Hollywood fought television with a French lens nobody had wanted
In 1926 Henri Chrétien patented a lens that squeezed a wide scene onto ordinary film and stretched it out again in the projector. Studios shrugged. A quarter of a century later, with television emptying cinemas, 20th Century Fox bought his old lenses, flew them to Hollywood and launched CinemaScope.
Chrétien's trick, which he called Hypergonar, compressed the picture sideways during filming and widened it on projection, doubling the width a normal lens could deliver. By 1950 falling attendance had studios desperate, and the arrival of Cinerama and 3D in 1952 convinced Fox chief Spyros Skouras that technology could win audiences back. He wanted a system cheap enough to fit into existing theatres, unlike Cinerama. Herbert Bragg, an assistant in Fox's research department, recalled the forgotten French lens, and since Chrétien's patent had lapsed, Fox bought his existing units.
Those originals were awkward. They lost their squeeze when the camera came close to a subject and needed two assistants, one to focus each lens. Bausch & Lomb, hired to make proper versions, improved the design and eventually fused the main and anamorphic lenses into a single unit, work that won the company an Oscar in 1954. Fox halted pre-production on The Robe to convert it, and although How to Marry a Millionaire finished first, The Robe was released ahead of it because of its importance.
The format's shape kept shifting. Planned with sound on a separate film, it would have been very wide indeed; adding magnetic stripes for stereo, and later an optical track, narrowed the frame step by step. Fox insisted on true stereo, using four magnetic stripes, the fourth driving surround speakers that switched on via a 12 kHz tone so hiss would not distract viewers.
Fox licensed the system widely. Disney used it for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and for Lady and the Tramp in 1955, its first animated feature in the format. Because anamorphosis itself had been known for centuries, rivals could build their own versions, and Panavision's lenses eventually made the hardware obsolete. The word 'Scope survives in studio slang for any very wide presentation.
Source: CinemaScope
