VistaVision is back. Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” not only earned Lol Crawley the Best Cinematography Oscar but has sparked a renewed interest in the format — one that is now being further fanned by unconfirmed reports of the 35mm horizontal format also being used in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” Alejandro González Iñárritu’s untitled 2026 film, and Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.”
The timing is perfect, therefore, for the TCM Classic Film Festival to screen two rare Paramount VistaVision prints of “We’re No Angels” (1955) and “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957) on April 26 at the TCL Chinese Theater. What’s more, the movies will be projected with special horizontal projectors, which haven’t been used since the 1950s.
Crawley will introduce “Gunfight,” the Western from director John Sturges (“The Magnificent Seven”), which teams Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday, and Charlotte Barker, director of film restoration at Paramount, will introduce “We’re No Angels,” the offbeat Christmas comedy, directed by Michael Curtiz (“Casablanca”), about three escaped felons from Devil’s Island, starring Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, and Peter Ustinov.
“The idea of actually screening VistaVision prints with VistaVision projectors first came last November,” Genevieve McGillicuddy, founding and executive director of the festival, told IndieWire. “Paramount approached Charlie Tabish, our head programmer, and said they had a small number of actual VistaVision prints of classic films. We wondered if it would be possible to project them with VistaVision projectors. That started a conversation with our lead tech and projection guru, Chapin Cutler, [co-founder] of Boston Light & Sound. We knew that if anyone could pull it off, he could. So things rolled from there, and we’re very excited to be able to do this.”
VistaVision, which launched with “White Christmas” in 1954, was Paramount’s answer to 20th Century Fox’s popular CinemaScope. However, the horizontal 8-perf, 35mm film strip provided a larger negative area than CinemaScope with greater sharpness, finer detail, and reduced grain. Indeed, VistaVision was the forerunner of IMAX 65mm, with its horizontal orientation.
Among the other classics shot in VistaVision were Alfred Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” (1955), “Vertigo” (1958), and “North by Northwest” (1959), John Ford’s “The Searchers” (1956), Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” (1956), and Marlon Brando’s “One-Eyed Jacks” (1961).
But “White Christmas” required a non-existent horizontal projector to show off the new widescreen format. Paramount turned to Century Projector Corp. to find a quick solution in time for Christmas week. They created six prototype VistaVision projectors: two for Radio City Music Hall in New York, two for the Warner Theater in Beverly Hills, and two for the Paramount lot.
Yet with only around two dozen custom-built VistaVision projectors available in the ’50s, few of the films were actually screened in their full glory. The VistaVision fad ended with “One-Eyed Jacks,” but the format was later revived by George Lucas and ILM for special effects process work on “Star Wars” and other prestige VFX films.
Of the few VistaVision prints available at Paramount (which, for some unknown reason, were made in the ’90s), “We’re No Angels” and “Gunfight” are the best of the bunch in terms of quality and condition. There are no Hitchcocks or “The Ten Commandments” or “Funny Face,” and “White Christmas” is faded.
“ I think they’re an interesting pair in terms of showcasing the projection,” added McGillicuddy. “But I think our audience is hungry for that kind of material. We know that ‘We’re No Angels’ was remade [with Robert De Niro and Sean Penn in 1989] and we don’t often screen too many Westerns.”
“What we picked were [very] different,” added Paramount’s Barker. “‘We’re No Angels’ was filmed on a stage and is very colorful [shot by cinematographer Loyal Griggs], and we just felt that this film isn’t shown a lot and could use a little attention.
“This contrasts a lot with ‘Gunfight,’ Barker added, ”which was shot on location [by cinematographer Charles Lang at Old Tucson Studios], and shows off a lot of the desert vistas where you’ve got that [deep] focus that VistaVision is known for. And you can show all four of the men walking down the street, which, in a non-widescreen film, would have been really tight.”
But to pull off these special screenings, Boston Light & Sound’s Cutler needed a pair of working VistaVision projectors. Fortunately, he had them, which he found in 1984 in a boneyard in Dallas, Texas. Cutler’s hope back then was to publicly screen “Vertigo” in VistaVision for its celebrated re-release by Universal Classics.
“They actually sent me reel one of ‘Vertigo,’ which we ran it in our shop but never on a big screen,” Cutler told IndieWire. “So, for me and my company, this is a bucket list event.”
The projectors that Cutler had in possession were two of the original prototypes that were made to screen “White Christmas.” Some upgrading was required because they were underdeveloped. They didn’t even have doors on them. “We’ve had to do things like put a picture changeover on them,” Cutler said. “ We also had to build new shutters so that we could cover [better stability of movement] between frames, which was something that they had difficulty doing back in the day.”
In terms of audio, Paramount has restored the VistaVision Perspecta three-dimensional sound for “We’re No Angels.” This was a cheaper alternative to magnetic stereo soundtracks. “ So that’s being reformatted to a three-track master, which is going to be interlocked to the film projectors and played back [using] Pro Tools,” added Cutler.
However, the biggest challenge was fitting a pair of VistaVision projectors in the already crowded Chinese projection booth. Because of their unusual construction, there isn’t room to have the reels mounted on them so they can be changed out quickly and efficiently during the run of the film.
“ The prints are made up in 2,000-foot reels,” Cutler said, “which means each reel runs about 10 minutes because the film runs twice as fast as it does in a standard 35mm projector. What we’re having to do is make the prints up on giant reels. So each reel will run approximately an hour, and the film is fed off a device called a tower, which holds about 17,000 feet of film. So we’re going to splice them together and have half the print on one machine, half the print on the other.”
While Cutler’s pulled off recreations of Smell-O-Vision and Sensurround at the TCM Festival, he never thought he’d get a crack at VistaVision. But he hopes this isn’t just a one-off. “ Personally, if this event turns into something, I would certainly love to see ‘One-Eyed Jacks,’ in VistaVision,” he said.
