Samuel Goldwyn Theater
8949 Wilshire Blvd
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
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Cinema has endured for decades in the face of competing visual storytelling mediums. In connection with our event The New Audience: Moviegoing in a Connected World, discover how studios and filmmakers – long before tablets, smartphones and the Internet – responded as audiences began trading regular visits to the movies for the ease and affordability of the first small screen: television. In response, numerous widescreen cinematic formats were rolled out around the world and capitalized on the breathtaking width of the projected image, not to mention the heightened fidelity of stereophonic sound, to achieve effects far beyond the reach of TV sets. This Is Widescreen offers a colorful assortment of films that demonstrate how filmmakers found new means of engaging the flexibility of the cinema and the key larger-than-life film formats employed over a 15-year period in Hollywood – from the launch of Cinerama in 1952 and the subsequent widescreen boom that included CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO and others – plus highlights from the first wave of 'Scope filmmaking from around the globe.
60th Anniversary
Friday, May 29 | 7:30 P.M.
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s groundbreaking musical reached the bigger-than-ever screen in 1955 courtesy of Oscar-winning director Fred Zinnemann (From Here to Eternity). Opening on Broadway in 1943, this naturalistic tale of the romance between a young cowboy and a farm girl (played onscreen by Gordon MacRae and a 20-year-old Shirley Jones in her film debut) told a human-scaled story different from the glitzy spectacles that had dominated musical theater, yet still found room for classic songs (including “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” and “People Will Say We’re In Love”), rousing dance numbers and choreographer Agnes de Mille’s influential “Dream Ballet.” Zinnemann filmed every scene in Oklahoma! twice – once in standard 35mm widescreen CinemaScope and once in the brand-new process of Todd-AO, using 70mm film at 30 frames per second, and this digital presentation features a restoration of the film’s lesser seen Todd-AO version. The film received four Academy Award nominations, including one for Robert Surtees’s glorious cinematography, and won two Oscars for its music scoring and sound recording.
1955, 145 minutes, color, DCP | Directed by Fred Zinnemann; written by Sonya Levien, William Ludwig, adapted from the musical, music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the play Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs.; with Gordon MacRae, Gloria Grahame, Gene Nelson, Charlotte Greenwood, Eddie Albert, James Whitmore, Shirley Jones, Rod Steiger.
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