No you are wrong. Not all films are shot with anamorphic lenses. Many films are shot with normal lenses and then matted when shown on a screen. That is why you sometimes see boom mics or other things on the screen in a theater. The projectionist hasn't matted the film correctly. Films that are in the 16:9 format are shot "full frame" (which means that the entire frame of film is taken up by a non-distorted image), and matted to the correct ratio later. The reason this sometimes effects viewing on television is because a frame of 35mm film is aproximately the same ratio as a 4:3 television. Most movies pre 1950's are actually in a full frame 4:3 format. When television started threatening theaters they started making widescreen films as a way to draw people back to the cinema by giving them more of a show, or big event that they couldn't get on TV. With modern films they sometimes show the full unmatted frame on TV or video rather than doing pan and scan, and you see small gaffs. A perfect example of this is in Pee Wee's Big Adventure when he is chaining his bike up. In the theater, and on the newer widescreen DVD the joke comes off perfect as it appears he is pulling an impossible amount of chain from the compartment on his bike. But in all "full screen" versions of the film, such as television broadcast, and old VHS versions, the joke is ruined, because you can obviously see the chain coming through a hole in the bottom of the bike compartment. Some film makers shoot with nothing (such as boom mics, crew members ect.) in the frame at all, so that it can be shown full frame with no flaws (Stanley Kubrick shot all his later films like this so they wouldn't be cropped when shown on TV). This means you are actually seeing more picture than with the "widescreen" version, but also not seeing what the director actually intended. So in those cases more isn't better. Most film makers though don't worry about this, and so there are mics, and all kinds of off screen objects actually still in the frame. This is why they have to crop the images sides off for pan and scan video. But if you look at any later Stanley Kubrick film on video, say Full Metal Jacket for instance, you are actually seeing more image than you saw in the theater. Some films are like this on video. The thing is that sometimes a film like this can be matted incorrectly when it is transfered to widescreen video, and cut out information that is meant to be visible. The Back to the Future DVD's that somebody mentioned are a classic example of this.
I think you are partially confusing anamorphically shot films with anamorphic DVD video. The concepts are similar, but not the same. Anamorphic films are shot using special lenses, because if they were shot with normal lenses the film grain would be a big problem and amplified when they were matted and blown up that much on a large screen. So the process was created to use the whole frame for a wider image by distorting it as it was shot, and then projecting it through special lenses to "un-distort" it on the screen. Anamporphic video on the other hand increases the resolution to take full advantage of the height of a TV screen, but rather than cropping the edges like pan and scan, it compresses the video lengthwise. So watching an anamorphic DVD on a 4:3 TV with the anamorphic function on your DVD player active will show you a compressed picture where everything looks tall and thin. But when you watch it on a 16:9 TV like an HDTV it stretches out to use the full screen, which gives you an image that uses the entire resolution of the screen, and also is widescreen. Non anamorphic widescreen DVDs and VHS tapes only use the lines of resolution that the image takes up on a 4:3 TV, and when zoomed in on an HDTV to fill the length of the screen they lose resolution, and are much lower quality.
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