From: David P. Hayes
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies.past-films
Date: Saturday, February 21, 1998 9:12 PM
Feuillade wrote in message
<19980222032900.WAA26811@ladder03.news.aol.com>…
>trystero@ne.mediaone.net writes:
>First of all, if "The Sting" were shot in Panavision, wouldn't it say so in the
>end titles?
>Most films that are shot in Panavision have the Panavision logo at the end,
>don't they?
The end titles would say whether the film was shot with Panavision equipment, but that doesn't mean the film was in the Panavision FORMAT. Panavision rents what the market wants.
>I saw "The Sting" many times on its original run, and it was shot in
widescreen
>-- but not the exaggerated Scope of, say, "Lawrence of Arabia."
How you saw the film in a theater--that is, what went through the theater's projector--is not related to what was on the film that went through the camera. Woody Allen's "Sleeper," from the same year as "The Sting," 1973, was shown in theaters in widescreen, and the images were composed that way, but on television and home video, the viewer sees the entire image shown in the theater plus additional picture area at the top and bottom of the screen. (There were gripes in one of the newsgroups recently that the unmasked top part of the video version revealed boom mikes and the tops of some sets, and shouldn't have been shown, but this doesn't change the fact that the presentation in the theater did not accurately reflect the aspect ratio of the lens on the camera on the film set.)
--
David Hayes
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