The optical company Bausch & Lomb was asked to produce a prototype "anamorphoser" (later shortened to anamorphic) lens. Herbert Brag, Sponable's assistant, remembered Chrétien's hypergonar lens. 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. Yet Cinerama and the early 3D films, both launched in 1952, succeeded in defying that trend, which in turn persuaded Spyros Skouras, the head of 20th Century Studios, that technical innovation could help to meet the television challenge. Chrétien attempted to interest the motion picture industry in his invention but, at that time, the industry was not sufficiently impressed.īy 1950, however, cinema attendance seriously declined with the advent of a new competitive rival: television.
That was done using an optical system called Hypergonar, which compressed the image laterally when the film was being shot, and dilated it when the film was projected. Chrétien's process used lenses that employed an optical trick, which produced an image twice as wide as those that were being produced with conventional lenses. It was that process which later formed the basis of CinemaScope. Bausch & Lomb won a 1954 Oscar for its development of the CinemaScope lens.įrench inventor Henri Chrétien developed and patented a new film process that he called Anamorphoscope in 1926. 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, 2.40:1, or 2.55:1 presentation or, sometimes, the use of anamorphic lensing or projection in general.
Although the technology behind the CinemaScope lens system was made obsolete by later developments, primarily advanced by Panavision, CinemaScope's anamorphic format has continued to this day. Skouras, the president of 20th Century Fox, marked the beginning of the modern anamorphic format in both principal 2.55:1, almost twice as wide as the previously common Academy format's 1.37:1 ratio.
CINESCOPE FLAT PICTURE PROFILE SERIES
CinemaScope logo from The High and the Mighty (1954).ĬinemaScope is an anamorphic lens series used, from 1953 to 1967, and less often later, for shooting widescreen films that, crucially, could be screened in theatres using existing equipment, albeit with a lens adapter.
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