Video: The Shapes of Things That Were

Wide-screen movies get sliced at the sides for TV

Theatrical movies, when they finally show up on television, have been treated like certain kinds of blue jeans: they have been shrunk to fit. No matter that the pay cable service promises the whole movie, just as it was shown in theaters. Never mind that free TV boasts of showing the same feature complete and uncut. No matter what station you watch, or how much you lay out for special cable channels, you are not seeing the complete movie. It may not have any scenes missing, but chances are it has been reframed, rephotographed and in essence redirected, to fit onto the home screen.

Back in the palmy days of Hollywood, movies were almost always made in one shape, a box that was 1.33 times as wide as it was high. But in the early '50s, competition from television (whose screen shape is a narrower 1.23 to 1) brought box office desperation and technological innovation. Hollywood started turning out films in CinemaScope and other processes that virtually doubled the width of the movie screen. The point was to give audiences an experience that they literally could not see on their small screens at home. But when the studios learned to stop worrying and love TV as a huge and unquenchable market for their films, one problem remained: how to squeeze those big movies into that little box.

The first solution was to show only the center of the wide-screen frame. The trouble was that anything or anyone on the sides of the frame was ignominiously deleted. Actors would be dropped from a scene, dialogue would get turned into mystifying soliloquies, and mainstream commercial movies like Advise and Consent would be transformed into weird avant-garde exercises in which the disembodied voices of actors floated from opposite sides of the picture as the camera focused on a table between them. Other solutions, like cutting from the right side of a frame to the left within what was originally one shot, were so dislocating that they induced brief spells of mal de mer. The current way to cope, called panning and scanning, is a great deal more sophisticated and rather less noticeable, but the viewer still comes up short.

Essentially, panning and scanning requires a technician to isolate a portion of the wide-screen action, recopy it onto tape or film and discard whatever else around it does not fit. In the process, 20% to 60% of the original image can be lost. The pan-and-scan technician moves optically over the film, creating tracking shots the director never intended; he can also delete, by necessity or miscalculation, vital pieces of visual information.

In one of the most magical moments of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, scientists stare in unashamed wonder at the first appearance of a little space creature. In the 1981 television version, they just stared: the space creature was cut out of the picture. "It was a disaster," Spielberg recalls. "It looked worse than the super-8 movies I make myself." Says Stanley Kubrick, whose 2001 lost the introduction of the star child in its wondrous last sequence to some bad panning and scanning in 1977: "It's a very unsatisfactory technique. It destroyed the compositional elements and often looks like a TV football game when the camera follows the man without the ball and has to pan back to pick up the key action."