Ultra Panavision 70 - History

History

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), like other American motion picture studios, briefly experimented with widescreen formats in the late 1920s. In 1929, the Fox Film Corporation introduced the Fox Grandeur widescreen photographic system. The Grandeur system used wide-angle anamorphic lenses mounted on a Mitchell NC camera. The image was captured on 65mm film, but projected using a 70mm projection print. The Grandeur system had an aspect ratio of 2.13:1. MGM licensed the Grandeur lens and camera system, and printed the 70 mm images on 35 mm stock (with the upper and lower portions of each cell of the print masked). Rather than buying expensive new projectors, theaters could use existing projection equipment fitted with a $200 anamorphic lens to project the print at the correct aspect ratio of 2.13:1. MGM abandoned the format after just two films, 1930's Billy the Kid and 1931's The Great Meadow.

In 1948, a U.S. Supreme Court decision forced movie studios to divest themselves of their profitable theater chains. The loss of these theaters and the competitive pressure of television caused significant financial distress for many American motion picture studios. Widescreen formats such as Cinerama were a public sensation and promised to bring many studios back from the financial brink, but the cameras were heavy, bulky, and difficult to use. The projection prints were in such large, nonstandard formats that theater owners wishing to exhibit these widescreen films were forced to expend large sums of money renovating their screens and buying new projection equipment. This limited the acceptance of these widescreen formats. MGM therefore began working on a widescreen format that would work with existing theater equipment. In 1953, the studio developed a process that captured images sideways on standard 35 mm film. It called the process Arnoldscope, after John Arnold, the head of MGM's photography department.

Arnoldscope was never used, but in 1954 Douglas Shearer, Director of Recording at MGM, approached Robert Gottschalk, president of Panavision, with a proposal for the development of a new widescreen photographic system. CinemaScope, introduced by 20th Century Fox in 1953, was the most prevalent widescreen format at the time. The main problems with CinemaScope were image distortions at the edges and corners of the screen and excessive grain. Shearer asked Panavision to develop a system that would retain the widescreen format (either in a 65mm or 70mm negative), eliminate the distortion effects, allow for a high-quality transfer to 35 mm, and permit a non-anamorphic transfer to 16mm and 35mm projection prints. The success of Paramount Pictures' 1956 widescreen VistaVision Biblical epic The Ten Commandments convinced MGM that it should not develop its own widescreen system but rather should license the CinemaScope process from Fox and build on it.

The first cameras used for MGM's new widescreen process were not original. Rather, they were the Mitchell 70mm cameras used for the Realife system a quarter century earlier. Panavision and the Mitchell Camera Company retooled the cameras to meet the specifications submitted by MGM. The new anamorphic Panavision lenses were very different from CinemaScope lenses. Older anamorphic lenses used optical ground glass elements set in a frame (e.g., a lens) to create the anamorphic image. The problem with the older anamorphic lenses, however, was that whatever was in the center of the image tended to be stretched wider than whatever was at the edges. In close-up shots, this distortion was particularly noticeable. (Actors' faces became so noticeably distorted that the problem was known as the "anamorphic mumps".) Placement of a dioptre lens in front of the anamorphic lens could correct this problem, but itself created problems with focal length, required increased light on the set, and had other issues. To avoid the "anamorphic mumps", Panavision did not use an anamorphic lens. Its new system used two prisms set at angles to an anamorphic 70mm camera lens to reduce the "anamorphic mumps" effect. This not only solved the problem of the "anamorphic mumps" but led to a less clumsy, more easily focused camera that required less light. Panavision named the lenses "Panatar."

MGM named this new anamorphic format "MGM Camera 65." The image filmed was captured on special 65mm Eastmancolor film stock. Roadshow theatrical releases in the Camera 65 format were generally printed on 70mm film stock. The extra 5mm of space on the 70mm film stock permitted the studio to use the new six-track stereo sound, which audiences rarely heard at the time. For non-roadshow screenings, 35mm prints (the type of film stock most smaller theaters could project) were made. The 35mm print had to be "hard masked", that is, black borders ran along the top and bottom of each frame. The image's 2.76:1 aspect ratio was cropped slightly to 2.55:1 for the 35mm projection prints. Because the 65mm film could be adapted to the requirements of individual theaters, theaters did not need to install the special, expensive 70mm projection equipment.

The financial problems at MGM led the studio to rush Camera 65 lenses into production in 1957. MGM's Raintree County (1957) and Ben-Hur (1959) were the first MGM films to use the Camera 65 process. MGM and Panavision shared a special technical Oscar in March 1960 for developing the Camera 65 photographic process.

Panavision changed the name of the process to Ultra Panavision in 1960.

Panavision developed a non-anamorphic 70mm photographic system from Ultra Panavision in 1959. This was named Super Panavision 70.