In your bio on John Wayne in the part about the movie The Big Trail you print:
"Because of the depression, Fox had only been ........"
That is not quite correct.
CinemaScope, or, as it is usually called nowadays in its generic name by camera folk, anamorphic, is not usually 70mm, and 20thCenturyFox's first features (including The Robe) in CinemaScope were all in 35mm. Anamorphic lenses, of which CinemaScope lenses by Bausch and Lomb were the first of many different brand names, squeeze the image horizontally, but not vertically. The complementary projector lenses unsqueeze the image, resulting in a wider image than with conventional cinematography. Sixty-five millimeter cinematography (which is printed onto 70 millimeter prints to allow room for multi-channel sound; the negative film is 65 millimeters wide) has sometimes been amamorphic (for example, Laurence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and other films), but has usually been non-anamorphic, non-squeezed, conventional cinematography. Lately, most movies released in 70mm have been shot in 35mm (either in anamorphic format or in the more conventional 1 to 1.85 or 1 to 1.66 formats) and optically enlarged (blown up) to 70mm release prints. The only recent feature film I can think of that was shot in 65mm was the Ron Howard movie with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the name of which escapes me as I write this.
At any rate, Twentieth Century Fox did not resurrect 65 or 70 mm cinematography 25 years after The Big Trail, but the studio was indeed responsible for re-introducing the wider-screen formats in the 1950s, through their CinemaScope process and the competition with other studios and wide-screen formats that CinemaScope set off. Sixty-five millimeter cinematography became popular again in the sixties with movies like Cheyenne Autumn and the re-make of Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando, and then later as a succesor to the three-camera Cinerama process.
I am a motion picture assistant cameraman.
Lane G. Russell