By November 1953, after just six weeks of release, "The Robe" had grossed $8 million and was well on its way to earning an unprecedented $50 million worldwide. (The top ticket price in Salt Lake City at the time was $1.50.)

Fox followed "The Robe" with CinemaScope releases of "How to Marry a Millionaire," starring Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall, and "Beneath the 12 Mile Reef," with Robert Wagner and Terry Moore, in November and December, respectively.

In January 1954, MGM released its first CinemaScope picture, "Knights of the Round Table," starring Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner, and then, in March, "Rose Marie," with Howard Keel and Ann Blyth. Other studios also followed suit, in a remarkably short period of time producing important films in the new viewer-friendly format. Only Paramount held out, instead developing its own system, VistaVision.

Later, there would be widescreen films shot in various 70mm formats — Todd-AO, Super Panavision 70, Dimension 150 and many others. In 1966, CinemaScope gave way to Panavision, which used the same technique with greatly improved lenses (and which remains the standard widescreen format for worldwide use today). More recently, such specialty "large-screen" formats as IMAX and SuperScreen have also found a niche.

Today, the Lyric is gone and the Villa is closed, an electronic version of the anamorphic system is used for professional and home-video cameras, and a new breed of widescreen TVs are in common use. And some DVDs automatically adapt widescreen films to fill widescreen televisions.

All this in the first 100 years of the motion-picture industry. Who knows what further movie-viewing changes the future may hold?

---

Hunter Hale is one of the programmers for the Organ Loft's silent-movie series.

E-MAIL: VisUnita@aol.com