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''Cinemascope'', or more strictly '''''CinemaScope''''', was a has continued to this day. HISTORY Origins demonstrates his Anarmorphoscope Lenses .]] A french professor named Henri Chrétien developed and patented a new film process that he called '' Anamorphoscope '' in the late 1920's, and it was this process that would later form the basis for ''CinemaScope''. Chrétien 's process was based on lenses that employed an Optical "trick" which produced an image twice as wide as that produced with conventional lenses. A premiere of Chrétien 's new process in New York greatly impressed the major Hollywood Film Studio 's of the time, eager to win back lost audiences from Television 's lure. It was 20th Century Fox who won the rights of '' Anamorphoscope '', but the format needed much development before it would be ready to use. The first batch of lenses that Chrétien had built were quickly transported back to Hollywood where they were further analysed and the basis of ''CinemaScope'' formed. Pre-Production of major Fox production '' The Robe '' was halted so that the project could be appropriatley changed to cater for what Fox President Spyros Skouras saw as the future of film making. 20th Century Fox 's famous advertising slogan, ''Movies are Better than Ever'', gained credibility with the ground breaking 1953 Film '' The Robe '' and with the introduction of Cinemascope, the movie industry was able to re-assert itself as particularly distinct from its newly invented competitor -- Television . [http://www.in70mm.com/newsletter/2002/67/panavision/panavision_beginning.htm Early implementations and CinemaScope ]]Lavish star driven Comedy '' How To Marry A Millionaire '' was the first ever film to be filmed in ''CinemaScope'', although '' The Robe '' was released to audiences before. Fox used it's most powerful people to promote ''CineamScope'' and with the success of '' The Robe '' and '' How To Marry A Millionaire '', the process became hot property in Hollywood . Fox sold the process to many of the major Film Studio 's including Columbia , Universal , MGM and Walt Disney Pictures who created one of the best examples of early '' Cinemascope '' productioms with the live action epic '' 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea ''. However, initial uncertainty meant that a number of films were shot simultaneously with anamorphic and regular lenses. Despite successful, early take-up of Cinemascope was slow - only the major films were made in the format, 10 to 30% of total output during typical years in the 1950's and 1960's . Rival processes created its own visually superior VistaVision technique as a rival to CinemaScope ]]The basic anamorphic process, the fundamental technique that ''Cinemascope'' was built on, was not patentable since the Anamorphoscope had been known for centuries. And Anamorphism had been used in visual media such as Hans Holbein 's painting, The Ambassadors (1533), as early as the sixteenth century. Some studios sought to develop their own systems rather than pay Fox. Paramount created the visually superior process of shooting horizontally on the 35mm film reel, called VistaVision which failed because of the difficulty of presenting it in normal theatres. RKO used the Superscope process in which the standard 35mm image was cropped in post-production to create a widescreen image. Another process called Techniscope was developed by Technicolor Inc. in the early 1960s, using normal 35mm cameras modified for two perforations per frame instead of the regular four and later converted into an anamorphic print. It was mostly used in Europe , especially with lower budget films, where it was a quite popular. Many European countries and/or studios used standard anamorphic process for their widescreen films, simply a clone of Cinemascope, renamed to avoid the copyrights of Fox . Some of these are Euroscope , Franscope , Naturama (used by Republic Pictures ). In 1952-53 Warner Brothers also planned to develop an identical anamorphic process called Warnerscope , but after the premiere of Cinemascope they decided to simply buy it from Fox instead. Technical issues Although CinemaScope was capable of producing a 2.66:1 image, the addition of stereo information could reduce this to 2.55:1. A change in the base 35 mm film aperture eventually reduced CinemaScope to 2.35:1. Often cinemas with smaller screens would further crop the format to make it fit. A general problem with expanding the image meant that there could be visible graininess and brightness problems. To combat this, larger formats were developed: initially an unsuccessful 55 mm, and later the '' and '' Anastasia '' Decline Panavision , who had initially made their fortune manufacturing anamorphic adapters for CinemaScope theaters, innovated on the technology of ''CinemaScope'' by including a dual rotating element which was controlled by the focus ring in order to keep the plane of focus at a constant anamorphic power of 2x. After screening a demo reel comparing the two systems, many US studios adopted the Panavision anamorphic lenses instead. Panavision was considered more attractive to the industry at large since they were both more affordable than ''CinemaScope'' and were not licensed by a rival studio. By the mid- 1960s even Fox had begun to abandon CinemaScope for Panavision (famously at the demand of Frank Sinatra for '' Von Ryan's Express ''). Fox eventually capitulated completely to third-party lenses by 1967. Modern references While the lens system has been retired for decades, 20th Century 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 anamorphic prints are often referred to, erroneously, as "'Scope" prints. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL REFERENCES
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