Introduction

PANAVISION Inc. was founded by Robert E. Gottschalk in 1954, shortly after the introduction of the CinemaScope wide screen format, to fulfill the need for high quality anamorphic projection lens attachments.

Within a year of the introduction of the CinemaScope format, ordinary 4 × 3 (1.37:1) pictures quickly looked old fashioned and theatre owners frantically sought a source of good anamorphic lens attachments to enable them to show the new films without the need to modify their theatres or to be beholden to one supplier.

At that time Gottschalk owned a camera store in Westwood Village where he numbered among his customers many professional photographers and cinematographers. Among his acquaintances was an optical engineer who helped ...

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