Panavision
| File:Panalogosm.png | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Movie camera rental, Motion picture equipment |
| Founded | 1953 |
| Headquarters | Woodland Hills, CA |
Key people | Robert Gottschalk, Founder Ronald Perelman, chief shareholder |
| Products | Panaflex Lee Lighting Genesis HD camera Grip equipment |
| Revenue |  $207.5 million USD (2004) |
250,000,000 (2008)  | |
Number of employees | 1,181 (as of December 31, 2004) |
| Parent | Saban Capital Group |
| Website | www.panavision.com |
Panavision is a motion picture equipment company specializing in camera, lens, and grip equipment, along with related accessories. Starting as a small partnership that created anamorphic attachments for projection lenses, they have slowly but steadily expanded their operations and product lines while maintaining a high level of design and quality, making for a prestigious brand name in the eyes of film crews. Unlike most of their competition, including rival Arri, Panavision operates exclusively as a rental house and owns their entire inventory. (Ironically, their comprehensive offerings of in-house and externally produced camera models means they are also one of Arri's top customers.) The company is currently based in Woodland Hills, California.
Any major production which uses Panavision's services is contractually obligated to provide a credit which says "Filmed with Panavision Cameras and Lenses" if using spherical lenses, or "Filmed in Panavision" if using anamorphic lenses.
Early history
Panavision was founded in late 1953 by Robert Gottschalk, John Moore, Meredith Nicholson, Walter Wallin, and William Mann. (It was formally incorporated in 1954, which is usually the more commonly-cited date.) Gottschalk was the driving force behind the company, becoming interested in anamorphic lenses several years prior while attempting underwater photography with Moore, with whom he worked in a camera shop. The technology had been designed around the time of World War One for increasing the field of view on tank periscopes - anamorphic lenses horizontally "squeeze" an image thus allowing a wider field of view once unsqueezed by complementary anamorphic lens. They bought a few of these lenses from C.P. Goerz, a New York optics company. Nicholson, a friend of Moore's, started working as a cameraman on several early tests of anamorphic photography.
Threatened by the new presence of television, film studios were looking for ways to draw an audience back to the theaters with innovations television could not provide at the time. Cinerama was among the first widescreen processes put forth - however it required three cameras (at first) and three synced projectors, and the image always had lines between the three images. Looking to create a high-impact method of widescreen filmmaking that was both more cost-efficient and less complicated or visually distracting, 20th Century Fox had been working to design an anamorphic production system, called Cinemascope. This involved both shooting the film with anamorphic lenses (which would squeeze the image onto the negative and subsequent prints), and then projecting them back with anamorphic lenses that could unsqueeze the image, creating an aspect ratio twice as wide as the frame itself. By the time the first Cinemascope film, The Robe, was announced for production, Gottschalk, Moore, and Nicholson already had a full demo reel of work with an anamorphic system.
Gottschalk learned, through a vendor to the camera store he was working at, that Bausch & Lomb were having difficulty filling the orders for theatrical anamorphic projection lenses. Eventually Gottschalk met Mann, who could provide the optical manufacturing; Mann introduced him to Wallin, who studied optics. Thanks to Wallin, the design put forward for the lenses was prismatic rather than the then-favored cylindrical method. This meant that the anamorphic lens extension factor (how much the image was horizontally unsqueezed) could be manually shifted, which was useful for projectionists switching between full-screen ("flat" or "spherical") trailers and an anamorphic feature.
Panavision's first product, the Super Panatar projection lens, debuted in March 1954 for $1,100 a pair and quickly captured the market. It attached between the projector and the lens. A later improved and lighter design (Ultra Panatar) enabled this to be mounted in front of the lens instead. In December of that year, the company then captured the film studio market by creating the Micro Panatar, which was attached to an optical printer for the purpose of creating "flat" (non-anamorphic) prints from anamorphic negatives. (Previously studios had shot everything with two cameras—one anamorphic and one flat—so that non-widescreen theaters could still exhibit the film. The cost savings of making flat prints in post-production instead were enormous.)
In 1955, Panavision entered the camera lens business by working with MGM to create the Camera 65 system. This employed using 65 mm film in conjunction with the APO Panatar lens, an integrated anamorphic lens (rather than a prime lens with an anamorphoser mounted on it) set to a 1.25 expansion factor. This process was also named MGM 65 and Panavision 65, before finally settling on Ultra Panavision. It meant that the aspect ratio was an astounding 2.75; unfortunately, it was only used on a small handful of films, starting with Raintree County (1956). Ironically the film was only released as a 35 mm anamorphic print due to the fact that all 70 mm theaters were solidly booked up with Around the World in Eighty Days. The first two films to actually be shown in 70 mm anamorphic were released in 1959 - The Big Fisherman and Ben-Hur. Subsequent Ultra Panavision films were Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Battle of the Bulge (1965), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), The Hallelujah Trail (1965), and Khartoum (1966). Virtually all 70 mm prints of these films still in circulation are straight spherical (2.20 ratio), however, due to the rarity of 1.25x anamorphosers for 70 mm projectors today.
Finally, the company's last major early period innovation was the Auto Panatar camera lens, used with 35 mm anamorphic productions. A problem with early Cinemascope camera lenses was what was known as the "the mumps"—a widening of the face in close-ups due to a loss of anamorphic power as a subject approaches the lens. Although early productions were willing to compensate for this limitation because of the new anamorphic process by staying away from close ups, as anamorphic became more popular, it became a major annoyance. Gottschalk himself solved the problem with additional rotating lens elements moved in concert with the focus ring. The Auto Panatar was released in 1958 and rapidly adopted industry-wide, eventually making Cinemascope lenses (and thus Cinemascope) obsolete. While Fox insisted on maintaining Cinemascope for a time, the pressure of actors' demands for Panavision lenses for their close ups, and the fact that the company was not owned by a rival studio eventually led Fox to abandon Cinemascope for Auto Panatars in 1965, debuting on Von Ryan's Express after Frank Sinatra's legendary demand that the studio use them.
Middle period and changes
Three of the founders, Nicholson, Mann, and Wallin, left in 1960 to move on in their own respective creative interests. Moore followed in 1962 in order to do production work (as did Nicholson). The same year, after mulling over working with camera companies on new designs, Panavision had the fortuitous opportunity to purchase the camera equipment division of MGM, which they took advantage of. (Mutiny on the Bounty - an Ultra Panavision production - went so over-budget that MGM needed to divest several whole divisions to stay afloat.) The company spent the next five years researching how to create a lighter, quieter camera with a reflex viewfinder; the Panavision Silent Reflex (PSR) was released in 1967, followed by a handheld 65 mm camera the next year. In the meantime, development of an optical printing lens for the purpose of blowing up 35 mm anamorphic to 70 mm had succeeded by 1964, the effect of which was to virtually destroy 65 mm productions—film studios no longer needed to shoot in 65 mm for 70 mm projection when they could more cheaply shoot in 35 mm anamorphic and blow it up to 70 mm for release. The Cardinal (1964) was the first film which used this process. Between 1970 and 1990, no major studio films were shot in 65 mm, and with the exception of a handful of films in the early 1990s, none have been since.
Around this time, Panavision switched its equipment business model to its current incarnation—equipment would be available only for rental, rather than sales. The advantages of this method were that more money and high standards could be spent on equipment development, all equipment could be maintained and modified directly by the company, it provided an incentive to make parts more durable, allowed for closer and more responsive feedback from customers regarding design, and meant that producers no longer needed to buy valuable camera equipment for a given production. To this day, Panavision remains the sole owner of all Panavision equipment (although at least one film school has a camera out on "permanent loan").
This policy required additional upfront assets, and to this end, the company was sold to Banner Productions in 1965, although Gottschalk remained as president. Panavision benefited from the purchase by becoming the global company it is today, branching out into markets beyond Hollywood. Kinney National Service bought out Banner in 1968 and then took over Warner Brothers the following year, eventually renaming itself Warner Communications. Consequently, the deeper pockets of new owners allowed a massive expansion in inventory and a leap forward in research and development.
Albert Mayer headed up the next major project—the creation of a lightweight (the PSR weighed 140 pounds), quiet reflex camera adaptable to either handheld or studio conditions. Following four years of development, the Panaflex debuted in 1972, concurrent with the Arriflex 35 BL. Both were revolutionary cameras in that they operated virtually silently, thus no longer needing a heavy and cumbersome sound blimp, and could be used for sync hand-held work. The Panaflex set itself apart by also including a digital electronic tachometer and magazine motors for the take-up reel. Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express became the first film to use them.
As the 1970s moved on, the Panaflex line was continually updated and expanded in further incarnations: the Panaflex X, Panaflex Lightweight (for steadicam), Panastar (high speed camera), Panaflex Gold, and Panaflex G2. Work with video cameras was first explored with the Panacam, although the company chose to leave the field for others to develop in the meantime. A competitor to the Steadicam, known as the Panaglide, was also developed and released.
Post-Gottschalk
Robert Gottschalk died in 1982, aged 64. Shortly afterwards, the company was bought by a group of investors led by Ted Field and John Farrand, who brought sweeping changes to the then-stagnant company. Optics testing was computerized, the new Platinum model camera was built (1986), and a new line of lenses known as Primos were created (1990), which exhibited matching color characteristics across the lens line. The company was sold to Lee Lighting in 1987 but financing was overextended, and the ownership reverted to Warburg Pincus in 1989.
In 1987, responding to sensed demand for the resurrection of a 65 mm camera, development began on a new model, which was released in 1991 and known as System 65. However, Arri beat them to market two years prior with the Arriflex 765. Production, for one reason or another, did not wind up re-adopting the gauge, and only a small handful of films used 65 mm during this time period; notably, Far and Away, parts of Little Buddha, and most recently Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet (1996).
As the end of the 1990s approached, it was clear that the movement for digital cinema was gaining mindshare in Hollywood, and so Panavision moved to capitalize on this by both improving its film camera systems and approaching the vanguard of high-end digital camera development.
For the former, the Millennium replaced the Platinum as the flagship camera (1997), followed by the Millennium XL (1999) and XL2 (2004). The XL series not only made for a much smaller camera body suitable for interoperability between studio, handheld, and steadicam work, but also marked the first significant change to the film transport mechanism in the camera since the Panaflex - two smaller sprocket drums for feed and takeup (a design similar to the Moviecam and subsequent Arricam) instead of one large drum to do both.
In the case of the latter, a joint partnership with Sony produced the HD-900F High Definition Camera System in 2000, first used by George Lucas for the second Star Wars installment, Attack of the Clones (2002). This was the first HD 24p camera system, and also required a new set of Digital Primo lenses of higher standards than the Cine Primos, due to greater magnification of the image on a smaller image recording area. Panavision followed this up in 2004 with the Genesis HD Camera, a full bandwidth (4:4:4) HDSDI camera with improved colorimetry and sensitometry-related specs and a Super 35-sized recording area, thus making it compatible with regular Cine Primo lenses and 35 mm depth of field.
In 1998, Panavision was acquired by and, as of 2005 is still owned by Mafco Holdings, a company solely owned by Ronald Perelman, via a Mafco subsidiary.
References
- Panavision official site
- Bijl, Adriaan. "The Importance of Panavision", Masters Thesis. Royal University of Utrecht, September 1991.
- Everything2 article, dated April 1, 2002
- Samuelson, David. "Golden Years", American Cinematographer, September 2003.
- "Honoring Our Own" Panavision article on engineer Takuo Miyagishima, 2005.
Suggested reading
- Samuelson, David. Panaflex User's Manual. Newton, MA: Focal Press, 1996.
See also
- 70mm film
- Camera crew
- Camera magazine
- Cinematography
- Clapper loader
- Digital cinema
- Focus puller
- Movie camera
- Principal photography
- Steadicam
- Widescreen