Inventor May Save Hollywood Many Millions

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 916, 8 March 1930, Page 25

Inventor May Save Hollywood Many Millions

New Projection Plan for Enlarged Screens EXPERIMENTER AT WORK An inventive genius, famous as co-founder of the Victor Talking Machine Company , Mr. Leon F. Douglass, has electrified the cinema industry of Hollywood by evolving an entirely new method of

screen projection. Imagination and determination have been co-ordinated, and the millionaire inventor has now seized upon a device to make a wider screen without sending half ihp manufacturing industry and the theatre owners into panic, and half of the remainder into bankruptcy. By so simple an arrangement as a series of lenses, he has provided definite assurance of this good news. Exhibitors who would have to i pend £I,OOO for new projection ma•hines to accommodate the 50-foot mage instead of the present 25, will :e able to “throw” the stage-width icture at a cost of something like With this device alone, theatres may project the present screen size or the larger one, interchangeably. This means a saving to the motion picture industry roughly estimated at £40,000,000. Statisticians say it would cost that sum to transform all the world’s cam- I

1 era and projection equipment to the < Proposed double width. ORDER CANCELLED j Just before Mr. Douglass an- ! nounced his invention, a ieading cinema firm had ordered 50 new projection machines at a cost of £50.000 to produce a double-width picture Work on these machines has been abruptly abandoned in favour of the new Douglass invention. The effect of the Douglass lens is to give the camera a range about three times that at present possible. The uses to which it may be pat are readily seen. It means the possibility of fullstage ensemble and great panoramic effects in the exteriors. It provides, without revolutionary change in equipment, for the photographing of three times the iateral area now caught by the camera.

The contracted image is brought i back to normal proportions by an adjusting or correcting lens in the projection machine. In other words, the image is first “packed” into the area of the conven- ! tional film size, and then, in the pro- j jection machine, is expanded back to its proper dimensions. At first technical and other execu- ! tives of the big Hollywood studios were sceptical of the Douglass invention; but they knew' enough not to ignore his claims, and hastily visited his place at Menlo Park to investigate. Two contracts, assuring Douglass j of an exceedingly large Income, sur- j passing that of the foremost movie j stars, were signed almost on the spot, j WIDER SOUND TRACK Since three times as much lateral !

area is possible, and since present plans require only a doubling of the existing screen width, the film strip now used in actual photography can accommodate a much wider sound film track than at present, ensuring improved results. Continued use of the 35-millimetre film will also eliminate fear of film buckling in the projection machines and cameras. In connection with the question of wider sound track, another Douglass invention, which may be termed the duo-phone or duo-tone, is ready for i demonstration. i The inventor applies here some | what the same principle as in his j already familiar loud-speaker: a double sound impulse, in which each j sound is followed by an “echo” a twelfth of a second later. This imparts a resonance to the tone, which is said to improve it considerably. Another invention of the famous Menlo Park genius, like the contracting and correcting lenses, has already been put into use on one of the Hollywood cinema lots. This is to be called the “zoom” lens, by which the camera can give the effect of approaching or departing from objects without any motion save the grinding of a crank. Mr. Douglass is working out a still more revolutionary process—a film which is black and white to the naked eye, but which, when passed through a series of prismatic lenses, will recapture the colours of the object photographed.