T he return of Hollywood cinema owed something to new ways of making images and sounds. By 1967, the studios depended on selling TV rights to features. As color television became common, the networks demanded color films for broadcast, and Hollywood committed itself to almost entirely color production. Eastman Color became the film stock of choice for most films and release prints, although some prints were made from Eastman using Technicolor's dye-imbibition process.
The industry had explored various versions of widescreen cinema in the 1950s, and by the mid-1960s a few had become dominant. Most films were shot in 35mm and masked during shooting or projection to a 1 :85 aspect ratio. To obtain a wider image with 35mm, the image would usually be anamorphically compressed, as in CinemaScope (p. 331). But there were optical problems with the original CinemaScope design, particularly its tendency to make faces fatter in close-up (" 'Scope mumps"). The Panavision company designed a better anamorphic system, first used on Jailhouse Rock (1957). The two systems coexisted in the 1960s, but, by the end of the decade, CinemaScope was defunct and Panavision became the anamorphic standard. For still more grandeur, big musicals or historical epics would be shot on 65mm stock and printed to 70mm to allow for multitrack sound. Exodus (1960), Lawrence of Arabia, and other films were both 70mm and anamorphic, thanks to Super Panavision 70.
Influenced by both European films and Direct Cinema, Hollywood Cinematographers adapted zoom lenses (p. 484) with enthusiasm. There soon arose a fashion for selfconscious zooming, as in The Train (1964). By the 1970s, filmmakers felt that such sudden enlargements or reductions of imagery called too much attention to the mechanics of shooting, so zooming was found mostly in low-budget films. Still, many Cinematographers kept the zoom lens on the camera to allow them to frame a shot precisely without changing camera positions.
Hollywood filmmakers also borrowed the hand-held shot from Direct Cinema. The shakiness of the handheld camera could suggest a documentary immediacy (such as the opening of Seven Days in May, 1964) or a nervous energy (the roadhouse dance and fight in Virginia Woolf). Cinematographers liked the maneuverability but also wanted to make the hand-held imagery steadier. Lighter-weight cameras, such as the 15-pound Arriflex 35 BL, became available at the beginning of the 1970s. Though somewhat heavier, Panavision's Panaflex could still be braced on the operator's shoulder, and this allowed shooting in cramped circumstances. John A. Alonzo used the Panaflex for meticulous wide-angle long takes in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974; 22.6). For Steven Spielberg'S Sugarland Express (1974), cinematographer Vil-mos Zsigmond obtained tight and steady shots inside a moving car by sliding a Panaflex along a board.
The Steadicam, first publicized on Bound for Glory
(1976), was a camera support that used a system of counterweights to suspend the camera on a brace attached to the operator's body. It created smooth, floating tracking
A best-selling novel, Love Story (1970). But the tide would really turn in the mid-1970s, when a string of modestly budgeted films by young, largely unknown directors would become stupendously profitable.
World History
