Does modern 35mm match up to 60s 65mm?

[mdonovan]

This thread has been awesomely educational... Exactly why I come to these forums. Thank you all.

[WonkaBedknobs83]

I spent the 1990s and the 2000s researching as much as this as I could and going to as many screenings as I could afford. If there were more and they were in closer proximity to where I lived at the time, I would have gone to them.

[Modren]

Originally Posted by WonkaBedknobs83

65mm shooting is not an inherently anamorphic process. It can be used with anamorphic lenses; this is how Ultra-Panavision was achieved for the likes of Ben-Hur and It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Even if Ron Howard himself never said so, not considering a larger format negative when they still did an IMAX re-release after the fact was still short-sighted.

Not wanting to use 65mm cameras had nothing to do with anamorphic lenses, it's about the size of the camera itself. It would've been much harder to do the kinds of shots Howard and Cundey wanted with those sets and a bulkier camera. And tbh, Super 35 is in some ways more beneficial for an IMAX blow-up because you have a taller image, allowing it to fill more of the screen than 5-perf 65mm. IMDb lists the IMAX version as 1.66, which is about 86% of the full 1.43 IMAX height. If they had shot on 65mm, the most they could open up to is 2.20 before you start cropping the image.

[WonkaBedknobs83]

Instead, they just cropped it for the standard movie theaters where the film actually played in 1995 to achieve the 2:4.1 ratio, while the IMAX version was still a blow-up of a 4-perf 35mm negative. So either way, you would have had a modified aspect ratio either in standard theatres or in IMAX. As it is, the IMAX version would in theory have been closer to how it looked on VHS or on cable and broadcast TV back in the day in terms of composition. I've only seen it at the 2.4:1 ratio. Either scenario would have required some version of the film to be cropped. The bulkiness of the cameras being an obstacle in this case had already become a self-fulfilling prophesy long before that because of all the years not spent on research and development of making those cameras smaller. That R&D went to doing that for 35mm cameras while the 65mm ones pretty much stayed the same indefinitely.

Nowadays, the IMAX name is now used for 2k digital presentations that don't use anything close to the full IMAX height but for 2.4:1 movies that are still shown in that ratio. Some people call it "lieMAX."

It also just occurred to me that from Tom Hanks' perspective, Apollo 13 makes up for the fact that Forrest Gump only went to space in the book and not the movie. I wonder if keeping that part would have affected Robert Zemeckis' decision to use actual anamorphic lenses for his film. That movie would have suffered more from being shot in Super 35 instead of Panavision because the breadth and scope of the wide-angle shots would not have been the same. Ironically, that movie does crop a lot of archival footage to fit the Panavision ratio from Birth of a Nation to a bunch of Presidents, one of whom had just died in time to miss it (as another one appeared in The Little Rascals, photographed in plain old 1.85:1 and based on shorts that predate widescreen). Annie did the same to those Camille clips (I don't remember how the pan and scan version handled those since I ditched it for the original RCA/Columbia widescreen laserdisc almost as soon as it was available and my family got a player) while M-G-M themselves had already done that to Gone with the Wind for its infamous late 1960s 70mm reissue, the source of the famous poster of the film that Fletch Lives parodied the year it turned 50. For that, they even had to re-create the title of the movie without the words sweeping across the screen one-by-one! There's a book called David O. Selznick's Hollywood from around 1980 with an example of the re-composition.

[Modren]

Originally Posted by WonkaBedknobs83

Instead, they just cropped it for the standard movie theaters where the film actually played in 1995 to achieve the 2:4.1 ratio, while the IMAX version was still a blow-up of a 4-perf 35mm negative. So either way, you would have had a modified aspect ratio either in standard theatres or in IMAX. As it is, the IMAX version would in theory have been closer to how it looked on VHS or on cable and broadcast TV back in the day in terms of composition. I've only seen it at the 2.4:1 ratio. Either scenario would have required some version of the film to be cropped. The bulkiness of the cameras being an obstacle in this case had already become a self-fulfilling prophesy long before that because of all the years not spent on research and development of making those cameras smaller. That R&D went to doing that for 35mm cameras while the 65mm ones pretty much stayed the same indefinitely.

They were framing for 2.39 while filming Super 35 full-frame. What you're seeing in standard theaters and on Blu-ray is what Howard and Cundey wanted you to see. The extra space in the frame is there to allow for reframing on home video. I honestly doubt the VHS version is just an open matte presentation, it probably required extensive reframing to adapt the intended look of the film to a different aspect ratio. There's an extra on the old Terminator 2 DVD that explains how the framing differs between the theatrical 2.39 aspect ratio and the 1.33 home video version; some shots are almost the full frame, others are still significantly cropped. Obviously Terminator 2 is not Apollo 13, but I expect it's a similar situation.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZVJHTVvnJ9k

[WonkaBedknobs83]

Either way, you're still stuck with wasted negative space no matter which framing you use, and now that most TVs are 16x9, the market demand that the 4x3 version was created for is no longer there. This thread made me actually go back and rewatch the movie since I already had the UHD disc. Even with 27 years of supposed technical progress, and despite also making a movie with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman while they were still married, Ron Howard still can't touch Stanley Kubrick visually (he can't even touch Stanley Kramer in that respect, never mind Kubrick), and even with what was available to the A13 film crew in the mid-1990s, I'm not convinced by the claims that the greater depth of field they wanted was only achievable with S35 when so many of the shots on Earth have such low lighting and shallow DOF typical of most post-1960s Hollywood films. Regardless of format, deep focus requires a lot of lighting and a high f-stop rating. If Ron Howard wanted to achieve a 2.4:1 ratio but did not want to use the same 65mm cameras he used on Far and Away because they were too big (and made no difference at the box office), there was always Techniscope. If it was good enough for Sergio Leone, it's a shame American filmmakers didn't utilize it more. In addition to the 2-perf in-camera crop to 2:1, the ratio Vittorio Storaro tried to make a compromise with early widescreen home video presentations of Apocalypse Now though it was shot with anamorphic lenses (and other 2.4:1 films as well), 3-perf was already invented years earlier to crop to 1.85:1 in camera; every Muppet movie after the first one was shot this way IIRC. Panavision itself rented the aperture plates that achieved this process. Anything but a fake widescreen process created for the sole purpose of recomposing shots for tiny TVs that are largely now rotting away in landfills. That's why I still have trouble wrapping my head around how Geoffrey Unsworth could solve logistical technical issues in 1967 that Dean Cundey could not in 1994 and how a movie made before we landed on the moon can be more visually impressive than a movie about an attempt to go back after we already got there made years after the fact.

Ironically, when Tom Hanks himself took a seat in the director's chair with That Thing You Do!, he eschewed all these wider widescreen formats for just a standard 35mm shoot for a 1.85:1 theatrical ratio.