The Shapes of Things That Were

By JAY COCKS

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."

Peter Keane, director of quality control for Home Box Office, admits that panning and scanning is "a series of compromises," but maintains that "the film redirects you. There is always a center." Says Tom McCarthy, senior vice president, post production, at Columbia Pictures: "Panning and scanning involves creative decisions." Unfortunately, those decisions are not made by the creators of the movie. Yet Richard Wolfe, 20th Century-Fox's vice president of engineering and video technology, insists, "My experience is that directors are not interested in the pan-and-scan transfer session."

There is a simple alternative to all this -- "better, but still not perfect," in Stanley Kubrick's words -- which involves masking the top and bottom of the transmitted TV image and showing the film in what the industry calls "the letterbox format." The image stretches from one side of the screen to the other, leaving a narrow black border at top and bottom and losing only the extreme sides of the frame. This technique reasonably preserves the director's original compositions. European television has been using such masking for years, but American television has remained leery. "It's dreadful," says a Cinemax executive. In 1981, according to the executive, when HBO acceded to Woody Allen's request that it show his Manhattan masked, viewer response was negative: "You just can't laugh at Woody Allen when he's only 1 1/2 inches tall."

Aesthetics aside, no U.S. video outlet, network or cable, has ever made a sustained effort to show films masked.

Nor have more than a few manufacturers of pre-recorded video cassettes provided a masked version of a film. The supposition seems to be that the viewer neither cares nor notices; but the viewer has never been presented with an alternative. During preparations for the network showing of Close Encounters, Spielberg inquired about showing the movie masked. He says an ABC executive told him flat out that this was impossible, that FCC regulations did not permit it.

This is not the case. As an FCC official told TIME, "If I were a licensee, I would not be worried about broadcasting with masking."

Film makers are already considering alternatives. Kubrick thinks "the ideal solution, extremely simple to do, would be for theatrical films once again to be shot in the original format that was the standard before CinemaScope." Director Martin Scorsese is launching a film-preservation committee that will attempt to ensure, among other things, that "if film makers make a picture in 'Scope, it gets shown that way on television." And Spielberg, who says that Manhattan looked "wonderful" masked, is going to "insist" that the next network showing of Close Encounters be masked as well. "Maybe I've got no contractual right," he says, "and it should be a friendly thing. But I am going to fight.''

--By Jay Cocks.

Reported by Peter Ainslie/ New York

With reporting by Peter Ainslie

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