Question for Movie people (maybe older ones?)

[BlueJazz]

From watching such films like "Laurence of Arabia" and umm..."South Pacific" I LOVED the Wide-Screen look.
Seems like you a get more immersed in a film that has a more natural look than the way films are made today.

What happened to making films in Cinemascope and such ??

[Drale]

1. Everything is in widescreen now its just that

all new TV's are widescreen as well so you don't see the black bars anymore. Widescreen is the natural movie format.

[MrScorpio]

2. Here you go

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinemaScope#Decline

[Marr]

3. Man, I love Laurence of Arabia. It's my favorite movie.

The book it's based on is incredible, too. I was surprised at how much of the book they actually got in the movie, and how true they were to the content.

[monmouth]

4. My complaint with films of that era was that the camera seemed a

mile away. I like the camera work of today, close up and seeing the emote going on. I'm not crazy about the letter box visual either.

[Lint Head]

5. Everything has gone digital with the Red One camera.

Film is very expensive and money talks when it comes to budgeting projects. Cleopatra starring Richard Burton and Elisabeth Taylor would cost a $300,000,000 today.

[Johonny]

6. I think things like Technicolor cost too much per print

thus you don't get the great color that you did from that era. If goto Eberts website and search I imagine he has better explanation about this since he gets asked this a lot.

[Pab Sungenis]

9. Technicolor is still around

and is actually the largest producer and distributor of film prints in the U.S. Back in the mid-00's all of the major studios except for Fox and Warner Brothers used Technicolor for print manufacturing and delivery.

[annabanana]

7. They lose some of their fascination in the living room.

Sharing them with a whole audience before a really HUGE screen was an experience.

Today's dinky little theaters with 4 screening room screens is kind of blah.

[HopeHoops]

12. I saw "Star Wars" when it first came in a theater they later carved into 8 smaller theaters.

The screen was fucking huge! It had a Roman curtain that took forever to draw up. When Leia's ship came onto the screen, you were THERE! And then the Imperial destroyer appeared - there was nothing that had ever before created that feeling. Eight damn sardine can theaters out of that one beautiful theater. What a waste.

[Pab Sungenis]

8. CinemaScope, the process, is gone

but at least part of its technology is still there. Very-wide-screen films, with a 2.35:1 length-to-width ratio, require anamorphic lenses that stretch the image on a strip of 35mm film to fill the wider area. This lens is called a "Scope" lens in honor of CinemaScope. Theaters have the option of either widening their screen area or cutting off some of the height for showing Scope films, and their decision is based upon the way their auditoria are arranged, how their screens are set up, and how their lenses are aligned.

A number of films are still produced in Scope as opposed to normal 1.85:1 35mm (known as "flat" in movie terms). For example, "The Social Network" was produced in Scope (the most recent film I watched that I remember being so). "3:10 To Yuma" and "True Grit" were Scope. "127 Hours" was flat. The decision on whether to use Scope or flat is usually an artistic one made by a director.

If you look at a modern Scope movie on a widescreen TV the letterbox strips at the top and bottom will look about as prominent as a flat movie's look on a 4:3 TV.

[Cresent City Kid]

10. Correct me if I'm wrong

Weren't the original movie screens closer to square before TV? I heard somewhere that the wide screen movies were created to give movie goers something extra when television became a source of competition.

[asjr]

11. Ah, those were the days!

[WinkyDink]

13. Computers.

[onenote]

14. multiplex theaters with tiny screens didn't help

A lot of big movie "palaces" got carved up in the 80s and 90s and converted into multiplexes with much smaller screens