65mm: Why 5-Perf?

When we talk about shooting 65mm today, the conversation usually starts with the image.

The resolution. The shallow depth of field. The texture of film. The sheer scale of the negative.

But there is a more basic question.

Why five perforations?

Because 65mm isn’t really one format. There is five-perf 65mm, eight-perf 65mm and, at the extreme end, 15-perf IMAX. Each is a different answer to the same fundamental question: how do you put a very large image onto film and then make the machinery around it work?

Five-perf became the most enduring answer.

And its story begins not with a camera, but with a showman who wanted to beat television.

The problem with Cinerama

By the early 1950s, Hollywood was facing an increasingly serious problem.

Television was bringing moving pictures into people’s homes. Cinema needed to offer something that television couldn’t.

One answer was Cinerama: an enormous, deeply immersive image produced by three synchronised cameras and three projectors, filling a huge curved screen.

It worked.

But it was also spectacularly complicated.

Michael Todd, the Broadway producer and showman, wanted the same sense of scale without needing three cameras and three projectors.

In 1952 he approached Dr Brian O’Brien and the American Optical Company with a deceptively simple proposition:

Could Cinerama’s spectacle be produced from a single strip of film?

Todd-AO was the answer.

And almost immediately it became apparent that this wasn’t simply a matter of building a bigger camera.

Everything had to change.

The camera.

The lenses.

The film.

The projector.

The screen.

The sound system.

Even the way the film was transported through the machine.

Todd-AO was not a camera format. It was an entire cinema system.

Starting with something that already existed

One of the details I find most fascinating about the development of Todd-AO is that the engineers didn’t begin with a completely blank sheet of paper.

American Optical had access to old 65mm Thomascolor camera mechanisms dating from the 1920s. Rather than simply discard them, the mechanisms were brought out of storage and adapted for the new system.

That feels very familiar when you look at large-format cinematography today.

New formats are rarely created in complete isolation. Engineers take what exists, work out what is still useful, and then try to solve the problems that the previous generation couldn’t.

Todd-AO was already doing that seventy years ago.

The new system used 65mm negative, giving the cinematographer considerably more image area than 35mm.

But there was another important decision to make.

How much film should each frame occupy?

The answer was five perforations.

Why five?

It is tempting to look at five-perf 65mm simply as a mathematical exercise: five perforations high, a wide frame, approximately 2.20:1 on the eventual 70mm release print.

But Todd-AO was designing much more than a frame.

The image had to work with the lenses.

The lenses had to work with the camera.

The camera had to transport the film reliably.

The resulting negative had to produce a practical release print.

The projector had to handle that print.

And the resulting image had to fill the enormous curved screen Todd had in mind.

Five perforations became the geometry around which those decisions could work together.

It also allowed Todd-AO to achieve its wide image using spherical lenses rather than relying on the anamorphic photography that had become associated with CinemaScope.

That opened up another possibility.

Instead of squeezing a wide image onto conventional 35mm negative and then unsqueezing it during projection, Todd-AO could use the large negative area to produce a wide image naturally.

And that mattered because American Optical was developing some extraordinary lenses to go with it.

Among them was the enormous 128-degree “Bug-Eye” lens.

This was not simply a bigger version of a conventional cinema lens. Todd-AO was being designed around the idea that the audience would be surrounded by the image.

The format, optics and screen were all part of the same idea.

The projector was just as important

If Todd-AO was going to work, cinemas needed a way of showing it.

This is where Philips entered the story.

In 1953, Magna Theatre Corporation approached Philips in Eindhoven and commissioned Jan Jacob Kotte to develop a projector capable of handling the new large-format system.

Kotte’s answer became the Philips DP70, also known in the United States as the Norelco Universal 70/35mm projector.

And this is where Todd-AO becomes particularly clever.

The DP70 wasn’t simply a 70mm projector.

It was designed to handle both 70mm and 35mm.

A cinema could therefore install the new machine without abandoning the enormous library of 35mm films it already needed to show.

That was enormously important.

A new format is only useful if cinemas can actually exhibit it.

The DP70 effectively became a bridge between conventional 35mm cinema and the new world of large-format presentation.

The engineering was extraordinary.

The machine had to transport a much larger piece of film through the gate while dealing with the heat generated by the enormous carbon-arc illumination required to throw the image onto Todd-AO’s huge curved screen.

The projector incorporated sophisticated cooling arrangements and a distinctive conical shutter. The shutter wasn’t simply there to interrupt the light beam: its design also helped manage the airflow around the film.

The film transport itself was engineered to accommodate the different requirements of 35mm and 70mm.

This was cinema engineering on an industrial scale.

And it worked.

Eventually around 1,500 DP70 projectors were built, according to surviving industry estimates.

In 1963 Philips received an Academy Scientific and Technical Award for the design and engineering of the Universal 70/35mm projector.

Todd-AO had become a complete system.

The first films

The first major demonstration came with Oklahoma!.

Premiering at the Rivoli Theatre in New York on 13 October 1955, it was photographed in Todd-AO on 65mm and presented in 70mm.

But there was another unusual feature.

It ran at 30 frames per second.

The higher frame rate was intended to reduce flicker and improve the presentation of the enormous image.

Around the World in 80 Days followed in 1956.

It was photographed using both the new 30fps Todd-AO process and a 24fps version for the conventional release route.

That dual approach exposed one of the practical problems with the original system.

Thirty frames per second produced a spectacular presentation, but it complicated the production and distribution chain.

By South Pacific in 1958, Todd-AO had settled on 24fps as its standard operating speed.

It was a compromise, but an important one.

The format was no longer an experimental exhibition system. It was becoming a practical production format.

And then, in the same year, Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash.

He never saw the system he had created develop into the mature large-format process that followed.

Five-perf becomes a standard

Through the 1960s, 65mm five-perf became one of the prestige formats of Hollywood.

Films such as The Sound of Music demonstrated what could be achieved when the huge negative was combined with high-quality lenses, elaborate production design and 70mm exhibition.

The important point is that five-perf didn’t win because someone declared it to be the perfect number of perforations.

It won because the whole system worked.

There was a camera system.

There was film stock.

There were lenses.

There was laboratory infrastructure.

There were projectors.

There were cinemas equipped to show it.

There was a distribution system built around 70mm prints.

Once all of those pieces existed, five-perf acquired something even more valuable than technical elegance:

infrastructure.

And infrastructure is one of the most powerful forces in cinema.

The format goes quiet

By the 1970s, the economics of large-format production were becoming harder to justify.

The film was expensive.

The cameras were large.

The lenses and accessories were specialised.

Laboratory work was more demanding.

And other large-format systems were beginning to appear.

IMAX, in particular, offered something fundamentally different: rather than using five-perf film running vertically, it ran 65mm film horizontally across 15 perforations.

The image became enormous.

Five-perf 65mm didn’t disappear, but it became increasingly specialised.

The interesting thing is that Todd-AO itself also evolved.

The company became increasingly involved in post-production and sound, eventually acquiring Glen Glenn Sound in 1986.

The name Todd-AO would therefore survive even as the original camera system became less common.

And then, in 1992, the format received one of its most remarkable late chapters.

Ron Fricke’s Baraka was photographed on 65mm five-perf at 24fps, using a Todd-AO camera supplied by the company alongside specially developed motion-control equipment.

It was a reminder that the technology had never completely gone away.

The machinery was still capable of making extraordinary images.

It simply needed somebody willing to use it.

Then came Tarantino

For a while, five-perf 65mm seemed like something from another era.

Then Quentin Tarantino decided he wanted to shoot The Hateful Eight in Ultra Panavision 70.

Suddenly, the old technology became relevant again.

Ultra Panavision used the same five-perf 65mm negative geometry, but combined it with anamorphic lenses to produce an exceptionally wide 2.76:1 image.

The lenses themselves had become part of the archaeology.

Robert Richardson discovered a collection of vintage Ultra Panavision lenses at Panavision that had not been used since films such as Khartoum in the 1960s.

Panavision’s Dan Sasaki and the optical engineering team then went to work adapting and rebuilding them for contemporary cameras.

But that was only half the problem.

There was another question.

Where were audiences going to see it?

By 2015, most cinemas had converted to digital projection.

A 70mm roadshow therefore meant finding large numbers of working film projectors and putting them back into service.

Boston Light & Sound became heavily involved in the effort. Approximately 120 projectors were acquired and refurbished to support the roughly 100-screen roadshow, providing machines and spares for the exhibition network.

This is an extraordinary detail.

Tarantino didn’t just revive a photographic format.

He helped revive the exhibition infrastructure around it.

Old projectors had to be found.

They had to be rebuilt.

They needed technicians who understood them.

The cinemas needed people capable of installing, aligning and operating them.

The lenses had to be recovered.

The cameras had to be adapted.

The film had to be processed and printed.

Suddenly the entire Todd-AO ecosystem had to come back to life.

That’s the real story of five perforations

So why five perforations?

There isn’t one simple answer.

Five-perf 65mm emerged from a particular moment in cinema history, when Michael Todd and American Optical were trying to solve the Cinerama problem with a single strip of film.

The answer required a large negative, wide spherical photography, a huge screen, high frame rates, magnetic sound and a new generation of projectors.

Five perforations became the geometry around which that system was built.

And once the system existed, it became self-reinforcing.

Cameras were built for it.

Lenses were designed for it.

Projectors were installed for it.

Laboratories processed it.

Cinemas learned how to show it.

Cinematographers learned how to photograph it.

The format became part of the infrastructure of filmmaking.

That may be why five-perf has proved so remarkably durable.

Because large-format film has never really survived on the strength of the negative alone.

It survives when people are prepared to rebuild everything around it.

That is the thread running through the history of large-format cinematography.

Todd-AO found a way to turn Cinerama’s three-strip spectacle into a single-camera system.

IMAX went in the opposite direction and made the image even larger.

The eight-perf cameras found another balance between image area and practical camera operation.

The Keighley cameras brought large-format IMAX photography into a new generation of productions.

The K65K found another way to make 65mm acquisition practical.

And today, cameras such as the Logmar Magellan are once again asking the same question that Todd-AO asked seventy years ago:

What does a cinematographer need a large-format camera to do now?

The technology changes.

The problems change.

The people change.

But the principle remains remarkably consistent.

Someone sees a limitation in the existing system and decides it is worth building something better.

Seventy years on, five perforations doesn’t look like an engineering compromise anymore.

It looks like a remarkably durable idea.

Mark