8mm Forum: CinemaScope

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Posted by Maurice Leakey (Member # 916) on December 11, 2017, 02:53 AM:

I have been watching the 1957 "The Good Companions" on Talking Pictures TV and was surprised to see these added words to "In CinemaScope":-

"This film is made under licence from 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. The registered proprietors of the trademark CinemaScope."

In those days Fox was very jealous of their new process. I remember a small cinema in the Somerset coastal town of Watchet who were refused a supply of any Fox film as they had not installed facilities for showing CinemaScope. The cinema said they couldn't afford all the extra costs.

The costs were high because not only were a new screen and anamorphic lenses required, there was the cost of the sound conversion because the first Fox 'scope films had four-track magnetic sound tracks for stereo.

But, as many smaller cinemas held off their conversion, Fox recapitulated and offered their 'scope films with optical mono tracks.

Fox's 'scope monopoly was soon thwarted by the introduction of Panavision who had also obtained anamorphic lenses. I believe there may not have been a monopoly by Panavision as many films began to appear in .......vision with virtually any company's name in front.

Posted by Paul Adsett (Member # 25) on December 11, 2017, 11:50 AM:

And the Panavision lenses were superior to the original Bausch and Lomb CinemaScope lenses, which suffered from distortion.

Posted by Brian Fretwell (Member # 4302) on December 11, 2017, 01:30 PM:

I believe fox bought the rights to the name Cinemascope from Henri Chretien who made the first lenses and demonstrated them to Fox. After that only Fox and Chretien could use the name. I have an example of a Cinemascope lend for 8mm by that firm. It is the Hypogonar. It is labeled Cinemascope and has an odd 1.75:1 squeeze ratio that gives 2.66:1 on projection.

I has Marque deposee usilage commercial interdit. Register mark commercial use prohibited round the barrel. It does not focus and is so small it can only be used with prime lenses. Front element about 25mm rear 14mm.

Posted by Dave Groves (Member # 4685) on December 11, 2017, 02:01 PM:

I have the 16mm Hypergonar with the name H. Chretien - 16mm round the edge. It's a focusing lens and produces a very good picture. Personally, I feel the shape of 16mm 'scope is too letterboxy and tends to cut heads off on some prints I've seen. I always thought it interesting that our own Rank organisation had the rights to the lens but did nothing with it. These were coming to an end so Fox, no doubt, jumped in and started a revolution and made a fortune. Whether they saved the industry at a time t.v. was making inroads to it's audience, is debatable, even if it did make an initial impact and change the shape of the cinema screen forever.

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 1183) on December 13, 2017, 05:48 PM:

I can't speak to the licensing in Europe, but here in the US.of.A, FOX bought all rights to the anamorphic lens process from Henri Chretien. FOX then trademarked it as CinemaScope. In order to hasten CinemaScope as a standard, they licensed it to other studios for little to no cost.

At first, FOX owned all the anamorphic camera lenses, and would loan them out to other studios. Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea was shot with FOX lenses. This resolved itself by the late 1950's as more camera lenses were manufactured.

CinemaScope camera lenses had both focus and depth of field issues, which the Panavision Corporation eventually solved with their prism based anamorphic lenses. While on the exhibition side, CinemaScope won out and is the standard up though today for anamorphic projection, on the camera side, Panavision won. The last major studio American film that was shot with CinemaScope lenses was FOX's In Like Flint in 1967.

Originally, a theatre has to install magnetic stereo along with CinemaScope as part of their licensing agreement. Early CinemaScope films did not have an optical track. Eventually, FOX relented on this requirement and changed the aspect ratio specification to allow for mag/optical prints.

The problem with 16mm scope films is that the fixed 16mm frame is in the wrong aspect ratio. In 35mm, flat (1.33/1.37) films have thick frame lines. When CinemaScope came out, they increased the height of the frame, completely eliminating the frame line. This is not possible in 16mm, so the choice was either crop the top/bottom of the picture (which is generally what happened), or put black bars on the sides to maintain the 35mm aspect ratio.

Posted by Lindsay Morris (Member # 3812) on December 13, 2017, 07:00 PM:

I also have a Hypergonar lens made by Henri Chritien & at the time I purchased it there was a small pamphlet packed with it stating that Henri had retained the rights to the 8mm & 16mm markets to use the process & the word Cinemascope on his lens.
As old as this lens is it beats many of the other later 8 & 16mm scope lens hands down on projecting & actually taking scope films on 8 & 16mm.
It is quite hefty though as compared to say a Kowa lens. It is not easily fitted to either cameras or projectors as there is no thread on the rear element so suitable brackets etc are needed to mount up correctly.
I was quite impressed by the resulting screen image of home movies shot in scope with his lens & squeezed onto a Std 8mm frame.

It had its origins as an armoured Tank viewing lens to give operators better width image capture. Then it sort of fell into the movie industry & the rest is history.

Posted by Phil Murat (Member # 5148) on December 14, 2017, 09:09 AM:

HI Lindsay,

"Henry Chretien" Anamorphic Lens (Also call Hypergonar in French) are very famous from our side , and of course, very expensive too.

Sometime, some owners get it just only as a collectable item, because they are beautiful items......

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