Hollywood’s Love Affair with VistaVision

0:00I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday story from Up First, where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story. Two of the nominees for Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards are especially beautiful to watch on the big screen. This is Bob Ferguson. I was a part of the French 75. In one battle after another, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a washed-up revolutionary trying to outrun his past. Viva la revolución! In Begonia, we see Emma Stone as a high-powered executive who gets kidnapped. Her captors shave her bald and slather her head and face with white antihistamine cream. Where is my hair? Your hair has been destroyed.

0:47to prevent you from contacting your ship. What ship? Your mother's ship. The filmmakers of both of these movies made a very deliberate artistic choice to use a once-obsolete technology from the 1950s. It's called VistaVision. VistaVision, the ultimate in film presentation that will thrill all your senses, touch all your emotions with its unbelievable clarity.

1:18Sharpness.

1:22Brilliance. Films shot in VistaVision are made for large, wide screens. The ones you find only at theaters. Today on The Sunday Story, VistaVision and what it can tell us about Hollywood's past and, in some ways, its future.

1:41Mandalit Del Barco:I feel like I'm living in some crazy weird alternate reality where people are interested in this weird format that I like. Stay with us. LifeKit can help you change your life in record time. In just about 20 minutes, a LifeKit episode gives you evidence-based tips you can put into practice that day. No fast-forwarding to get to the good stuff. Just smart, straightforward advice right away. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with the Sunday Story. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and joining me today is NPR culture correspondent, Mondelite Delbarco. Mondelite is here to talk to us about VistaVision, a vintage movie format and its unusual comeback.

2:29So, Mondelite, I got to be honest. I don't get to the movies much. I'm usually with my kids, and so it's just easier to stream a little bit at home, and I can barely get to do that. So help me understand the appeal of this kind of old-school film technique in this modern age. Yeah, so Aisha, I'm sure you know that most streaming shows these days are digital creations, and the same goes for a lot of films, too. That look is very clear, very precise, maybe a little too clean. But VistaVision is kind of different. It's a special widescreen format that uses 35mm film, and it really turns the viewer's experience up a notch or two.

3:11It can be visually exhilarating with a big widescreen image. You might feel some of that watching on your TV, but to get to the full experience, you really have to go to a movie theater. And that's part of what's driving the VistaVision comeback. I mean, obviously, I know that theaters have been struggling, right? Is this kind of like a gimmick to renew interest in going to the movies? Well, I wouldn't quite call it a gimmick. But yeah, the idea is in part to get people back to cinemas. You know, movie theaters have been in really bad shape since the COVID-19 pandemic shut them down. And they still haven't fully recovered.

3:50Plus, Aisha, in this age of streaming, people have gotten used to watching movies on their TVs or even their cell phones. But filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson, who made One Battle After Another, and Yorgos Lanthimos of Begonia, they're betting that VistaVision will attract people back to the movie theaters. Well, I know that both of these movies have gotten a lot of praise. And, you know, as you say, like, they're up for awards. So something is working. But take us back. Like, was VistaVision a big deal? Like, did it make a big splash when it came out in the 50s? It really did. Yeah. In 1954, Paramount Pictures introduced audiences to its first VistaVision movie, White Christmas.

4:35A wonderful story that will warm your hearts, just as the breathtaking scope of a new screen wonder will widen your eyes. White Christmas in VistaVision.

4:49From all accounts, the premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York was a hit. But the interesting thing is it was developed in part to address that very familiar problem. Back then, movie theaters were also feeling threatened by the growing popularity of television.

5:07I Love Lucy was a hugely successful TV show, so were shows like The Honeymooners. And at the time, people watched those shows on tiny old black and white TVs before color came along. So, I mean, did it work? Like, beyond White Christmas, was VistaVision, like, a real draw? Yeah, I was really wondering about that, too. So I decided to dive into the history of this format. So I drove over to the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood to visit Charlotte Barker. She's the studio's director of film restoration and preservation.

5:41Mandalit Del Barco:My whole office is nothing but VistaVision items and a camera. It is a VistaVision museum of sorts. She's also writing a book about VistaVision, and she says she's pleasantly surprised it's become so timely. I feel like I'm living in some crazy, weird alternate reality where people are interested in this weird format that I like. So Barker says VistaVision arrived at a really innovative time in movie history. It was part of a widescreen movie craze in the 1950s. It started with Cinerama. This is Cinerama.

6:14Mandalit Del Barco:Cinerama was the three screens, three projector system. And when that came out, everyone in Hollywood said, we need to do a widescreen system. It was a different image three times. And those were put together to make one panoramic image. The problem was it had these visible seams where the images were joined. So they could never really get rid of that. That's what Cinerama was. Okay. So it sounds like those seams could be annoying. people might not want to see them. Yeah, you know, but, you know, despite that, seeing movies in widescreen was considered pretty neat. It was so new and different, but Cinerama was soon upstaged.

6:52Barker says 20th Century Fox introduced another format called Cinemascope.

6:57Mandalit Del Barco:They figured out a way to do it with one lens, one anamorphic lens, which would squeeze an image onto regular 35 millimeter film whenever they shot it. And then whenever it was projected, it would unsqueeze it and make it a widescreen image. But by doing that, that added a lot of film grain to the image. And the edges of the image were distorted. So actors didn't want to go to the edge of the lens because their face started to look a little funny. They called it the mumps. Okay. And, you know, a Hollywood actor is not going to want their faces to be distorted. That's their moneymakers. What about this division?

7:34Like, did it fix these problems? Yeah, well, VistaVision was really an improvement. There was no stretching of the images, no distortion. Like the other formats, it also uses 35mm film. But instead of running the film through the camera vertically, it feeds through horizontally like a still camera. And Barker says this meant the image could be a lot larger, in fact, twice as large.

7:58Mandalit Del Barco:There's no grain. And the image clarity is beautiful. It showed the full view of your eye, like what your vision sees in your peripherals. That was the scope of VistaVision. But how is it different from like other widescreen formats, like IMAX film? Well, IMAX wasn't around in the 50s, but it's true we now have IMAX and interactive 4DX experiences and other theater formats. The cinematographers I interviewed told me those are much more expensive than VistaVision, and they sometimes require special projectors and special theaters. And so who was behind VistaVision? Like, was some, you know, somebody who loved movies just tinkering in their garage, or who developed it?

8:45Well, actually, way back in the 1920s, when motion pictures were just getting started, Paramount Pictures held a patent for a widescreen format. But it wasn't developed until the 1950s as VistaVision, when two guys from Paramount, the sound director and the chief engineer and head of the studio's camera departments, developed it. Their technical achievements earned them Academy Awards. And Aisha, really quickly, some of the top filmmakers of the day started using VistaVision. Behold his mighty hand. Filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille used VistaVision for the 1956 remake of his biblical epic The Ten Commandments.

9:25That film had the biggest sets ever constructed. And with the huge scope of the camera, you could see Charlton Heston as Moses parting the Red Sea. You could watch all those movie extras dramatically getting swept away. That's the big moment with the Red Sea. Yeah, very dramatic. You know, director Alfred Hitchcock also famously used VistaVision cameras to shoot many of his iconic films.

9:55In Vertigo, the VistaVision cameras captured Kim Novak's character jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge and Jimmy Stewart's character losing it. That is quite the screams. Yeah, it's haunting. You know, Hitchcock made other VistaVision movies, too. In North by Northwest, the wide-angle shots of Mount Rushmore added to the suspense of the story about a man on the run in a case of mistaken identity. Cary Grant plays him, and there's that famous scene of a prop plane chasing him through an open field. And one more example, Aisha, in To Catch a Thief, which stars Grace Kelly and Cary Grant again, the VistaVision cameras captured the magnificent panoramic vistas of the French Riviera, Nice, and Monaco.

10:43No one but Hitchcock could create such relentless excitement, filling the screen with fireworks as he matches the blazing talents of these two great stars in the love affair of the year. So what happened? I mean, you had all these classics made using VistaVision. Did filmmakers keep using this format for a while or did something newer and shinier come along? Well, VistaVision fell out of fashion once the company Panavision created better wide-angle lenses. Paramount released its last VistaVision film, One-Eyed Jax, in 1961. Here's Charlotte Barker again.

11:23Mandalit Del Barco:After that, they just couldn't justify spending the extra money, especially for the amount of film that had to be used in the camera, because think about it, it was twice the amount of film cost. That might have been the end of it all, but thanks to another film, it wasn't. So it sounds like we'll have more on that when we come back.

11:47We're back with the Sunday Story. I'm Ayesha Roscoe talking to NPR culture correspondent Mondelite Del Barco about an old movie technology that's become hot again, VistaVision. So what happened to all those special VistaVision movie cameras after that last VistaVision film was made in the early 1960s? Well, they got mothballed for about a decade. And then VistaVision found a new hope in the 1970s. Okay, everybody knows that one. Star Wars. Yeah, George Lucas's team at Industrial Light and Magic used VistaVision to shoot the special effects of Star Wars. George wanted a realistic representation of space travel.

12:36That's John Dykstra. He led the team creating visual effects in the movie. He says they pulled out some old VistaVision cameras and customized them. We built more than one. I can't remember how many, but we did modifications on existing VistaVision cameras. They were basically legacy devices. They were big, clunky. Okay, so they modify these clunky old VistaVision cameras to make it look like spaceships really were traveling through space. Were they happy with the results? They sure were. Dykstra won the 1978 Oscar for Best Visual Effects. He says the bigger images from the modified cameras kept the quality high when the images had to be processed and layered.

13:19That's something you have to do again and again for stop motion animation. Dennis Murin was also on the crew. George, bless him, he was trying something different. And John said, I think we can do this. Murin became a visual effects supervisor at Lucasfilm for 40 years. And he was also creative director for ILM. You know, we build equipment to do all the maneuvering of the spaceships. This better format, this bigger film aspect ratio, they should be more consistent with the live-action photography so they look real. So the shots look like you're out in space, you're actually shooting real objects flying around.

13:57This division continued to be used on animated films until digital cameras became mainstream. But for decades, it wasn't at all used to shoot live-action films. So what brought it back? Well, one of the first people to bring it back was director Brady Corbett. He decided to try it for his film The Brutalist. The people here, they do not want us here. The cinematographer for The Brutalist was Lowell Crawley, and Aisha, in 2025, he won the Cinematography Oscar for his work. When I interviewed him, he gave a lot of credit to Corbett for choosing to use VistaVision. Brady was intrigued by the idea of using a camera system from that era, given that a large section of The Brutalist takes place post-Second World War in the sort of 50s in America.

14:42So he thought that was a nice idea to shoot with that system. Crowley also says it was a beautiful format. The VistaVision camera enabled us to shoot these incredible, you know, high-resolution images and avoid this sort of distortion of a wider-angle lens. So the architecture, the marble quarries and the landscapes that Crowley shot in Hungary and Italy were gorgeous. But he says the vintage Beaumont VistaVision camera he used was as finicky as a classic car. You've got to be gentle with them. I will roll with the punches with these cameras because they're just beautiful pieces of machinery, you know, and you have to forgive them their failings.

15:23Their failings? So what's wrong with these cameras? Well, these cameras are kind of divas. They're larger than life and very noisy. I can't think of anything more off-putting than trying to give this very nuanced, sensitive, quiet performance with this, you know, with this camera rattling away at you, you know. You know, so sometimes we just had to put up with it. It's kind of like starting up a lawnmower. It's like...

15:53Michael Bauman was the director of photography for One Battle After Another. He says they used three VistaVision cameras. All of a sudden the camera would just go, and just stop. All right, we got a jam. Let's figure it out. Sometimes film would come flying out. Sometimes the magazine that holds the film would just be dead. Bauman says throughout the shoot, he was constantly tweaking the cameras. You know, you're trying to resurrect a great format back from the dead. And it can be frustrating at times, but the visual value of what we were getting was well worth the pain and misery at the time, you know?

16:30And Aisha, you can see the payoff in the dramatic climax of one battle after another. Bauman and his crew strapped a VistaVision camera to the front bumpers of a car for a chase through a rolling desert landscape. So we could get the camera just a few inches off the surface of the road, which provides that super dynamic image of the wide lens of going over the hills, what we call the River of Hills. It's an incredibly powerful sequence.

17:02What's interesting is that filmmakers are doing something that Alfred Hitchcock did to muzzle the camera noise. They're covering the cameras with soundproof cases called blimps. Blimps. That's quite the name. Yeah, blimps. They're especially useful for recording scenes with lots of close-up conversation, like in Begonia. Can we have a dialogue, please? Don't call it dialogue. This isn't Death of a Salesman. Okay, can we talk? Begonia's director, Yorgos Lentimos, says he wanted the wide-angle look, even though much of the film is set in a cramped basement. It could feel counterintuitive, like you'd normally use a larger format if you had really impressive vistas, as the name itself says, or wide shots and landscapes and things like that.

17:51But I felt the juxtaposition of filming close-ups of faces in a very limited space with that kind of format kind of made them iconic. It's almost like the photography portraiture. And it kind of focuses on the characters even more. Lanthimos first experimented with VistaVision in 2021 for a scene in his film Poor Things. He had a cinematographer, Robbie Ryan, film a scene where Emma Stone's character is reanimated. It's the first time in Poor Things where the film goes to colour. So it's this like crazy Technicolor like explosion that hits you and it's all in VistaVision. So it's a really brilliant sequence.

18:36Ryan told me he used VistaVision again to shoot Begonia. I got a little bit traumatised when the whole shoot was going on on a daily basis. But, you know, I loved it because it was a really, it's a massive camera. And because the magazines are horizontal, you can almost put your cup of tea on it, you know, so it was great. Ryan says they were able to work out some of the kinks. It's called VistaVision, so you think you're going to get all this landscape photography, but the landscape in Bugonia is the face. You know, just looking at the iconic bald Emma Stone with antihistamine cream all over helped kind of like make that even more sort of like super real.

19:13It sings off the screen and the results are so gorgeous. It sounds like a lot of work went into shooting with this format. Have you seen one of these VistaVision cameras? Yeah, actually a few of them, in fact. And my editor and I were lucky enough to be invited to visit actor Giovanni Ribisi at his home in Los Angeles. Remember, he starred in Avatar and other films. He was on the TV show Friends. Ribisi also happens to be a very passionate enthusiast about VistaVision. He even fired up his refurbished camera for us. Okay, ready? And here we go.

19:52Okay, so there's that sound we've been hearing about. Yeah, it's the same camera he lent to Paul Thomas Anderson to shoot one battle after another. You know, it's rather small, the size of a toaster maybe, not like the big cameras that Hitchcock used. But it does have the horizontal magazines, the canisters holding the film. And Rabisi said his camera was probably made in the 1990s for the visual effects of one of the Spider-Man movies. He Frankensteined it together with different lenses, a different viewfinder and other parts. And he told us a funny story about how he tracked down and bought this camera.

20:26It was kind of like a, almost like a back alley drug deal where I went with a bag of cash and we traded. You know, we were only going to be at his house to record the sound of the camera. but Ribisi was so excited that we spent hours. And he even used his camera to shoot a bit of footage of me interviewing him next to his swimming pool. I had a lot of questions. So what's so great about VistaVision? Why do you want to use this format? You know, honestly, I think that there's just something that is very emotional about it when you watch it. There's just, it has this sort of analog feel to it that there's just, nothing else is like it.

21:07Is it like listening to a vinyl record as opposed to something? You could make that analogy. And if you want to talk about nostalgia, this is one of the things that kind of breaks my heart because people don't really know how to build these things anymore. Do you think the nostalgia factor and the beauty of this format is enough to bring people back to the theaters? Well, that's really hard to say. I don't know. Many theaters are continuing to fight for their survival, and they're just trying all sorts of things to try to get people back. Many of them host live events and retrospectives and film festivals.

21:45Some cinemas have pickleball courts or huge video arcades and bars in the lobbies. They have specially made popcorn buckets to match the movies, and they have those comfy recliner seats in the theaters where you can order food and drinks. The industry seems to be doing whatever it can to survive, to compete not just with home streaming, but with TikTok and other social media apps and every other way that people are being entertained. So, I mean, it's a gamble. Yeah, we'll have to see. But probably those cinephiles who, like old tech, will appreciate VistaVision. There's that nostalgia factor. And, you know, even though most people in the audience won't even realize a movie they're watching was made in VistaVision, they might feel that it was shot with a lot of thought.

22:28And now, Aisha, VistaVision films, they just keep getting made. There's a new movie out right now that was made with the format Wuthering Heights, the romance starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

22:44Greta Gerwig also shot her new movie, Narnia, in VistaVision. And Alejandro González-Iñárritu's cinematographer shot the new Tom Cruise movie in VistaVision. I mean, it makes me think about, you know, the craft of moviemaking. Like, even though, you know, you may not know all the moving pieces, what transports you is the art and the craft of moviemaking. And it seems like there are a lot of people who are trying not to lose that. that there is something special about being in the theater, that there is something special about that experience. Yeah, it's true. This is about people who respect the craft of moviemaking and they relish the experience of going to the movies with an audience.