Cinema: Strictly for the Marbles

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In all the excitement over 3-D, the other studios had almost forgotten about Cinerama. Had Fox found a way to make it practical? Apparently, Fox had. The system was called CinemaScope, a trade name for a reduction lens that can be screwed into an ordinary movie camera to widen its range of vision (see box). All Fox pictures from that day forward, announced Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century-Fox production head, would be made in CinemaScope. Then he proved he meant it by announcing that the first of these pictures would be The Robe, the cinemadaptation of Lloyd Douglas' bestselling Biblical story.

Fox gave a semiprivate demonstration of CinemaScope on a slightly curved screen 65 ft. wide by 25 ft. high. The japesters hailed it 'a poor man's Cinerama,' but there was a plaintive ring of envy in the phrase. CinemaScope could not, like Cinerama, clothe the watcher in its grand 3-D illusion; but it did trick his eye with a generous sense that life is lived on a broad terrace, with a noble view before it.

There was more than a suggestion, however, that at first Producer Zanuck hardly knew how to fill the view. In the only close-up shown—a scene from The Robe in which Victor Mature gazes up, with his usual unreadable expression, at the figure of Christ on the Cross—the screen looked a little like a Technicolor dollar bill that needs some engraver's doily-work to fill up the edges.

As usual, it was a statistic that affected the esthetic sensibilities of the cinemoguls. "Did you hear," whispered one, "that Mature's upper lip is twelve feet high?" Pitchman Zanuck leaped in to pound home the point. "The third dimension is useless!" he cried. "Anything that compels you to wear glasses is destined to fail . . . So you throw things at the audience. You throw fire and water in their faces. How long can we keep that up? We don't need depth. My brain gives me all the depth I need. I've been supplying my own third dimension all my life. What we need is to open up—open up wide!"

Not Too Exclusive. Fox's Skouras offered to rent CinemaScope to the worried movie industry for $25,000 a picture. The industry hesitated. What, the cinemoguls asked themselves, would happen—if, as and when they all went CinemaScope—to the $330 million worth of pictures already made for small screens and not yet released? To Paramount, for instance, with its $42 million backlog, the subject was painful indeed.

But, to everyone's delight, the lawyers claimed that the CinemaScope-type lens —which Skouras had personally purchased only last December from Henri Chrétien, a Frenchman who invented it back in 1931—did not belong exclusively to Fox. Paramount promptly laid one on the table to prove it: Chrétien had made a similar deal with Paramount in 1936.

The order rang out for a counter-counter-revolution. If the old screen, as Zanuck had said, was just a "postage stamp," then CinemaScope was nothing but a "letter slot." The "ribbon effect," said the esthetes, might be all right in Radio City Music Hall, but what about the little theater in San Luis Obispo, which can hold a screen no larger than 13 ft. by 10 ft.? With CinemaScope, the screen would be 13 by 5.