"screen, has made it possible to endow ""White Christmas"" with a fine pictorial quality. The colors on the big screen are rich and luminous, the images are clear and sharp, and rapid movements are got without blurring—or very little—such as sometimes is seen on other large screens. Director Michael Curtiz has made his picture look good. It is too bad that it doesn’t hit the eardrums and the funnybone with equal force."" ""Variety"" liked it: """"White Christmas"" should be a natural at the boxoffice, introducing as it does Paramount’s new VistaVision system with such a hot combination as Bing Crosby,"
"VistaVision, which shot horizontally on the 35 mm film roll, and then printed down to standard 4-perf vertical 35 mm. Thus, a negative with a finer grain was created and release prints had less grain. The first Paramount film in VistaVision was ""White Christmas"". VistaVision died out for feature production in the late 1950s with the introduction of faster film stocks, but was revived by Industrial Light & Magic in 1975 to create high quality visual effects for ""Star Wars"" and ILM's subsequent film projects. RKO used the Superscope process in which the standard 35 mm image was cropped and"
"High Speed #1 (VVHS1), which was used to film the parting of the Red Sea in ""The Ten Commandments"" (1956) and special effects on ""Star Wars"" (winning bid US$60,000.) VistaVision VistaVision is a higher resolution, widescreen variant of the 35 mm motion picture film format which was created by engineers at Paramount Pictures in 1954. Paramount did not use anamorphic processes such as CinemaScope but refined the quality of their flat widescreen system by orienting the 35 mm negative horizontally in the camera gate and shooting onto a larger area, which yielded a finer-grained projection print. As finer-grained film stocks"
"VistaVision VistaVision is a higher resolution, widescreen variant of the 35 mm motion picture film format which was created by engineers at Paramount Pictures in 1954. Paramount did not use anamorphic processes such as CinemaScope but refined the quality of their flat widescreen system by orienting the 35 mm negative horizontally in the camera gate and shooting onto a larger area, which yielded a finer-grained projection print. As finer-grained film stocks appeared on the market, VistaVision became obsolete. Paramount dropped the format after only seven years, although for another forty years the format was used by some European and Japanese"
"aperture plate, also known as a soft matte. Most films shot today use this technique, cropping the top and bottom of a 1.37:1 image to produce one at a ratio of 1.85:1. Aware of Fox's upcoming CinemaScope productions, Paramount introduced this technique in March's release of ""Shane"" with the 1.66:1 aspect ratio, although the film was not shot with this ratio originally in mind. Universal-International followed suit in May with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio for ""Thunder Bay"". By summer of 1953, Paramount, Universal, MGM, Columbia, and even Fox's B-unit contractors, under the banner of ""Panoramic Productions"" had switched from filming"
"white ""glow"" around black objects (and a corresponding black glow around white objects), which was a defect of the pickup. Later vidicon and plumbicon video camera tubes produced much cleaner, more accurate pictures. In 1951, singer Bing Crosby’s company Bing Crosby Enterprises made the first experimental magnetic video recordings; however, the poor picture quality and very high tape speed meant it would be impractical to use. In 1956, Ampex introduced the first commercial Quadruplex videotape recorder, followed in 1958 by a color model. Offering high quality and instant playback at a much lower cost, Quadruplex tape quickly replaced kinescope as"
"Paramount Pictures Paramount Pictures Corporation (also known simply as Paramount) is an American film studio based in Hollywood, California, that has been a subsidiary of the American media conglomerate Viacom since 1994. Paramount is the fifth oldest surviving film studio in the world, the second oldest in the United States, and the sole member of the ""Big Six"" film studios still located in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hollywood. In 1916, film producer Adolph Zukor put 22 actors and actresses under contract and honored each with a star on the logo. In 2014, Paramount Pictures became the first major Hollywood"
"soundtrack area in a standard print. All 3-perf negatives require optical or digital conversion to standard 4-perf if a film print is desired, though 3-perf can easily be transferred to video with little to no difficulty by modern telecine or film scanners. With digital intermediate now a standard process for feature film post-production, 3-perf is becoming increasingly popular for feature film productions which would otherwise be averse to an optical conversion stage. The VistaVision motion picture format was created in 1954 by Paramount Pictures to create a finer-grained negative and print for flat widescreen films. Similar to still photography, the"
"White and the Seven Dwarfs"" (1937), ""Gulliver's Travels"" (1939), and ""Fantasia"" (1940). As the technology matured it was also used for less spectacular dramas and comedies. Occasionally, even a film noir—such as ""Leave Her to Heaven"" (1945) or ""Niagara"" (1953)—was filmed in Technicolor. ""Technicolor"" is the trademark for a series of color motion picture processes pioneered by Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation (a subsidiary of Technicolor, Inc.), now a division of the French company Technicolor SA. The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was founded in Boston in 1914 (incorporated in Maine in 1915) by Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Frost Comstock, and W. Burton"
"starred Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera-Ellen. It was an extremely loose remake of ""Holiday Inn"", with a plot again involving an inn, but otherwise different from the earlier film. Fred Astaire was offered the second lead in the new film, but after reading the script, he declined. The role was then offered to Donald O'Connor, but he was injured before filming began. Danny Kaye ultimately took the role. In 2004, the American Film Institute listed ""White Christmas"" at No. 5 in its 100 Years...100 Songs. A colorized version of ""Holiday Inn"" was released by Universal on October 14,"
"annual output. In December 1954, after making ""Lucy Gallant"", Pine Thomas announced the end of their relationship with Paramount after 77 films over 14 years. Pine declared that the ""opportunity for the creative independent producer is the greatest in the history of the business. The sought-after stars, directors and writers are only interested in associating themselves with distinguished projects, regardless of whether these projects are controlled by an independent or major company."" Pine said the company's new method of operation would be to set the screenplay, stars and director before seeking finance. In 1955 Paramount sold 35 old-Pine Thomas films"
"using traditional animation. But as Snow White was also the first one to become successful and well-known within the English-speaking world, people tend to disregard the seven films. Following Snow White's release, Disney began to focus much of its productive force on feature-length films. Though Disney did continue to produce shorts throughout the century, Warner Brothers continued to focus on features. Color television was introduced to the US Market in 1954. In 1958, Hanna-Barbera released ""The Huckleberry Hound Show"", the first half-hour television program to feature only animation. Terrytoons released ""Tom Terrific"" the same year. In 1960, Hanna-Barbera released another"
"flat shows in a 1.37:1 format, and used variable flat wide-screen aspect ratios in their filming, which would become the standard of that time. By this time Chrétien's 1926 patent on the Hypergonar lens had expired while the fundamental technique that CinemaScope utilised was not patentable because the anamorphoscope had been known for centuries. Anamorphosis had been used in visual media such as Hans Holbein's painting, ""The Ambassadors"" (1533). Some studios thus sought to develop their own systems rather than pay Fox. In response to the demands for a higher visual resolution spherical widescreen process, Paramount created an optical process,"
"White Christmas film was the highest-grossing film of 1954 by a wide margin. Schoen wrote for Maurice Chevalier's first American tour in 1955 and also arranged for Chevalier's television specials. Schoen composed and arranged for Danny Kaye's 1956 movie ""The Court Jester"" – a hugely successful musical-comedy. Film composer Elmer Bernstein was hired as the assistant musical director to Schoen for the film. The Court Jester was an enormous challenge for Schoen at the time because it was his first feature film. He was not officially trained on the mechanisms of how music was synchronized to film. Most of the"
"the shot. More recently, certain key sequences of the film ""Inception"" were shot in VistaVision, and in the film ""Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"", shots that needed to be optically enlarged were shot in VistaVision. White Christmas was the first Paramount film to utilize the VistaVision method. The camera numbered VistaVision #1, used on Cecil B. DeMille's ""The Ten Commandments"", films by Alfred Hitchcock, and others, was offered at auction on September 30, 2015 by Profiles in History with an estimated value of US$30,000 to $50,000, with a winning bid of US$65,000. Also offered at the same auction was VistaVision"
"Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, Donald O'Connor, Cyd Charisse, Mickey Rooney, Vera-Ellen, Jane Powell, Howard Keel, and Kathryn Grayson. Fred Astaire was also coaxed out of retirement for ""Easter Parade"" and made a permanent comeback. The other Hollywood studios proved themselves equally adept at tackling the genre at this time, particularly in the 1950s. Four adaptations of Rodgers and Hammerstein shows - ""Oklahoma!"", ""The King and I"", ""Carousel"", and ""South Pacific"" - were all successes, while Paramount Pictures released ""White Christmas"" and ""Funny Face"", two films which used previously written music by Irving Berlin and the Gershwins, respectively. Warner"
"film for Paramount was just as director: the Jack Benny vehicle, ""Man About Town"" (1939). He then turned producer as well as director and made two more with Benny, ""Buck Benny Rides Again"" (1940) and ""Love Thy Neighbor"" (1940). He also did the romantic comedy ""Skylark"" (1941), starring Claudette Colbert and Ray Milland. While all of these films made profits for the studio, ""Holiday Inn"" (1942), starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, with music by Irving Berlin, is most remembered today. ""Holiday Inn"" introduced the song ""White Christmas"" performed by Crosby. ""White Christmas"" remains the best-selling single of all time."
"White Christmas (musical) White Christmas is a musical based on the Paramount Pictures 1954 film of the same name. The book is by David Ives and Paul Blake, with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. The original St. Louis production starred Lara Teeter, Karen Mason, Lauren Kennedy, and Lee Roy Reams, and the 2004 San Francisco production starred Brian D'Arcy James, Anastasia Barzee, Meredith Patterson, and Jeffry Denman. The musical, titled ""Irving Berlin's White Christmas"", premiered in St. Louis in 2000 at The Muny, after which it opened in San Francisco in 2004. It has since played in various venues"
"Studios and Paramount Pictures were major supporters and developers of Perspecta, and it was used, uncredited, on Paramount VistaVision pictures when the system was unveiled in 1954, with the exception of Hitchcock's features for Paramount, until it fell out of favor around 1958. In theory, the ""High Fidelity"" in VistaVision's trademark strongly implied high-fidelity sound, but, in reality, the system provided only higher fidelity Technicolor prints (after the 1955 revision of Technicolor's dye-transfer printing process), not higher fidelity sound. Universal-International, Warner Bros., Columbia Pictures, United Artists, and Toho were among some of the other major studios to utilize Perspecta regularly."
"standard 35 mm film. It called the process Arnoldscope, after John Arnold, the head of MGM's photography department. Arnoldscope was similar to Paramount's VistaVision except that it used an image ten perforations wide rather than the eight of VistaVision. (It would seem that Paramount also forgot about their 1930 widescreen 65mm Fearless Super Cameras) Unlike VistaVision, which had some limited use both as a camera format and as a print format, Arnoldscope was never used commercially. Also in 1953 CinemaScope was introduced by 20th Century Fox (who again had forgotten their own 1929/30 Fox 70mm Grandeur widescreen cameras). Due to"
"of the movie-going public. By 1932, the Great Depression had forced studios to cut back on needless expense and it was not until 1953 that wider aspect ratios were again used in an attempt to stop the fall in attendance due, partially, to the emergence of television in the U.S. However, a few producers and directors, among them Alfred Hitchcock, have been reluctant to use the anamorphic widescreen size featured in such formats as Cinemascope. Hitchcock alternatively used VistaVision, a non-anamorphic widescreen process developed by Paramount Pictures and Technicolor which could be adjusted to present various flat aspect ratios. Masked"
"to be publicly presented. In 1917, the earliest version of Technicolor was introduced. Kodachrome was introduced in 1935. Eastmancolor was introduced in 1950 and became the color standard for the rest of the century. In the 2010s, color films were largely superseded by color digital cinematography. In digital cinematography, the movie is shot on digital medium such as flash storage, as well as distributed through a digital medium such as a hard drive. Beginning in the late 1980s, Sony began marketing the concept of ""electronic cinematography,"" utilizing its analog Sony HDVS professional video cameras. The effort met with very little"
"and 35 mm projection prints. The success of Paramount Pictures' 1956 widescreen VistaVision Biblical epic ""The Ten Commandments"" convinced MGM that it should not develop its own widescreen system but rather should license the CinemaScope process from Fox and build on it. Alas, someone remembered the old 1930 Fox Grandeur 70mm cameras. The first cameras used for MGM's new widescreen process were not new, rather they were those four original 1930 Mitchell FC 70mm cameras built for the forgotten 70 mm Fox Grandeur system a quarter century earlier. Panavision and the Mitchell Camera Company retooled these cameras to meet the"
"leading anamorphic system for theatrical projection. In December 1954, the company created a specialized lens for film laboratories—the Micro Panatar. When fitted to an optical printer, the Micro Panatar could create ""flat"" (nonanamorphic) prints from anamorphic negatives. This allowed films to be distributed to theaters that did not have an anamorphic system installed. To accomplish this dual platform release strategy before the Micro Panatar, studios would sometimes shoot films with one anamorphic and one spherical camera, allowing nonwidescreen theaters to exhibit the film. The cost savings of eliminating the second camera and making flat prints in post-production with the Micro"
"mm anamorphic prints because the circuit of 70 mm theaters was booked with ""Around the World in Eighty Days"" (1956), shot with the competing, nonanamorphic Todd-AO system. In January 1959, the posters for the 70 mm release of Disney's ""Sleeping Beauty"" carried the notation ""Process lenses by Panavision"" next to the Super Technirama 70 logo. The first film to be presented in 70 mm anamorphic—""Ben-Hur""—was released by MGM in 1959 under the trade name MGM Camera 65. Panavision also developed a nonanamorphic widescreen process called Super Panavision 70, which was essentially identical to Todd-AO. Super Panavision made its screen debut"
"Euroscope, Franscope, and Naturama (the latter used by Republic Pictures). In 1953, Warner Bros. also planned to develop an identical anamorphic process called Warnerscope but, after the premiere of CinemaScope, Warner Bros. decided to license it from Fox instead. Although CinemaScope was capable of producing a 2.66:1 image, the addition of magnetic sound tracks for multi-channel sound reduced this to 2.55:1. The fact that the image was expanded horizontally when projected meant that there could be visible graininess and brightness problems. To combat this, larger film formats were developed (initially a too-costly 55 mm for ""Carousel"" and ""The King and"
"Hollywood. This copy was used when ""Fantasia"" was reissued in stereo by Buena Vista Distribution in SuperScope, a derivative of the anamorphic widescreen CinemaScope format, on February 7, 1956. The projector featured an automatic control mechanism designed by Disney engineers that was coupled to a variable anamorphic lens, which allowed the picture to switch between its Academy standard aspect ratio of 1.33:1 to the wide ratio of 2.35:1 in twenty seconds without a break in the film. This was achieved by placing the cues that controlled the mechanism on a separate track in addition to the three audio channels. Only"
"independent theaters such as the Rivoli, since Hollywood movie studios controlled all major U.S. movie theater chains at the time. De Forest's decision to film primarily short films (one reel), not feature films limited the appeal of his process. All or part of the Paramount Pictures features ""Bella Donna"" (premiered 1 April 1923) and ""The Covered Wagon"" (premiered 16 March 1923) were filmed with Phonofilm as an experiment. (In the case of ""The Covered Wagon"", Hugo Riesenfeld composed the music for the film.) However, the Phonofilm versions were only shown at the premiere engagements, also at the Rivoli. ""Siegfried"", the"
"Paramount Pictures from 1937 to 1967. Marshek was the first editor to cut a three-strip, live-action Technicolor film, the 1934 short ""La Cucaracha"". He also was the first to cut a full-length, three-strip Technicolor feature film, ""Becky Sharp"" (1935). He worked with directors King Vidor, Gregory La Cava, Lewis Milestone, Rouben Mamoulian, Frank Tuttle, Jack Smight and the actors Anthony Quinn and Marlon Brando when they made their feature-film directing debuts. He cut films featuring the top stars at Paramount, including Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Elvis Presley. Marshek died at the age of 90"
"one of the first films to receive an X rating in the United States when the MPAA introduced their new rating system. In 1970, Paramount teamed with Universal Studios to form Cinema International Corporation, a new company that would distribute films by the two studios outside the United States. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would become a partner in the mid-1970s. Both Paramount and CIC entered the video market with Paramount Home Video (now Paramount Home Entertainment) and CIC Video, respectively. Robert Evans abandoned his position as head of production in 1974; his successor, Richard Sylbert, proved to be too literary and too tasteful"
"from 1990 to 2001) but debuted in 1986, well beyond the wiping era. Several award shows from the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Academy Awards and the Emmy Awards, only survive in kinescope format. From 1957 to 1965, the Academy Awards were taped in black and white, but only survive in kinescope format for overseas distribution, especially for the European TV audiences, which used another system (625 lines as opposed to 525 lines), as the tapes used for late broadcasting were reused. All of the taped broadcasts of the Academy Awards from 1966 onward (the first to be broadcast"
"distributed two dozen Christmas subjects over two decades, the first being ""Christmas-Time in Toyland"" (released in 1939) and the last ""The First Christmas"" (in 1959). The perennial in this category was ""The Night Before Christmas"", a live-action dramatization of the poem; this 1946 release remained in print for 26 years. In 1947, United World Films, Inc., the non-theatrical division of Universal Pictures, purchased a majority stake in Castle Films. Castle subsequently became a Universal subsidiary, drawing upon the studio's library of vintage films (with Abbott and Costello, W. C. Fields, Boris Karloff, James Stewart, etc.). The merger with Universal also"
"most famous of the film's several innovative techniques. Though American filmmakers began experimenting with 70mm widescreen (such as Fox Grandeur) in 1929, widescreen did not take off until CinemaScope was introduced in 1953. Polyvision was only used for the final reel of Napoleon, to create a climactic finale. Filming the whole story in Polyvision was logistically difficult as Gance wished for a number of innovative shots, each requiring greater flexibility than was allowed by three interlocked cameras. When the film was greatly trimmed by the distributors early on during exhibition, the new version only retained the centre strip to allow"