The Hidden Architecture of CinemaScope Set Design

Almost seventy years after the popular success of the CinemaScope film, The Robe, inaugurated the widescreen era, there remains little critical understanding of the design logic of wide format films. Drawing on the evidence gained from an examination of nearly two hundred CinemaScope films, this essay focuses on the earliest of CinemaScope films, How to Marry a Millionaire (completed before The Robe but released after it), to offer a radical re-thinking of how set design is the key to widescreen aesthetics. The essay illustrates how, from the very beginning of CinemaScope production, a pair of grids were used to determine the composition of the frame and placement of actors within it, jobs that were normally ascribed to the director. Thus, far from being mere background, the grid-defined film sets add to the general sense of heightened interconnectedness that, like narrative and plot, satisfy a viewer’s desire for order and coherence.