Modern References
The song Stereophonic Sound written by Cole Porter for the 1955 Broadway musical Silk Stockings mentions CinemaScope in the lyrics. The first verse is: ‘Today to get the public to attend the picture show/ It’s not enough to advertise a famous star they know/ If you wanna get the crowds to come around/ You gotta have glorious Technicolor/ Breathtaking CinemaScope and Stereophonic Sound.’ The musical was adapted for film in 1957 and was indeed filmed in CinemaScope.
While the lens system has been retired for decades, Fox has used the trademark in recent years on at least three films: Down with Love, which was shot with Panavision optics but used the credit as a throwback to the films it references, and the Don Bluth films Anastasia and Titan A.E. at Bluth's insistence. Nonetheless, these films are not true CinemaScope as they use modern lenses. CinemaScope's association with anamorphic projection is still so embedded in mass consciousness that all anamorphic prints are now referred to generically as "'Scope" prints.
In the 1963 Jean-Luc Godard film Contempt (Le Mepris), filmmaker Fritz Lang makes a disparaging comment about CinemaScope: "Oh, it wasn't meant for human beings. Just for snakes – and funerals." Ironically, Contempt was shot in CinemaScope.
The 1987 Paul McCartney B-side "Back on My Feet," written by McCartney and Elvis Costello, contains the lyric "His face starts to fade as we pull down the shade/And the picture we made is in glorious CinemaScope."
The 1988 John Waters film Hairspray uses the trademark as a crack on the weight of an overweight teenage girl who wants to star on a TV dance show: "please; this show isn't broadcasted in CinemaScope!" A 2002 Broadway musical version of Hairspray and a 2007 film adaptation of the Broadway show retain this joke as part of the lyrics of one of the show's songs, "(The Legend of) Miss Baltimore Crabs."
Musician Fiona Apple references a CinemaScope in "Hot Knife", a song on her 2012 album The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do. She sings "If I'm butter, then he's a hot knife, he makes my heart a CinemaScope screen, showing the dancing bird of paradise."
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