All that nonsense about "discovered a way", is just that; nonsense. Fox planned right from the start to use optical reduction, aka printdown, to make 35 mm CinemaScope prints from the 55 mm CinemaScope 55 negatives. Printdown was a process that all of the movie studios had been using since the 1920's, primarily to make 16 mm prints from 35 mm negatives. It was a well-proven process.
The reason for the double shoot had nothing whatsoever to do with the printdown process. What Fox was worried about most was whether the large CinemaScope 55 lenses (the largest anamorphic lenses made up to that time) would provide a high enough quality image on the 55 mm negative. They were also worried about the bulkiness of the cameras and whether they could be handled adequately in difficult shooting situations. It was only when they had enough footage to compare the results from the 2 shoots for a variety of scenes that they decided that the 55 mm lenses and the cameras were up to the task.
It should also be noted that even if they had produced the originally planned 55 mm prints for "Roadshow" presentations, they still would have had to use the printdown process to produce those 55 mm prints. The images on the 55 mm negatives were 8 perforations high and left no room for the soundtrack, while those on the proposed 55 mm prints were only 6 perforations high but left room for the soundtrack, so a 25% reduction was required for those prints. So, printdown was required for both proposed print sizes.
The reason for the double shoot of Oklahoma was because the early Todd-AO movies were filmed at 30 frames per second rather than the industry standard 24 frames per second used by CinemaScope, thus making it impossible to create both Todd-AO and CinemaScope prints from the same negative. However, after Fox acquired a sizeable financial interest in Todd-AO the frame rate spec was reduced to 24 frames per second allowing Todd-AO negatives to be used to produce both 70 mm Todd-AO prints and 35 mm CinemaScope prints. Fox dropped CinemaScope 55 and used Todd-AO as their large-format system starting with "South Pacific" in 1958.
Where, oh where do the IMDB "Trivia" writers get their misinformation? The correct information is readily available from many sources including, but not limited to, the on-line Widescreen Museum.
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Mike-957
11 years ago
Thanks for the detailed lowdown on the 55mm/35mm shooting. Obviously, Sinatra walked while they were still deciding. R+H were never happy with his casting and Henry Ephron wrote that he struggled to record 'Soliloquy' and did not get a usable take at Fox before they headed to Boothbay Harbour. I think more was involved than his famous "I only do one take" approach to working in cinema (which is not beneficial to co-stars who may need more than one take,as Sinatra himself may have needed when he was a beginner).
I think the first 'post'-er was only referring to the Boothbay Harbour footage, a good deal of which survived. The switching from location to sound stage is-despite the beautifully constructed sets- a bit jarring. I have heard that the 'If I Loved You' sequence was too "foggy". A fragment of this survives when Mr Bascombe intrudes upon Billy+ Julie. Susan Luckey told me that they had originally hoped to do the Ballet on a real beach but it was too problematic. 'Soliloquy' was shot at Zuma Beach, CA so Gordon really went for a long walk to think about his upcoming fatherhood (!) The long intro to 'When The Children Are Asleep' was shot on the pier and was meant to give Billy "time" to get back from his musings on the beach.
They apparently went to a real local island for the Clambake scenes. A scene of them arriving was shot and deleted. A fragment of this location footage survives when Julie sees Billy+ Jigger leaving the island. From the back she is on the location. The medium shot of her watching him head off are in the studio. They may have only planned to do the opening and closing shots of that sequence on location. We'd need to ask Shirley Jones about that to be sure, I guess.
If CAROUSEL had been a hit they would have re-issued it in 70mm, as they did with THE KING AND I in the early '60's. I saw KING in 70mm. It looked great and I'm guessing had to be taken from the original (bigger) negative. (The ratio of a 70mm presentation would mean that the sides of the image would have been cropped, a very noticeable feature of BEN HUR when seen in 70mm. Some shots in the chariot race are actually squeezed for memory.)
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rorysa
11 years ago
1) What location-to-soundstage sequences do you find "jarring"? I hope you are not referring to "Louise's Ballet," which needed to be conveyed artificially and which would not have made any sense if it had been shot on a real beach.
2) What materials can I go to in order to see what scenes were shot? Have you seen a production schedule?
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Mike-957
11 years ago
Hi. I was not referring to the Ballet, which is fine on a set as it is a surreal sequence. Nonetheless, I believe they had planned to originally film that sequence on a beach at the outset. (The 'Prologue' sequence in WEST SIDE STORY is also surreal but works fine on location. Other numbers in that film were photographed on slightly stylized studio sets)
I have notes by a friend of mine who researched the production and wrote an article on the filming for the Boothbay Harbour local paper back in '91. (I have unsuccessfully attempted to get a copy of that article).
The changes which take place in the opening portion of the film (ie. going from studio to location and back again) are a little 'jarring' to me. The 'Julie Jordan' song was shot on the same estate where the 'If I Loved You' sequence was first photographed. Thus, after the studio sequence at the Fairground, the film cuts to a location sequence (the argument between Mrs Mullins and the girls) and should then have cut to another location sequence ('Julie Jordan'), then a studio set ('Mister Snow'), then back to a location ('If I Loved You'). Apparently one of the reasons why the 'Julie Jordan' sequence was cut was in order to lessen the "jarring transition from live action background to set". As 'If I Loved You' had to be redone back at Fox, this was minimized anyway. My own thoughts are that it would have been better to have shot every scene from the Fairground sequence onwards on location (until the Clambake). CAROUSEL is the only movie I can think of which doesn't have one scene set indoors and possibly has more location footage than any other musical filmed up until that year. (OKLAHOMA! has locations mixed with studio sets too, though I don't think the sets for the outside scenes are as good as the ones constructed for CAROUSEL).
Henry Ephron states that the delays in filming caused by Sinatra meant that by the time they got around to filming 'If I Loved You', the foggy nights had set in and the footage was unusable. Pity. If they'd been wise and cast Gordon MacRae from the "getgo", things would have been different. Before filming he had been playing Billy in a State Fair production of CAROUSEL which, coincidentally, also had William Le Massena in it (as the Starkeeper). MacRae was kind of "in rehearsal" for the movie without knowing it.
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rorysa
11 years ago
Lots of good stuff! Let's go in order:
1) I don't see how the rich kids' dance and the carnival/carousel scenes would have made sense on a real beach, not to mention the physical problems of performing ballet in the sand (yeah, I know Luckey did some, and very nicely, but I can't see the whole ballet being done on sand).
2) That's an article I would love to read! Where did he do his research--in person at Fox?
3)The argument scene to "Mister Snow" doesn't seem jarring at all to me. It seems like the characters just moved slightly inland, which in terms of geography and space, is understandable.
4) Whatever the reason was, "If I Loved You" turned out so beautifully, serendipity prevailed. I don't know if they could have done that great crane shot back and forth across the water on location. It's my favorite shot during a song in any film musical.
5) As I've posted many times, MacRae was wonderful, better that Sinatra would have been.
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Mike-957
10 years ago
Hi:
1) Henry Ephron and Henry King came to the same conclusion;
2) I hope to find the article myself one day. My friend Arne Anderson gave me a written rundown of many of the facts related to the production schedule. I suggest contacting the people who publish the Boothbay Harbour local newspaper. They were pleasant when I emailed them but never got back to me re finding the issue to photocopy for me (I offered to pay for copying and postage). I took an afternoon cruise around Boothbay in '81. I was dismayed to hear the cruise guide speaking about CAROUSEL and saying something like "you probably have never heard of this movie" or "we haven't seen it either". They passed the island where he said they did some shooting (ie. landing for the clambake and Billy and Jigger leaving early-only the latter shots survive in the finished movie). I'm guessing my friend Arne got some help from Fox when preparing this article. Henry Ephron's autobiography 'We Thought We Could Do Anything' provides some interesting facts. He says CAROUSEL out-grossed OKLAHOMA! in NYC for a period of time and Richard Rodgers sent him a letter of congratulations and thanks after the premiere.
3) I think the MR SNOW sequence is beautifully depicted by the Fox set designers. It's just obvious they have moved from location to a set.If IF I LOVED YOU had been successfully shot on location, there would have been another change of "visual tone" to the movie in what is basically one long sequence. The shot of John Dehner interrupting MacRae and Jones doesn't match at all but it's nice to have at least a fragment from the location version left in the final cut;
4) Although the crane shot may not have taken place, I am still curious to see how the sequence was done on location.As the old Grandeur cameras were noisy, all the dialogue had to be looped later regardless of whether scenes were photographed outdoors or on sets.( This usually has to happen for location shooting because of extraneous sound but not so much for studio filming).
THE KING AND I also used the same 65mm cameras and had to have all of its dialogue looped. By the way, Henry King was a finalist for the Best Director of 1956 for this film by the Directors Guild of America and the screenplay was nominated by the WGA. It was generally well-received critically (the NY Times was very positive, TIME magazine less so) and did very well here in Australia and in the UK. It is not the critical and box office failure which some misleadingly say it is.Even Shirley Jones is overly critical of it, although she reports that when one of her sons first saw it (recently) he phoned her immediately to tell her what a "beautiful movie" it is;
5) Gordon MacRae should have been nominated for Best Actor in a musical at the Golden Globes. Yul Brynner won and is excellent but personally I think MacRae's role is the more difficult to pull off and make moving. (Brynner's character is endearing from the start, unlike Billy Bigelow). The highly critical David Shipman basically says MacRae nailed this role (in THE GREAT MOVIE STARS,The International Years) even though he feels the film began well but became too sentimental.(I think the sentiment is handled in a restrained and affecting manner,something Hollywood can't seem to do anymore, LES MIZ notwithstanding)
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rorysa
10 years ago
After some further searching, I see that there apparently is production documentation maintained in the AMPAS (Margaret Herrick)library.
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