Klarinet Archive - Posting 000965.txt from 2003/04

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] "The Benny Goodman Story" redux
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 00:45:01 -0400

Richard Bush wrote,
>An old movie would be in the the ratio of the 35 mm
>format, whatever that is. 35 mm still cameras were
>born to use this motion picture format, the ratchet holes
>for advancing the film in projectors along with the film
>emulsions developed just for movies.

THE BENNY GOODMAN STORY dates from 1955. (The copy of THE BENNY GOODMAN
STORY that the Library of Congress lets readers view in the "bat cave" is a
privately donated 16mm dupe, BTW, which is why the LOC catalogue is no
help.) Some of the widescreen formats used 50mm up to 70mm film stock, but
the anamorphic lens, for making widescreen movies on 35mm film (up to and
including Fox's ultra-wide CinemaScope, introduced in 1953), had been
around since Henri Chrétien invented it in 1928. Widescreen formats,
including Metroscope, Todd AO, Vistavision, and at least three increasingly
wide incarnations of Panavision, were the hot lick then, all competing with
each other by the mid to late 1950s.

Pan & Scan isn't a shooting format; it's a method of squishing a widescreen
movie into a full screen home video or TV broadcast. The old method of
trimming to fit, by just capturing the middle of each frame, can result in
ridiculous scenes where two actors conversing with each other are visible
to the audience only as background scenery, usually out of focus, with a
nose bobbing ihthe foreground on the right side of the screen and another
nose bobbing in the foreground on the left (as happened in the first,
nearly unwatchable VHS of "The Year of Living Dangerously," for instance).
The improvement, Pan & Scan, means the video capture moves around each
frame, not in jumps but in slow, panning motion, frame by frame, so that
the person speaking, or the crucial action, is usually visible. However,
just as much footage gets lost in each frame of Pan & Scan as gets lost in
the earlier, cruder reformatting for TV.

I think THE BENNY GOODMAN STORY was originally widescreen for two reasons:
because it was shot in Technicolor, a process Universal reserved for its
higher-budget "A" features, most of them widescreen; and, more importantly,
because there's *no reason* to release a VHS or a DVD in Pan & Scan format
*unless* it was a widescreen movie. 1.37 : 1 movies (the typical format
for cheaper "B" pictures in the mid-1950s) look pretty good in TV format
1.33 : 1 aspect ratio, losing only a little bit on the sides--usually not a
noticible enough difference to make re-formatting worthwhile. But mid-20th
century musicals, in particular, were usually produced in widescreen
format, and IMHO they lose a lot in Pan & Scan.

Lelia Loban
lelialoban@-----.net

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