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GI4RSI > MOVIES 28.01.05 14:34l 29 Lines 4418 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 32241-GB7FCR
Read: GUEST
Subj: Byegone memories of the silver screen.......................
Path: DB0FHN<DB0THA<DB0ERF<DB0FBB<DB0GOS<DB0ACC<DB0EA<DB0RES<DK0WUE<GB7FCR
Sent: 050128/1328Z @:GB7FCR.#16.GBR.EU #:32241 [Blackpool] FBB-7.03a $:32241-GB
From: GI4RSI@GB7FCR.#16.GBR.EU
To : MOVIES@WW
Screenings
It is 50 years, virtually to the day, that I went to the town of Dromore, to see the Wonders of Cinemascope. The trip was organised by the late Laurence Bradley, who conducted a barbers‘ shop in Bridge Street, and who hired a bus for the occasion. The Dromore picture house was called The Montague Cinema, and the enterprising town had installed the wide screen process before any of the two cinemas in Omagh at the time. Some people tended to confuse Cinemascope with the short-lived experiment in 3-D or the three dimensional process where you would have the sensation of spears or lions or whatever comin‘ atcha.
Cinemascope was one of the devices which the film industry turned to, almost in desperation, in the early 1950s to counter the threat from television, and other alternative leisure pursuits at the time. The idea was not new, and had been around since the silent era. The trick was to change from the conventional 4:3 ratio of the standard screen to something close to 5:2, thus creating an image that was much wider than it was high. You see the effect when widescreen movies come out over a standard TV screen, with black bands at the top and bottom of the picture. Interestingly enough the trend in recent years has been towards wider screens.
The way in which the new image was created was to use a special lens in the camera to condense the frame, and then to use a corresponding lens in the projector to expand the image out on to the wide screen. Sometimes, during the short supporting films, the projectionists would neglect to adjust the projector to accommodate the differing types of film, with bizarre and often hilarious results. This, needless to say, did not happen in Dromore in 1955. The picture was called The Robe, still often shown on TV over Easter because of its quasi-Biblical theme. It was not, in fact, the first film to be made in Cinemascope - that distinction went to a Marilyn Monroe comedy, but it was the first to be released, the studio figuring that it had the proper gravitas with which to launch the new photographic process.
Later in the spring of that year Millar‘s Picture House in Omagh closed for a fortnight, to accommodate a process called Vista Vision. This process did not widen the screen, but claimed to provide greater clarity and depth of focus. When the new screen was unveiled the people did not notice any great difference from what they had been watching previously, except for a slight meniscus along the top of the screen which may, or may not, have been intended. The first picture shown in Vista Vision was a comedy featuring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, then at the height of their popularity as a team. After that came the first film made in this proprietary process ‘White Christmas‘ shown somewhat unseasonably in the May of 1955. It, did, however, get to Omagh remarkably soon after its initial release in the December of 1954. In those days, a picture took about a year to reach the cinemas of Omagh, and was generally the worse for rough handling in many projection rooms all over the country.
In August the Picture House in Omagh went over to Cinemascope, with a series of MGM musicals that included ‘The Student Prince‘, ‘Rose Marie‘, ‘Deep in My Heart‘ and ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers‘. James Dean‘s film ‘Rebel Without a Cause‘ was to be seen, in Cinemascope, in Millar‘s on the September evening in 1955 when Omagh went over from gas to electricity for the purpose of lighting the streets.
Before long, the other Hollywood studios, were following 20th Century Fox, and patenting their own type of wide screen optics; Metroscope, Warnerscope, Superscope, Megascope, Technirama, Todd AO, to mention just a few. The public soon became indifferent, and were more concerned about the quality of the movie, rather than the shape of the screen on which it was being shown. The director Fritz Lang commented that Cinemascope was only good for photographing snakes and funerals. Nonetheless, it could often be used imaginatively.
Later on, in the County Cinema and in other rural cinemas, the owners converted the screens to letterbox format simply by masking out the top and bottom of the screen; you got the new proportions, at the cost of a smaller image.
73 - Kenny, GI4RSI @ GB7FCR
Message timed: 13:28 on 2005-Jan-28
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