by Robert S. Birchard
Photos courtesy of 20th Century Fox and Cineric

In the 1950s, with competition from television on the home front and the spectacular three-panel Cinerama format on the theatrical front, 20th Century Fox looked for a way to emulate Cinerama’s wide perspective at a more economical production cost. The result was CinemaScope, introduced with The Robe in 1953. CinemaScope utilized 35mm film with a 2:1 anamorphic squeeze in production and an unsqueeze in projection that resulted in a 2.55:1 aspect ratio. The public lined up at the box office, and by 1955, nearly half of all Hollywood productions were produced in CinemaScope. However, the limitations of the format were evident almost from the beginning. Because the resulting screen image was almost twice as wide as a “flat” 35mm picture, there was great light loss and increased grain visibility — especially with the lenses, film stocks and light sources available at the time.

Fox tapped its chief research engineer, Earl Sponable, engineer Gordon Laube and the studio’s executive director of photography, Sol Halperin, ASC, to develop a new format that would address these issues, and the result was CinemaScope55. As planned, the system used 55.625mm film with an 8-perf pulldown and anamorphic lenses for shooting, and proposed 55.625 reduction-printed release prints with a 6-perf pulldown that would allow space for six magnetic soundtracks.

Only two films were shot in the CinemaScope55 process, Carousel and The King and I, but neither was ever exhibited in 55mm. In the race to hit the screen before other widescreen competitors could become industry standards, Fox went into production on the two Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals before prototype projectors were built, and both pictures were initially screened in 35mm CinemaScope prints generated from dupe negatives struck from 35mm reduction interpositives.

Until recently, the best surviving elements on Carousel and The King and I were 35mm interpositives made in the 1960s, but Fox kept the original 55mm camera negatives and black-and-white YCM separation masters. The studio recently initiated the preservation of both films by tasking the New York facility Cineric, Inc. with making new printing elements from the obsolete CinemaScope 55 format. Although the original 55mm printer gates are still in existence, they were built in the 1950s to deal with new, unshrunken film. To handle the Fox restoration project, Cineric built new sprocket drives and had synchronizers, split-reels and cores built, and a printer gate, ultra-sonic cleaning machine and an Oxberry film scanner were adapted to accommodate the 55mm materials.

“The original 55mm Eastman Color negative for The King and I was essentially in good physical condition,” says Schawn Belston, vice president of film preservation and worldwide library services for 20th Century Fox, “except for dye fading in the dupe negatives for the opticals and some physical rips in the film. We made new negatives for most of the opticals from the 55mm black-and-white separation masters, but a few of the opticals had been made after the separations were struck. For those, we digitally scanned the faded opticals, made color corrections in the digital domain to compensate for the fading and transferred the color-corrected digital files back out to film.

“The entire negative for Carousel was severely and unevenly faded,” he continues, adding that it had also been cinched and ripped in numerous places. “The separation masters for Carousel were struck before they finished editing the film and did not contain any opticals. On top of these difficulties, there were Newton Rings, caused by bad contact printing, printed into all the Carousel masters. [The masters] were essentially useless, so we chose an entirely digital route for this restoration project.”

Because of the wear to the negatives, wet-gate printing and scanning was essential, but there were initial problems with bubbling because of the large format. Higher-volume pumps for the perchlorethylene solution solved that but created other problems with sealing the gate to prevent leakage. Shrinkage in the separation masters was compensated for by repositioning the lens on the reduction printer with computer-controlled stepper motors for each of the YCM rolls, allowing registration of the three elements to within 1⁄10,000 of an inch and eliminating color fringing. Because dye fading was inconsistent throughout Carousel, corrections were made through digital deflickering, comparing light and dark samples within an image and making the necessary density corrections frame by frame.

The various elements — original 55mm Eastman Color camera negative, new 35mm reduction negatives generated from the separations, and 35mm negatives output in 4K resolution (4096x3072 pixels per frame) from the digital scans — were used as A, B and C rolls to create new 35mm prints of both films. Color corrections were made, and then interpositives (IPs) were generated from which 35mm internegatives (INs) were struck.

True 2.55:1 35mm prints with four-channel sound on an SRD track printed between the perforations were made, with the image extending into the area currently used for an optical soundtrack. These prints required a special aperture plate, recentering of the optical center of the projector and recentering of the projector relative to the screen, plus a different focal-length lens. Few screening facilities are equipped for this, so from the preservation IP a reduced “letterboxed” IN was created that fit the 2.55:1 image within the standard 2.35:1 aspect ratio, with small black panels at the top and bottom and four-track Dolby Digital and analog SR optical tracks.

The decision to preserve the films in 35mm was made for historic as well as practical reasons, according to Belston. “While there is a lot of image area in the 55mm negatives, the film stocks of that era were primitive by today’s standards. Both Carousel and The King and I were made just three years after Kodak released its first color negative film stock. One reason Fox originally opted to go with the 55mm format was that the negative stocks were low-resolution and very grainy, and the larger image area compensated for that. With today’s fine-grained film stocks, a contemporary 35mm negative can have the resolving power that the 55mm system had back then.”

For Cineric, restoring the CinemaScope 55 pictures was both challenging and enlightening. “We learned that ingenuity and commitment can overcome barriers, and that know-how and experience are vital,“ says Balazs Nayari, Cineric president. “Use every tool at your disposal, and don’t be afraid to experiment and fail. From an equipment-design perspective, field flatness in a new printer gate coupled with the need to do liquid gate without bubbles was a real challenge. We also learned that digitizing the film at full 4K resolution does, in fact, yield the best results.”

From the first test through the final prints, the restoration of both films took nine months. Although Belston and Nyari are mum about the cost, Belston offers that “the digital solution [for film restoration] has become much more attractive in terms of both vastly improved technical quality and price.”