- Molly. - Yes.
Tell me about Truck Night in America.
- So, Truck Night in America, it's a competition reality show.
It's this crazy obstacle course where trucks are tested to the limit
and they make them go through these insane physical challenges.
They have to drive on top of broken trucks. It's called the graveyard.
So it's like making an elephant walk across an elephant graveyard.
It's kind of satanic.
The show culminates in a crazy epic obstacle course.
There's sort of a countdown, they go three, two, one…
And the screen gets wide.
It's that widescreen feeling like you're watching something epic--
WAIT.
Why is that what widescreen feels like?
- I don't know, it's just a feeling?
Is that...not what you want me to say?
Nope, Molly's right.
This feels different than this.
Widescreen has a feeling.
And there's a story behind that.
It's not a story about trucks, but it is a story about America.
And roller coasters.
And Jesus.
Today we live in a world full of magic picture rectangles.
I have a magic rectangle on my desk,
one in my living room, and I have a Zelda one,
and I have the demon rectangle that controls my life
and gives me Twitter from my pocket.
But a hundred years ago, there was only one kind of magic rectangle.
It was called movies. And it was shaped like this.
An almost square rectangle. A ratio of about four to three.
That's because four to three was the shape of film.
You can thank Thomas Edison for that.
And for about 50 years, that would be the shape of movies,
partly because it just looked really good.
- It's beautiful and good for closeups.
That's Scott. He's a film history professor.
- I am a film historian.
He was actually my film history professor.
- Mainly 30s and 40s is what I've written about.
Anyway, the main reason that movies stayed that shape for so long
was just that it was really hard to change it.
- To change it is huge! Because then you're changing the film,
you're changing the camera, you're changing the lenses,
and you'd have to change all the projectors.
But that's okay, because in the US, in the early 20th century,
The movie industry is doing extremely very good.
- Everybody went to the movies all the time. Nothing else to do.
Here's a chart. This is how many people went to the movies weekly in 1925,
and 1935, and 45. And compare that to 2017.
Look at that as a percentage of the US population,
and you can see it even better. Back then we went to the movies a lot.
- They were so central to American culture that I don't think we get it today.
And crucially, we would go to "the movies." Which is where that expression comes from.
We wouldn't go to see a particular movie. It didn't really matter what was playing.
If you wanted entertainment, you just went.
And then in the late 1940s, something changes.
People stopped going to the movies.
And you have to understand why to understand what happened next.
Today, a pretty common misconception is that television was responsible.
That people stopped going to the movies because they started watching TV.
And that sounds right,
but chart the fall of movies against the rise of TV,
and you can see that logic is backwards.
People didn't start getting TVs until after movie attendance was already going down.
So it wasn't TV.
But there is a reason that people stopped going to the movies,
and it was something bigger.
A shift in the way that Americans were living their lives.
Scott?
- There is a myth of the consumerist paradise,
that starts... I mean it's been going...
but it gets amped up in the late 1940s.
After World War II, America sees a boom in suburbs,
and spending money, and, crucially, leisure time.
And with that comes an explosion of new ways of spending that leisure time.
Simple things that are completely not noteworthy to us today,
but that after the war, were becoming accessible
to millions of people for the first time.
Things like amusement parks, or visiting national parks,
or gardening, or grilling.
- Expendable income is going to things that make you American.
All these fun things to do instead of going to movies.
Scott is still kind of mad about it.
- The worst one was mini golf.
Mini golf, that bastard.
The B word!
- There's motorboating, there's... Sunday drives?
This was a disaster!
Here's what happens in the late 1940s.
Americans start to lose interest in entertainment.
And they start to be more interested in recreation.
That is the reason that movie attendance goes down.
And there's no plan to stop it.
Newspapers start running ads for a movie that can't be shown in movie theaters.
It's called This Is Cinerama.
- "This is Cinerama!".
And instead it opens here.
At a Broadway theater called the Broadway Theater.
A theater that's been specially outfitted with a giant, curved, wide screen.
Cinerama uses three separate projectors to project three separate images.
You can kind of see the seams. But it's really wide.
And This Is Cinerama has no characters, and really no story.
It's more like one of those IMAX movies that you might see at a science museum,
but you know, 50 years before that.
We start on a roller coaster, we tour some European cities,
some kids sing, there's water skiing,
there's like 30 minutes of just aerial footage...
- If you can put the camera on something and drive it into something?
Then you're talking Cinerama.
It is more of a fairground ride than anything else.
More like a ride than a movie.
And that's because its creator, this guy, Fred Waller, was onto something.
- Waller's big innovation was, let's treat cinema like a big outing event.
A recreation event.
And that pays off. This is Cinerama is a huge hit.
It makes more money than any other movie in 1952,
even though it only plays in that one theater.
And once it expands outside of New York, it's a phenomenon.
This is how, in the 50s, we get all these words that end in -rama.
And suddenly, Hollywood has an idea for how to get people back to the movies.
- That woke up the industry.
To the fact that, people will go see things bigger.
You know, maybe the problem with our movies...
is, they're not big enough.
It's important to say that This Is Cinerama was not the first widescreen movie ever.
In the 20s and 30s, there had been a few one-off widescreen productions
that were just too complicated to do on a big scale.
But at the time, for most people, This Is Cinerama is like nothing they've ever seen.
It's clear that wide Cinerama movies are something people will pay for.
The problem is that Cinerama doesn't scale.
You can't put three projectors in every movie theater in the country.
- Cinerama, too expensive, and too big a change,
for both exhibitors and the studios. What is the solution?
The first movie studio to come up with an idea here is Paramount Studios.
They have a movie called Shane.
It's a Western.
It's not in widescreen. And Paramount is about to release it.
And then they have a crazy idea.
They crop off the top and the bottom.
And suddenly, Shane is the first modern widescreen movie.
And Shane is, you know, it's good.
Shane is considered one of the great westerns.
And technically, it is wide.
But you know. It's no Cinerama.
And then, across town at another studio, 20th Century Fox,
Some guys in the engineering department are like, hey.
Remember that French guy?
Henri Chretien is a French guy.
He invents a special French camera lens.
His lens can squish a wide picture onto a regular film.
He calls it the Hypergonar.
- I always said hyper gonner!
But Hypergonar makes much more sense.
Anyway, because the lens can squish wide stuff onto not-wide film,
it means that if you have another Hypergonar lens on your projector,
that'll unsquish the image. Widescreen.
In 1929, Chretien tries to sell the Hypergonar to Hollywood.
They don't want it.
But 25 years later, back at Fox, it's like, let's go find that French guy.
So Fox's engineers go to France and they find the French guy.
He's old now. And he can tell them how to make the lenses,
but it'll take too much time.
So they go back to California with his original lenses.
They take all of them, deliberately, so no other studio can get them.
- We've got them all. We have the Infinity Stones.
Back in Hollywood, Fox starts shooting movies
with the squish lenses immediately.
And before long, they also come up with a new name for it.
CinemaScope.
CinemaScope is really wide. Almost Cinerama-level wide.
In fact, some people called it the "poor man's Cinerama."
Cinerama was like Perrier. But CinemaScope was more like a seltzer.
In September 1953, the first CinemaScope movie is released.
A movie about Jesus's robe, called "The Robe."
It's fine.
Actually it's not amazing.
But it's a giant hit. The second biggest movie of 1953,
and adjusted for inflation, still one of the biggest movies of all time.
And the Jesusness of The Robe also does something really important.
It means that epicness, and biblical-ness,
historical significance, the promise of being transported...
All this stuff was baked into the idea of "wideness" in movies
from the very beginning.
Over the next decade, width comes to be associated
with a particular type of story.
The Robe in 1953, The Ten Commandments in 1956,
Ben-Hur in '59, Lawrence of Arabia, '62.
These are some of the best-known movies of the era.
All these historical, or biblical, epic stories.
It would almost miss the point to call these movies entertainment.
They're experiences.
That's what wide comes to mean.
- The studios were very successful at convincing us that
the aesthetic choice to have an emotional story experience
involved a rectangle.
Partly because The Robe is such a big hit,
by the late 50s, the entire industry is converted.
Almost all movies are now made in some form of widescreen.
And that changes how movies are sold.
- The big change in marketing was to say,
a movie is not a habit, a movie is a special event.
A movie is a special event. And so, starting in the 50s,
we no longer just go out to the movies.
We start going out to see a particular movie.
- We live this today.
So the way we feel in America about movies in the summer, in tentpole season,
Is basically a CinemaScope experience.
CinemaScope is a hit. But before long,
it's just one of a lot of different ways to do widescreen.
But there's no going back. Movies now have a different shape.
And a different role. By this point television is in people's homes.
And TV takes over the role that movies used to have:
Casual entertainment, where you watch whatever's on.
And, Hollywood realizes that TV doesn't have to be the enemy.
- During the 1950s, 60s, and I think into the 70s,
they're making a lot of money by taking their old catalogs,
and selling them to TV.
Okay, but now movies are wide, and TV is not.
So how do you-
A widescreen movie airs on TV for the first time:
1953's "How to Marry a Millionaire."
Problem. Mid-century TV is super low-res.
So if you put a wide, or short movie into a TV, really small image.
So, in 1961, we actually get another invention from the engineers at 20th Century Fox.
-They invented this thing called panning and scanning.
Panning and scanning, or pan and scan,
meant using an optical printer to go through each shot of a widescreen film
and decide which part of each shot gets to go on TV.
- People accepted this. Because there was nothing to call your attention to it,
unless you had seen the film and remembered.
Pan and scan is essentially redirecting a movie, shot by shot.
And the idea is that if it's done well, no one will notice.
It didn't always go well. Particularly in the very beginning.
The 1954 version of A Star Is Born had a famously shoddy pan-and-scan job
the first time it went on TV.
A crucial scene looks like this:
That was the exception, though.
For decades, pan and scan became a really normal part
of how movies got onto TV and, later, VHS.
But nerds and directors hated it, because it adulterated the original.
- "We want to see the movie the way the director originally intended it."
Like this scene, from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade,
which has all these little non-verbal reactions from the person who isn't speaking.
Sean Connery bites his lip, Harrison Ford answers a question by nodding,
Connery's eyes get really wide...
In the pan and scan version, all that stuff is gone.
But pan and scan is not the only way to get a movie on TV.
Like, look at this scene from Back To The Future.
This is the wide theatrical version.
But then, this is the TV version, which is kind of bigger than the widescreen version.
You sort of see more on TV.
That's because what you're looking at here is not pan and scan.
Instead, it's a style of making a movie where you shoot multiple versions of it at once.
So, you might shoot the movie so that it looks good both in widescreen,
and in 4:3 for TV.
Sometimes this is called Open Matte. Sometimes it's called "TV safe"-style shooting.
Sometimes it's called Shoot and Protect. Sometimes it's called "shooting it flat."
But the point is just that the wide version of a movie? It's not always the original.
Sometimes there really is no original.
Yes!
The first HDTV set is sold in the US.
It's on the news. But not in HD.
HDTV is wide.
- "The TVs that people have at home today are 4x3,
and the TVs that people will have at home in the future are 16x9."
But HDTV doesn't mean the end of pan and scan,
because it's actually still less wide than a lot of movies.
And unlike old TV, which was the same shape as old movies,
the exact dimensions of HDTV are this weird specific shape
that almost no movies are actually made in.
That means if you see the theatrical version of a movie on HDTV,
it'll have some black bars.
But if not, it means there's still some pan-and-scan or open matte situation happening.
But still. TV is now wide.
Everything we watch is, finally, wide.
Ah. Right. Phones.
This is important.
Another huge shift happens in the way that we spend our time.
We start watching stuff on our phones.
And specifically, we start watching stuff as part of vertically scrolling feeds:
Platforms that really discourage turning your phone sideways.
And that changes the entire calculation around the shape of what we watch.
Suddenly, a very wide video shows up in our feeds as very small.
Looks very bad.
And a less wide video, say a square, or even a vertical rectangle, looks really good.
Vines. Instagram videos. Movie trailers. News videos.
Open Netflix's app, and previews play in vertical format.
But Netflix keeps its movies and its shows in regular widescreen.
And movies stay wide. Our shows stay wide.
Maybe the shape of what we watch is related to what we want from it.
So there's the stuff that we use to fill our time,
the way we once went to the movies. The way we once watched whatever was on TV.
That stuff, give it to me however.
And then there's the stuff that we choose to watch.
The stuff we expect to take us somewhere.
We go to see a movie.
We binge watch a show.
That stuff?
We still want it wide.