as WarnerScope (1958-61), Megascope and Hammerscope.

A notable exception was the American release of such Hammer films as House of Fright (1960), The Pirates of Blood River (1962) and The Crimson Blade (1964), which were printed by Pathé from squeezed internegatives.

Black-and-white prints were made from squeezed dupe negatives; CFI, DeLuxe and Pathé also all having the Superscope optical printer lenses.

Until the early '60s, Technicolor processed the negatives and made not only the 70mm release prints on all films shot in 65mm, but also the initial 35mm general release and 16mm non-theatrical prints.

Some of the 35mm anamorphic release prints of Raintree County and Ben-Hur were "letter-boxed" to retain the 2.75:1 Camera 65 aspect ratio. In the early '60s, both DeLuxe and MGM Laboratories would put in 65/70mm facilities and would begin doing lab work for their parent companies, 20th Century-Fox and MGM. They would also make the 35mm release prints using a 35mm squeezed internegative made from either a 65mm or 35mm squeezed interpositive, as well as any new 70mm, 35mm or 16mm prints of the films originally printed by Technicolor; DeLuxe also doing new prints of 65mm films made for United Artists release.

Because splices would show in prints from a Techniscope negative, those printed in the United States were assembled into single rolls with an extra frame at the head and tail of each cut. Technicolor's computerized Auto-Selective printers would be programmed to skip those two frames at each cut when making the matrices.

In the late '60s, because of the number of Techniscope films their clients were importing, DeLuxe and Pathé put in optical printers to make squeezed 4-perf interpositives or internegatives, and after 1966, CRIs eliminating the extra frames in the process. These labs were also able to capitalize on a brief flurry of interest in Techniscope by low budget filmmakers in Hollywood.

By 1970 anamorphic photography and its associated post-production techniques had become a worldwide standard, and as previously noted, in the early '80s Superscope was revived as Super 35 and many of the post-production techniques introduced for it in 1954 were revived with a more contemporary spin.

(MGM, current owner of the United Artists library, recently used Super 35 optics to make a new anamorphic internegative on Vera Cruz, the first film to be released in Superscope.)

The other formats fell into disuse, creating problems in restoring them and/or making new prints.

Although black-and-white separations were made on almost all the 65mm, Technirama and Vista Vision films, they were made dry, which meant any scratches on the negatives were printed into the separations and they were never test printed back to see if there were any other flaws in their manufacture.

During the '60s and '70s interpositives were made off the original negatives to generate 35mm and 16mm internegatives for TV syndication use. Later, new theatrical prints were made off these internegatives with results of varying degrees of quality when compared to prints from the original release.

When serious efforts were made to restore many of these films in the late '80s and early '90s, these internegatives were considered unacceptable, the separations discovered to be flawed, and the original negatives were found to be faded, especially on films shot in the '50s.

Vista Vision had survived for rear projection work, and after its adoption by John Dykstra for visual effects work on Star Wars, its use became standard in that field and is still used for plate photography on elements to be composited digitally.

65mm was also used for this work by Douglas Trumbull and his successor Richard Edlund. Much of the lab equipment developed in the '50s and '60s for both these formats would find their way into various effect houses.

Preservationists working on the restoration of 65mm and Vista Vision films would use this equipment as a foundation for developing new equipment that met higher contemporary standards.

Restoring films in less used formats proved to be more difficult. In 1972 Pacific Theaters, which had bought the Cinerama Corporation, approached Linwood Dunn about making a single strip 70mm conversion of This is Cinerama. Inspection of the original negatives revealed fading problems not only between scenes, but also between panels, which would make color re corrections time consuming and expensive.

Technicolor still had a set of matrices on the film and so a new IB print was struck and used in a triple head optical printer to create a new 65mm internegative.

Unfortunately this was done in the standard 70mm 2.2:1 aspect ratio so a third of the image in the side panels was cut off. There has been talk over the last decade of doing restoration on all the Cinerama travelogues in both three panel and 65mm; as of this writing there are four theaters internationally that can show the original three-projector process.

In 1965 MGM Laboratories made an un squeezed 2.2:1 IP on Ben-Hur. All subsequent 70mm prints have been made off internegatives from this IP. Although wide screen buffs would love to see it, reportedly it is not commercially viable to do a restoration of this film in its original 2.75:1 aspect ratio or to make new 70mm prints in this ratio of the other films shot in Camera 65/Ultra Panavision as there are not enough theaters internationally that could show them properly to recover the costs of the prints.

Technicolor junked its Techniscope printers in 1975 and had stored away its lenses for squeezing or un squeezing Technirama. 35mm 4-perf anamorphic IPs and separations had been made on the various films shot in these processes, but as the former especially had been done to yield un squeezed internegatives for non-theatrical release and TV syndication, that they had not been made to the highest standards of quality was immediately evident when they were used as a source of new theatrical prints in the '80s.

Fortunately a number of facilities had been set up by then which specialized in film restorations and they set out to develop optics that would yield the highest quality images from these negatives.

Spartacus got the deluxe treatment from Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz: restoration to a 65mm IP with new 70mm prints. Because Technirama is no longer a commonly used format, preservationists would like to preserve Technirama films in 65mm, as was also done with Disney's Sleeping Beauty.

Unfortunately many of the owners of Technirama films have been reluctant to go for the additional expense. Harris and Katz also restored the Vista Vision film Vertigo in 65mm. Techniscope films like American Graffiti and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly have also benefited from new printer optics resulting in prints that are sharper than those from the films' original release.

Naturally there has been talk of using digital technology to both preserve and eliminate some of the conversion problems with these now arcane formats. In the opinion of many preservationists and those knowledgeable about film technology, the resolution of state-of-the-art digital systems is not up to the quality of, especially, three panel Cinerama, 65mm, Technirama and Vista Vision; and film--even reduction to 35mm anamorphic separations--is still considered the best medium for the preservation of films in those formats. Unfortunately economics may result in decisions on this issue that will be regretted in the future.

The next installment will deal with another area of the Wide Screen Revolution that has rarely been discovered: its effect on non theatrical and amateur filmmaking. Did you know that anamorphic lenses, including Chrétien's Hypergonar, were being marketed to amateur filmmakers--in 1928?