Panavision is a motion picture equipment company specializing in camera, lens, and grip equipment, along with related accessories. After starting out as a small partnership that created anamorphic attachments for projection lenses, Panavision has slowly but steadily expanded its operations and product lines while maintaining a high level of design and quality. It has thus become a prestigious brand name in the eyes of film crews. Unlike most of its competition, including rival Arri, Panavision operates exclusively as a rental house and owns its entire inventory. Its comprehensive offerings of in-house and externally produced camera models means Panavision is also one of Arri's top customers. The company is currently based in Woodland Hills, California, United States.

Any major production that uses Panavision's services is contractually obliged to provide a credit that 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. He had become interested in anamorphic lenses several years earlier, while attempting underwater photography with Moore, with whom he worked in a camera shop. The technology had been designed during World War I to increase 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. Gottschalk and Moore bought some 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 advent of television, film studios began looking for ways to draw audiences back into 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 shooting the film with anamorphic lenses (which would squeeze the image onto the negative and subsequent prints). The images were then projected back with anamorphic lenses that expanded 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 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 (64 kg)), 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).

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.

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.

Note from the ESPV boys: Actually this is rubbish. Since the early 1980s Sony had been ear-bashing the industry about how it "needed" to "move up" to all-electronic movie production. Their earlier attempts were more entertaining than impressive, and if there was any impetus at all by the late 1990s, it was more that after all those years of toil they actually had something that might actually work! Not well, but work after a fashion at least:-)

We also rather suspect that a lot of the so-called "mindshare" started and stopped with certain PV and Sony executives desperately trying to justify their own existences!

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.

Panavision goes digital

Following a number of failed attempts to marry up standard- and high- definition TV cameras with film-type lenses in the 1980s and 1990s, Panavision entered into a joint partnership with Sony which produced the "Panavized" HD-900F "CineAlta" High Definition Camera System in 1999, first used by George Lucas for the second Star Wars installment, Attack of the Clones (2002). This was the first "commercial" HD 24p camera system, which also required the design and manufacture of a new range of Digital Primo lenses.

This system presented a number of unwelcome compromises, as for decades the "Holy grail" had always been to produce an electronic camera that could utilize Panavision's existing range of film-type lenses. The idea was that their customers would already familiar with these, they would produce similar on-screen images with an equivalent depth-of-field characteristic, and generally make the transition from film to video as painless as possible. However the need to leave room for a colour splitting prism in a 3-CCD camera means that the focal plane of most standard Cine Lenses is too short, and completely new lenses had to be designed and fabricated. Apart from significantly increasing the cost of the project, this greatly restricted the choice of lens available to film-makers. For this and other reasons, the PV CineAlta system has attracted little interest from mainstream film makers, although they are still in demand for ordinary HDTV studio production work.

Note from the ESPV boys: Panavision's line on this was always that standard Cine lenses didn't have the required resolution for this job, rather than the fact that such lenses simply wouldn't work at all! The unstated but obvious implication was that only they were up to the task of producing ones that did! Which is arrant nonsense; there is no significant difference in performance between their lenses and  equivalent models from Canon and other manufacturers, a fact that was subsequently not lost on George Lucas! There was no particular reason why Lucas needed Panavision for the project at all, and it says a lot about his technical knowledge that he fell for that line of bullshit in the first place!

In an attempt to address these problems, Panavision followed this up in 2004 with the Genesis HD camera, a full bandwidth (4:4:4) HD SDI camera claimed to have improved colorimetry and sensitometry-related specs and a Super 35-sized recording area, making it focally compatible with regular Cine Primo lenses and giving a true 35 mm depth of field.

Note from the ESPV Boys: The word "Claimed" was apparently removed and replaced several times when skeptics tried to point out that as yet, nobody has been given the chance to actually verify any of these claims!

The main imaging module of the Genesis is made by Sony, but the exact relationship between the two companies is unclear, since their joint partnership was dissolved in 2004 with Panavision's re-purchase of the 8% shareholding Sony bought in 1999. (See "Financial" section below).

Shortly after the release of the Genesis, Arri brought out the D-20, a comparable model digital video camera, which also incorporates a reflex optical viewfinder to address concerns voiced by camera users about inadequate focusing capabilities with a black and white video viewfinder. The D-20 is also a full-frame 35mm "silent gate" CMOS sensor, rather than the Genesis' 16 x 9.

The Genesis has (as of October 2005) only been used by two feature film productions: Superman Returns (using mostly video and some film) and Flyboys (apparently all video, although virtually nothing is known about this project). Both are scheduled for theatrical release in 2006 and undoubtedly will face high scrutiny from the cinematographic community. Superman Returns Director of Photography Tom Seigel was recently (Sep 2005) quoted as saying: "The grade and treatment of Superman was heading towards a Comic book look that probably 'wasn't going to be the best advertisement for Panavision or Genesis...'"

Very little actual Genesis "film-out" material has been released to date by Panavision, what has been seen was under tightly controlled conditions, and no commercial projects have been viewed publicly. 

Note from the ESPV Boys: Contrary to what PV will try to tell you, we were the ones who broke the news about the Genesis being used for Superman Returns, nobody else knew anything about it at the time. And we only found out because one of our Sydney contacts was asked to troubleshoot  a problem one of the on-set technicians  was having, that Panavision Sydney couldn't (and still haven't) solve!  

There is still considerable skepticism in the film industry about real the value of digital cinematography  at all for mainstream movie production, and contrary to popular opinion, only a minute percentage of cinema-release projects have been shot digitally since Sony/Panavision introduced the CineAlta in 1999. In fact, only two blockbuster movies worthy of the name have been shot digitally (as of October 2005): Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Critics were quick to point out this is hardly a fair test, as a film with "Star Wars" in the title is likely to attract a huge audience regardless of how it was shot. Apart from those the only other examples are a relative handful of minor to moderate Box-Office successes such as Sin City, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Spykids and Collateral (which was only part digital). It's ironic that hardly any Columbia Pictures films, even the CGI-heavy marvel Comics based films (Spider-man, X-Men) etc were shot digitally, even though Columbia is owned by Sony!

Note from the ESPV Boys: Another "edit war" went on here, where every elitist wanker in the world seemed determined that his/her particular favorite piece of minority-interest waste-of-celluloid should be counted as a "blockbuster"!

Despite its considerable prestige as a "household name", Panavision as a company is saddled with huge and generally unsustainable levels of long-term debt. It currently runs up substantial losses each year, and its shares have not returned a dividend for at least two decades. (It made a record loss of $40 million in 2004 - see "Balance sheet" in references below; note that figures are in thousands and bracketed numbers indicate a loss.) In the current climate, there seems no reasonable mechanism whereby it could ever repay these debts, estimated at somewhere between $400 - 500 million, depending on how one defines "debt".

Note fron the ESPV Boys: This section was eventually deleted altogether from the current Wikipedia article as it was vandalized so many times by, we presume, PV's loyal employees. One of these seemed determined that the world should not know that well over 50% of PVs so-called "assets" consist of  "Good Will" and "Intangibles", assets that apparently weren't present when RP bought the place in 1998!

Most of Panavision's debt is in the form of bonds issued in the 1990s to finance the purchase of former competitors the Samuelson group and other smaller companies. When the first of these started to mature in 2001, majority shareholder Ronald Perelman used his influence on the board of M&F worldwide corp, (a small but profitable supplier of flavoring extracts), to organize a highly unorthodox deal whereby that company would purchase his shareholding in Panavision for a mixture of cash and M&F shares. The other M&F shareholders strenuously objected, seeing this as virtually plundering their dividends for Perelman's sole benefit, and took legal action. In July 2002 the Delaware Chancery Court agreed and ordered the transaction "unwound".

Perelman then tried issuing a fresh bond issue of 65c-in-the-dollar discount notes (a level of return generally regarded as junk bond status), presumably to finance the payout of the maturing notes. This offer was suddenly withdrawn after only a couple of weeks, with no real explanation, (although much the same tactic was tried by Enron, shortly before they went under). Finally Perelman was forced to use about $130 million of his own money to buy up the outstanding notes (which is one factor complicating exact definition of Panavision's level of indebtedness).

Note from the ESPV Boys: Recently RP sank another 60 million of his own money into the company, again via the "back door", which suggests he's embarrassed by the whole PV carry-on!

When Perelman purchased his shareholding in May 1998 the price was $28 per share. By August 2002 it had plummeted to $1.25, and currently floats around the $4-6 mark. (See PV Share price history, below).

The company was delisted by the New York Stock Exchange in July 2002. John Farrand suddenly left the company in January 2003. (Although few details of his departure were made public, an SEC filing in April 2004 mentioned a $3 million severence package, usually an indication someone was fired.) Farrand was replaced by current CEO Bob Beitcher in March 2003.

A number of company changes since then indicate that Panavision may be quietly quitting the Digital market. In 1999 Sony had purchased an 8% shareholding in Panavision, (it has been suggested that this was merely an instrument for purchasing 100 Cine Altas). In a dramatic and humiliating about-face after the intial fanfare of Star Wars Episode II, for Episode III George Lucas used more advanced F950 HD cameras and Fujinon lenses supplied by rival firm Plus8Digital. In 2004 Panavision sold their minority shareholding in the digital post-production house eFilm and (apparently) used the proceeds to buy back Sony's shareholding in Panavision. Despite their initial promise, Panavision's heavy investments in Digital Cinematography have yet to show any "bottom line" return and there are signs the majority shareholder is growing impatient with this.

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.
• Balance Sheet for 2004.(Yahoo! Finance)
• Share Price History.(Yahoo! Finance)

Suggested reading

• Samuelson, David. Panaflex User's Manual. Newton, MA: Focal Press, 1996.

See also

• 70 mm film
• American Cinematographer
• Camera crew
• Camera magazine
• Cinematography
• Clapper loader
• Digital cinema
• Focus puller
• Movie camera
• Principal photography
• Steadicam
• Widescreen

External links

• Panavision official site
• Panavision Australia official site
• "The Importance of Panavision" thesis paper
• Ultra Panavision 70 process
• Super Panavision process
• Our Site:-)