Lonely Are the Mistaken

There is a historical error in Bob Fisher's excellent article on Philip Lathrop, ASC. Lonely Are the Brave was not one of the first films shot with Robert Gottschalk's redesigned 35mm anamorphic lenses. These lenses were first introduced in 1958 and by the time Lonely Are the Brave went into production they were being used for anamorphic photography by virtually all Hollywood companies but 20th Century Fox.

One source for the confusion regarding the history of these lenses is that until about 1962 companies which had contracted with Fox to shoot in CinemaScope were required to so credit their anamorphic films, even if Fox-licensed Bausch & Lomb lenses were not used. Most pictures released between 1958 and 1962 by MGM and Columbia, the first companies to use the new lenses, bore the standard CinemaScope credit in main titles and advertising with a secondary credit "Photographic Lenses by Panavision" usually on the same card with the copyright notice. United Artists, which had no such corporate contractual obligation, released the first film solely credited to Panavision, Frank Capra's A Hole in the Gead (1959), photographed by William Daniels, ASC. Paramount, which had avoided anamorphic cinematography previously, began using the Panavision lenses in 1961.

- Rick Mitchell

Los Angeles

Vanishing Point

In the October, 1977 issue of American Cinematographer (p. 1048) there appeared a fascinating article by Ulrich M. Fritzler, "Shutterless, Flickerless Projection Is Here. …