How VistaVision Made an Unlikely Comeback at the TCM Film Festival

The TCM Classic Film Festival isn’t just high on vintage films — occasionally, at least, the festival also finds a way to make room for long-gone methods of projection and exhibition. This is, after all, the festival that brought back Smell-o-vision for a screening back in the 2010s. “We bring back in every format, eventually,” said TCM Festival director Genevieve McGillicuddy during a speech wrapping up the annual gathering on Sunday night.

In this case, she was referring to a presentation that happened during the 2025 festival that might have been even rarer or longer in coming back than showing movies with scents. On Saturday night at the TLC Chinese Theatre, the 1950s process known as VistaVision was celebrated with the screening of two motion pictures filmed in that format, “We’re No Angels” and “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.” There was a big wrinkle that makes the showing of those movies more special than they might sound, though.

These weren’t just standard-issue 35mm studio prints that bear the VistaVision logo, which you can still find revived on occasion in revival houses. The two films shown at the Chinese Saturday were shown using actual VistaVision projectors, of which only a few exist in the world, which are equipped to run large-format prints that run through the projection system horizontally, a la modern-day Imax. Film prints in this format are about as rare as the projectors.

When was the last time a VistaVision film was exhibited publicly using these specialized printts in these highly unusual native VistaVision projectors?

“Oh, it would have been the mid-‘50s,” Paramount’s Charlotte Barker, the woman responsible for the TCM screenings, told  Variety between screenings, confirming that nothing like this had happened publicly in about 70 years.

Going back into the auditorium to introduce “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” to a rapt audience, Baker told those members of the crowd that had come for both screenings: “You’re probably the first people ever to do a double feature of horizontal, seven-perforation VistaVision films. I think that’s really cool. This has never happened before.”

As the director of film restoration at Paramount Pictures, Barker developed a fairly fanatical interest in VistaVision, which was developed by her studio at the beginning of the 1950s as an alternative to CinemaScope to bring filmgoers into theaters for something that could be sold as spectacular. By the beginning of the ‘60s, it had died out.

And yet VistaVision still has an allure for cineastes. The recent Oscar contender “The Brutalist” was advertised as being shot using VistaVision cameras. Coming up, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” was also shot via VistaVision — but in this case, it’s believed that Anderson plans to find a way to also have an extremely limited release of his movie using actual VistaVision projectors. If he is successful in that, again, it will be the first time it’s happened in about seven decades. The TCM Festival offered a strong indication that Anderson might be following through with that radical idea: He had a trailer made for “One Battle After Another” printed in the horizontal, seven-performation format, which unspooled for the first time ever before Saturday’s two historic TCM revival screenings.

The big question, of course, is: Is there really anything special about VistaVision? Everyone who is a major film buff has probably seen a normal 35mm print of an original VistaVision release like “Vertigo” or “The 10 Commandments” in a venue like the New Beverly or the Vista (no relation) and thought it looked good but not earth-shakingly great. But as witnesses to the TCM screenings can attest, there is a very different quality to seeing actual VistaVision prints and projectors in use. “We’re No Angels,” the more crisply filmed of the two classic films that were shown, was particularly a revelation. The immaculate print appeared to this layman’s eye to look about as sharp as contemporary digital Imax, but with the celluloid origins and print adding additional richness. (The “One Battle” trailer shown using the system looked remarkable, too.)

For a better explanation of what VistaVision was — or is, with a few of today’s filmmakers taking a renewed interest — here is how Paramount’s Barker explained it for the crowd at the Chinese.

“It was Paramount’s answer to Cinemascope, with Paramount turning things on their side, with an eight-perf image.. Unlike traditional 35mm film, it ran horizontally through the camera, and it captured an image across two 35mm frames, giving a wider screen image. This gave filmmakers a larger negative area  So it was really sort of the 4K or 8K of its time. And the format ended up inspiring Imax, which is kind of great, since we’re here in an Imax theater.”

One benefit of shooting in VistaVision was that the resulting films could be  printed down to standard 35mm prints, which could be put into theaters is a variety of aspect ratios. In fact, that’s usually what happened. Showing the film with VistaVision projectors that could handle a print that matched the original negatives was really more of an afterthought, albeit a glorious one, that happened only in a handful of theaters in the ‘50s.

“It was only meant as a camera format, never as a projection format, which we’re seeing today. So films that were shot in this (VistaVision) division were printed down to a standard 35mm 4-perf format for release, allowing theaters to screen them on any projector and not to need special projection equipment,” Barker said. “But naturally, once executives started showing off this beautiful new format in 1954, everyone started asking, ‘Can we see it in native 8-perf format?’ So a handful of projectors were built, and the horizontal format was shown in a few larger cities around the world like we’re seeing here today. So not every film that came out in VistaVision was released in the 8-perf format.”

In fact, the Humphrey Bogart-starring “We’re No Angels” and “O.K. Corral” were among the films that never did get publicly exhibited in horizontal eight-perf; the print of “Angels” that showed at TCM was shown was a reference print made by Paramount in the ‘80s. But there were a number of VistaVision films — including the format’s kickoff movie, “White Christmas” — that did get exhibited in this more spectacular process, at theaters including Radio City Music Hall in New York and the Warner Beverly Hills out west.

Barker discovered these prints in the Paramount archives while hunting around, picking up material for a book she’s writing on VistaVision. (The print of “Angels” “was a preservation element from about 30 years ago we found that was just hiding away in the archive.” In the case of “O.K. Corral,” it was just a single reel on the lot, but once she found it and threw up a beautiful image of beautiful Burt Lancaster onto the screen, “clear, vibrant and in surprisingly great condition,” she located the remaining reels off-site.) Once transfixed, she looked to find a way to allow the public to see these prints.

“When it came time to pitch ideas to TCM this year for different things to show at the festival, I added my usual VistaVision wishlist to the mix,” Barker said. “Last year, I’d proposed a celebration for the 70th anniversary of this vision. But it was Columbia’s 100^th anniversary, so that got the celebration, as it should — much better to highlight. But this time I thought of a ‘why not go big or go home’ pitch: Hey, we got some VistaVision film prints, and if you can find a projector, you can show ’em.’ And suddenly it wasn’t just a crazy idea, it was actually an idea that might be happening. So over the holidays, we all got to work. Charlie and Genevieve at TCM got to work checking out all of the stuff at TCM to see if they could make it happen. C. Chapin Cutler and Sean McKinnon at Boston Light & Sound started investigating to see if [they could get some projectors to make it work. By January, we were all in, and then started a massive team effort.”

She’s thankful to Cutler for providing the all-important projectors, which “don’t exist. They took some of the original six projectors that were built originally to project ‘White Christmas.’ They had three of the six, and out of those three, they made two that function, and those are the two that are up in the booth today.”

Cutler told Variety, “I collected them originally in 1984. They came out of a dealer’s boneyard in Dallas, Texas. They were two of the original six Century prototypes that Century made in 28 days. They either went to Radio City Music Hall, the Warner Theater in Beverly Hills or to the Paramount (studio) theater here in L.A. How they got to Dallas, I’ve got no clue.”

Cutler says that for a time, colonial Williamsbug had a set of projectors they were using for 40-minute special attraction films. Some time in the ‘70s, they sold those to Lucasfilm, “and those were the machines that they used for doing the background plates and the special effects work for ‘Star Wars.’” (FX people liked working with VistaVision for a time because of the added clarity, even though those sequences got transferred down to standard 35mm when it came time to integrate with the live-action work.) “And Doug Trumball used VistaVision for the original entertainments at the Luxor Hotel. There are a few of those machines still around too. But once again, it’s not feature film work, that’s special effects work.”

Cutler is taking the two projectors that were installed in the Chinese back to Boston now that TCM Fest is over. But Barker is hopeful they’ll be brought back next year, to show some more of the massive prints that exist in the Paramount archive. “I’d like to go back into the vault, and personally, I would like to do ‘10 Commandments.’ I would like to see us do ‘One Eyed Jacks’ [the early ‘60s release that was the last feature filmed in VistaVision in its original run]. And I’d like to see us do ‘The Big Country’ in Technorama, which is VistaVision in anamorphic format… just more bucket list items.”

And is anyone guessing what will happen with the P.T. Anderson film winding its way into the few VistaVision projectors that exist? “It’s not a decision that’s been made yet,” says Cutler, “but they’vebeen very happy with how their trailer will look, from the first time they’ve seen any little bit of VistaVision stuff on a big screen. So we keep our fingers crossed.”

And for Barker — a preservationist who has won awards for her work restoring “The Godfather,” among other Paramount projects — this year’s festival was a dream come true. “A year ago, I never thought this would be happening,” she said. “I’m the nosy one that found prints in the archive. (Sometimes) the annoying person, that is what it takes.”