VistaVision - History

History

As a response to an industry recession brought about by the popularity of television, the Hollywood studios turned to large format movies in order to regain audience attendance. The first of these, Cinerama, debuted in September 1952, and consisted of three strips of 35mm film projected side-by-side onto a giant, curved screen, augmented by seven channels of stereophonic sound.

Five months later, in February of the following year, Twentieth Century Fox announced that they would soon be introducing a simpler version of Cinerama using anamorphic lenses instead of multiple film strips; a widescreen process that soon became known to the public as CinemaScope.

As a response, Paramount Pictures devised their own system the following month to augment their 3-D process known as Paravision. This process utilized a screen size that yielded an aspect ratio of 5 units wide by 3 units high, or 1.66:1. By using a different sized aperture plate and wider lens, a normal Academy ratio film could be soft matted to this or any other aspect ratio. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that all of their productions would be shot in this ratio.

This "flat" widescreen process was adopted by other studios and by the end of 1953, more than half of the exhibitors in America had installed wide screens. However, there were drawbacks: because a smaller portion of the image was being used and magnification was increased, excessive grain and soft images plagued early widescreen presentations. Some studios sought to compensate for this by shooting their color pictures with a full aperture gate (rather than the Academy aperture), and then reducing the image in Technicolor's optical printer (a predecessor of that which would be today's Super-35 1.85:1 format).

Paramount took this concept a step further, using old Stein cameras that were originally meant for an aborted early 1930s color process. For the color process, instead of an image four perforations high, the camera exposed eight perforations (essentially two frames) consisting of one 4-perf image through a red filter and one 4-perf image through a green filter. In shooting VistaVision, the film was run horizontally rather than vertically, and instead of exposing one 4-perf frame twice, the entire eight perforations were used for one image.

Because of its peculiar horizontal orientation on the negative, VistaVision was sometimes called Lazy 8 by film professionals. This gave a wider aspect ratio of 1.5:1 versus the conventional 1.37:1 Academy ratio, and a much larger image area. In order to satisfy all theaters with all screen sizes, VistaVision films were shot in such a way that they could be shown in one of three recommended aspect ratios: 1.66:1, 1.85:1 and 2.00:1.

The negative was "scribed" with a new form of cue mark, created by Paramount at the start of each 2000-foot (610 m) reel. Similar in shape to an F, the cue mark contained staffs that directed the projectionist to the top of the frame for the three recommended aspect ratios. The projectionist racked his framing so that the staff touched the top of his screen (at the appropriate ratio) and the framing was set for the rest of the reel. On many home video releases these cue marks have been digitally erased.

While most competing widescreen film systems used magnetic audio and true stereophonic sound, early VistaVision carried only Perspecta Stereo, encoded in the optical track.

Loren L. Ryder, chief engineer at Paramount, expressed four general reasons he thought Paramount's VistaVision would be the forerunner of widescreen projection in most theaters:

• VistaVision could be shown at widescreen aspect ratios between 1.66 to 2.00:1.
• VistaVision could be (and most often was) further printed down to standard vertical 35mm reels keeping its 1.66:1 widescreen aspect ratio, which meant exhibitors did not need to purchase additional projection equipment, unlike CinemaScope.
• VistaVision did not cut down the number of seats in any theater (as did Cinerama, and CinemaScope at first).
• VistaVision allowed patrons to see more and therefore gain more enjoyment out of a feature.

After months of trade screenings, Paramount introduced VistaVision to the public at Radio City Music Hall on October 14, 1954, with their first film shot in the process, White Christmas.

White Christmas, Strategic Air Command, To Catch a Thief and The Battle of the River Plate (a.k.a. Pursuit of the Graf Spee) had very limited (two or three) prints struck in the 8-perf VistaVision format in which they were shot. Although the clarity of these 8-perf prints was striking, they were used only for premiere or preview engagements between 1954 and 1956 and required special projection equipment. This exhibition process was impractical because for the footage to travel through a projector at the normal 24 frames per second, the film had to roll at 3 feet per second, double the speed of 35 mm film and causing many technical and mechanical problems. Aside from these prints all other VistaVision films were shown in the conventional 4-perf format, as planned.

Alfred Hitchcock used VistaVision for many of his films in the 1950s. However, by the late 1950s with the introduction of finer-grained color stocks and the disadvantage of shooting twice as much negative stock, VistaVision became obsolete. Less expensive anamorphic systems such as Panavision and the more expensive 70 mm format became standard during the later 1950s and 1960s.

Since the last American VistaVision picture, One-Eyed Jacks in 1961, the format has not been used as a primary imaging system for American feature films. However, VistaVision's high resolution made it attractive for some special effects work within some later feature films. Many VistaVision cameras were sold off internationally beginning in the early 1960s, which led to a significant number of VistaVision-format productions (which did not use the trade name) in countries such as Italy and Japan from the 1960s to 1980s. The format was used infrequently for lesser-known Japanese films until at least 2000.