YouTuber Mathieu Stern teamed up with Atlas Lens Co. CEO Dan Kanes to secure and shoot with a piece of filmmaking and Disney history. The CinemaScope Camera Attachment appeared on a French auction site, having been lost for 70 years, and was swiftly purchased by Kanes for his museum, but not before he sent it to Stern so he could make the video (below).
The item in question is a CinemaScope Camera Attachment, a type of adapter that’s synonymous with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The live-action adaptation of Jules Verne’s book was the most expensive film ever made, at the time of its release in 1954, and to complicate matters further, it was to be an early adopter of CinemaScope, a type of anamorphic lens technology, trademarked by 20th Century Fox, and used to shoot in a wide-screen format.
CinemaScope was an expensive format. Not only did filmmakers have to pay 20th Century Fox a licensing fee, but as Dan Kanes explains in the video, the technology was slow to use because camera operators had to focus both the primary lens and the attachment, and in opposite directions, too.
In addition, Disney only had access to a single CinemaScope Camera Attachment, which made shooting the feature even trickier. Ironically, Stern states in the video that “Just a few months after the movie’s release, Bausch & Lomb introduced new anamorphic lenses that no longer required dual focusing.”
The history of this long-lost adapter is only part of the video. Make sure you watch the full video to see Stern adapt and shoot with the attachment for the first time in 70 years.
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