A forgotten history of widescreen movies

SALT LAKE CITY — Moviegoers no doubt take it for granted that theaters show films in widescreen. And might assume that the push to go wide from the older, boxier format dates back to the widescreen spectacle of the 50s, "This is Cinerama."

It actually began decades earlier, before movies even had sound, to a time when people like Darlene Stark's great-grandfather, her son Daniel's great-great-grandfather, John Daniel Elms, were in the picture.

Elms' father and grandfather were Union soldiers in the Civil War, and his wife was said to be a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee.

Elms was a Virginia oyster farmer who moved to Staten Island around 1922 and noticed that movie screens were unnaturally small because the buildings that housed them were narrow.

So the engineer and inventor, with fellow engineer William Wadell, got to work on a camera system that could shoot on film bigger than the standard 35mm filmstock and project it on bigger screens.

Their efforts are part of an early history of widescreen.

The 1897 Corbett–Fitzsimmons boxing match was filmed in widescreen, the final sequence of "Napoleon" (1927) featured Polyvision, and Paramount Pictures introduced Magnafilm in 1929, to name a few.

Elms' contribution was called Widescope.

At first, it used two 35-millimeter cameras trained on the same subject and would project those two reels as one wide film. It later became a single 70-millimeter camera.

Elms' papers include a stock certificate for the Widescope Corporation in the name of William Bitzer, cinematographer for D.W. Griffith, director of "Birth of a Nation."

Darlene Stark was raised by her grandparents. Her grandfather had worked with his dad on Widescope. After Charles Elms died, their records and cameras sat in her basement for decades.

Daniel Stark was recently trying to help his elderly mother clean up her house and brought the boxes upstairs.

Mother and son highlighted some historic nuggets — an invitation to a reception at Elms' lawyer's new office (the lawyer was Franklin D. Roosevelt) and prints of a handful of frames from the silent 1917 extravaganza Cleopatra, which was lost in the 1937 Fox vault fire.

And there was the story of the Widescope camera.

In the late 20s, movies were transitioning to "talkies," or movies with sound, and audiences were growing. Theaters were becoming enormous picture palaces.

Movie magnate William Fox had two studios — on the east and west coasts — and a stable of theaters. He wanted a camera system that could make movies big enough for the bigger venues. Seventy-millimeter film could be projected onto screens three-and-a-half times larger.

Fox also wanted something bigger to compete with a new medium on the horizon — television.

According to research by Cinema Gear and historian Rick Mitchell, Elms and co-inventor William Waddell arranged a demonstration for Fox's Fox Case Corporation. That company handled the new Movietone sound system created by Theodore Case and Earl Sponable.

Fox licensed Elms' invention and hired John Daniel Elms to make a Widescope with sound. Elms' son, Charles Elms, worked on the project, as well. (One trade publication from the time names John D. Elms as president of Widescope Camera and Film Corporation and George W. Bingham as the camera's inventor, while others mention only Elms as the inventor. John Elms held the patent).

The result was not commercially viable. Fox hired the Mitchell Camera Corporation to modify their camera to accommodate 70-millimeter Grandeur film.

That camera (actually, the very Mitchell camera pictured here according to Richard Bennett of Cinema Gear) was used, most notably, to film "The Big Trail," which featured Zion National Park in Utah as one of its film locations and a fresh-faced John Wayne in his first starring role.

Neither camera would last. The stock market crashed and theaters, struggling to upgrade their facilities to play movies with sound, couldn't afford to convert to a new film format.

William Fox lost control of his businesses and went to prison after a federal conviction for fraud and obstructing justice.

The senior Elms sued him to keep the rights to his camera and won.

Widescreen didn't start catching on until the 50s and 60s, but it did, thanks to ideas pioneered by people like John Daniel Elms.

"This is Cinerama" made a big splash when it debuted on three-panel screens in 1952. Cinerama signed a contract with Charles Elms to use some of the Widescope technology in that system.

"I mean there's a saying that the geniuses of yesterday make the geniuses of today," Daniel said. "And without the very first ones we wouldn't have what we have now."

Widescreen, Hollywood's response to the rise of television, became the theatrical norm.

John Daniel Elms died in a car crash in 1937. His son had a career in commercial film production.

(Darlene remembers hearing about how her grandmother once got lost while Cary Grant was getting from a train station to a film set and made the actor two hours late for a commercial production).

"Like it's awesome to be related to such a genius guy," Daniel Stark said.

"But I think the most important thing — I want my grandfather and my great-grandfather to be properly recognized," Darlene Stark said.

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