11/3/23
Newsletter #502
The Crack of Dawn
By 1926 Paramount Pictures was called Paramount Pictures (as opposed to Famous Players-Lasky) and was settled in at their present location on Melrose, between Gower St. and Van Ness Ave. Adolph Zukor was the president; Sam Goldwyn had been fired (with a huge payoff), then formed his own company and got fired again; Cecil B. DeMille was a huge director, first known for his sexy films, then his biblical epics; and poor Jesse Lasky was fabulously rich, was the vice-president of an enormous film company, but had nothing to do. His pioneering spirit was no longer needed.
So, Lasky started the first and only research and development department in the movie industry. Film at that very moment was taking a giant leap into the future with the introduction of sound. This transformation was led by Warner Brothers with their Vitaphone System. The Vitaphone System, however, was ridiculous: the projector was attached by a bicycle chain to a phonograph playing a four-foot wax record. If the record skipped, sync was lost. Other than using hit or miss, there was no way to get the picture and sound back into sync.
But while Warners was developing Vitaphone, Fox Films, with Western Electric, had been developing the “Fox System.” Based on ideas from the U.S. Navy, the Fox System, otherwise known as “optical sound,” transformed sound into squiggly lines printed right on the film. When light was projected through the squiggly lines, it became sound. This was the system that was in use for the next 75 years, until the introduction of digital sound. Since Paramount had no sound system in development, they were forced to license the Fox/Western Electric system.
In 1928-29, when the whole industry was wrestling with sound, Jesse Lasky was figuring out and building what he believed would be the next step in cameras and lenses. This time Paramount would lead the industry, instead of merely following along. Lasky brought together the greatest thinkers in the fields of optics and mechanics and began having new cameras designed and built, as well as new lenses ground.
A Frenchman named Henri Chrétien had developed a lens during World War I to provide a wide-angle viewer for military tanks that provided a 180-degree view. He called the optical process Hypergonar, which sounds ridiculous to me, and everyone else, too, so it became known as Anamorphic. The system used a concave lens during shooting that squished the image, then a convex lens during projection that stretched the image out to widescreen. But unlike the crazy Cinerama system that used three cameras, this was only one.
Lasky’s Paramount R&D department developed a lot of things in a relatively short time, 1926-1932. Another invention that actually made it to the market, then failed, was 70mm film. Fox beat Paramount with their Grandeur 70mm system (Paramount had Real Life), but since the theaters had just installed sound and wouldn’t put in new 70mm projectors (it was, BTW, in one of these Grandeur 70mm films, The Big Trail [1930], that John Wayne had his first starring role. Just as a note, although they had made the film bigger with 70mm, the sound was as primitive as all early sound movies, meaning it sucked, so it just wasn’t impressive for the picture. Only four films were shot in the Grandeur/Real Life 70mm format in 1929-30. None of them is very good, and none made money.
Lasky’s R&D department also experimented with and built cameras that ran sideways. This makes a lot of sense. It took until the 1960s before they figured this out in editing. If you put the two reels of film vertically, like all cameras and Moviola editing machines, it creates tension and drag on the film, mostly due to gravity. Moviolas were forever going out of control and breaking film.
Then some wise person in Europe figured out that if you laid out the reels horizontally, it relieved all of the drag and tension.
Two European companies, KEM and Steenbeck, came out with flatbed editors and changed how everybody edited. Moviolas were dead (I actually owned a Moviola in the 1980s).
Laying the reels horizontally flat in a camera once again removed the tension and stress on the film and in doing so made the image obviously clearer. Plus, by running 35mm film sideways, and using two frames, it naturally wants be widescreen (as opposed to Anamorphic’s need for squishing and stretching).
In 1932, during the Great Depression, Paramount’s stock went down the shit hole and they filed for bankruptcy. Jesse Lasky had too much money in the stock market and lost it all. Adolph Zukor took advantage of this moment to grab all of the power away from Jesse Lasky, who had also gotten himself in trouble with the IRS. Lasky was forced out of Paramount Pictures. That was also the end of the R&D department.
Here’s the ironic joke, which Jesse Lasky did live long enough to see. Basically, in a fire sale, Paramount sold off every piece of equipment that they had in development. None of it was worth very much, and nobody thought it mattered.
Then, entirely independent of anything going on at Paramount, one of my favorite characters in history, Marion C. Cooper, about whom I’ve written, came up with three-screen Cinerama, and suddenly widescreen was the rage. The 3-D with red and blue glasses came out (another idea from the 1920s).
Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox bought Henri Chrétien’s lenses, which were the squish and stretch Anamorphic process. The process was renamed CinemaScope. 20th Century Fox released the first CinemaScope film, The Robe, with young Richard Burton in 1953. It’s not a good movie, but it made a lot of money. Fox immediately put out the sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), in ‘Scope, and it made a lot of money, too. Darryl Zanuck, who was known for his bright, historical films, was now quoted as saying, “I don’t want my films deep, I want them wide.”
Next up came the sideways system which became known as Vista Vision. Paramount still had rights to this system, but had licensed it to Warner Brothers and other companies. The first film in Vista Vision was White Christmas (1954), which was the year’s top-grosser. Was it the Vista Vision or was it Crosby and the song? Who knows?
Then the big-time promotor, Michael Todd, who had just married young Elizabth Taylor, decided to make the biggest film of all-time, with every star, and then he made a tremendously big fuss about it. The film was the painfully unexceptional, Around the World in Eighty Days (1956). To make it the biggest and the widest and the best, Michael Todd announced the introduction of a fabulous new system called Todd-AO, produced in the unheard-of size of 70mm. Todd had new lenses made by American Optical (they’re the AO), then pulled out the Grandeur/Real Life cameras from 1929. His film won Best Picture of 1956 (though it certainly shouldn’t have).
Jesse Lasky lived to be 77 and died in 1958 (the locksmith said he died young – as in, “The good die young”— compared to mean old Adolph Zukor at 103). Lasky did get to see all these systems he initiated and had created in the late 1920s finally become popular in the 1950s. And I honestly believe that he was amused. He didn’t get to see that the picture on the sideways Vista Vision cameras was so incredibly clear that George Lucas used it for all of the early Star Wars movies, but he would’ve been amused.
As I mentioned, I own a 1st edition of Jesse Lasky’s autobiography (with Don Weldon), I Blow My Own Horn, published in 1957. He seemed like he had a great time doing what he did, until it ended. I sensed no bitterness. 77 was older then than it is now. Even though Adolph Zukor outlived Lasky by nearly 30 years, I don’t think he had any fun doing what he did. He was tremendously successful, but he had a stick up his ass. They wheeled him out at the Oscars for years. I see Adolph Zukor as Lionel Barrymore in It’s a Wonderful Life – an unhappy old creep.
For whatever it’s worth, these 500-plus newsletters presently equal 948 single-spaced pages, which are composed of 412,000 words. It’s the size of Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s one and only book. But that’s another subject.
Please, have a nice day. I’ll try too.