Cinemascope

CinemaScope is an anamorphic lens series used, from 1953 to 1967, for shooting widescreen movies. Its creation in 1953 by Spyros P. Skouras, the president of 20th Century Fox, marked the beginning of the modern anamorphic format in both principal photography and movie projection.

The anamorphic lenses theoretically allowed the process to create an image of up to a 2.66:1 aspect ratio, almost twice as wide as the previously common Academy format's 1.37:1 ratio. Although the CinemaScope lens system was made obsolete by new technological developments, primarily advanced by Panavision, the CinemaScope anamorphic format has continued to this day. In film-industry jargon, the shortened form, 'Scope, is still widely used by both filmmakers and projectionists, although today it generally refers to any 2.35:1, 2.39:1, or 2.40:1 presentation or, sometimes, the use of anamorphic lensing or projection in particular. Bausch & Lomb won a 1954 Oscar for its development of the CinemaScope lens.

French inventor Henri Chrétien developed and patented a new film process that he called Anamorphoscope in 1926. It was this process that would later form the basis for CinemaScope. Chrétien's process was based on lenses that employed an optical trick which produced an image twice as wide as those that were being produced with conventional lenses; this was done using an optical system called Hypergonar, which was the process of compressing (at shoot time) and dilating (at projection time) the image laterally. He attempted to interest the motion picture industry in his invention, but at that time the industry was not sufficiently impressed.

By 1950, however, cinema attendance seriously declined with the advent of a new competitive rival: television. Yet Cinerama and the early 3D films, both launched in 1952, succeeded at the box-office in defying this trend, which in turn persuaded Spyros Skouras, the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, that technical innovation could help to meet the challenge. Skouras tasked Earl Sponable, head of Fox's research department, with devising a new, impressive, projection system, but something that, unlike Cinerama, could be retrofitted to existing theatres at a relatively modest cost – and then Herbert Brag, Sponable's assistant, remembered Chrétien's "hypergonar" lens.

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