Camera on Spartacus

[al mcguire]

Interesting Camera being used on Sparacus. Wikipedia  shows it as Technirama

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technirama

[Jeff Wexler]

I just read the description of the Technirama process --- pretty wild, vertically oriented film frame, huge coaxial mags used (it ran through a lot of film) and used anamorphic lenses to squeeze the vertical image (instead of horizontal as is with Cinemascope and other anamorphic processes).

[Marc Wielage]

That's one goofy system. It seems to me all they did was combine the horizontal film of VistaVision with an anamorphic lens. To me, that's kind of weird -- VistaVision's promise was that you could use very high-quality regular lenses with an image spread out over more perfs, so it truly gave you a higher quality image. The anamorphic lenses back then were not great. I can see why this system didn't last long.

Going in the opposite direction, Technicolor later came up with a cheapo system christened Techniscope, which used just 2 perfs for a widescreen image. The advantage there is that a 1000' load would run 20+ minutes instead of the usual 11 minutes. The disadvantage is that the image was a little less steady and the projected image was a lot grainier due to the optical steps involved. But a lot of the Spaghetti westerns were shot in Techniscope: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West. The increased grain didn't hurt the box office any.  

The last big movie I know of that was shot in Techniscope was George Lucas' American Graffiti, done mainly so they could use spherical lenses and less light. More and more modern indies are being shot in Techniscope, which to me makes no sense -- I honestly think great digital (like Alexa) looks better than 2-perf and is more economical.