An 8mm and Super 8 anamorphic widescreen process.
Film Explorer
The Super 8 camera reversal of Footbridge (1967). This amateur format, invented by Paul Grenadier and Richard Orton, captured a widescreen image onto narrow 8mm film using an anamorphic lens.
Richard Orton, Santa Monica, CA, United States.
The Super 8 camera reversal of Footbridge (1967). The CinemaScope 8 inventors adapted a 16mm anamorphic projection lens to use on an 8mm camera. An extra wide 2.72:1 image was compressed horizontally to fit within the standard 1.36:1 Super 8 frame.
Richard Orton, Santa Monica, CA, United States.
Identification
Unknown
2.66:1 (CinemaScope 8); 2.72:1 (Super CinemaScope 8)
1
As Kodachrome II stock was used, colors are vibrant and saturated with rich blacks.
A custom logo at the start of these films announced “A CinemaScope Picture”.
All surviving copies of Orton and Grenadier’s widescreen films are silent, however the films featured the memorable 20th Century Fox fanfare over the Riverside International CinemaScope logo. The audio for this was synchronized from a separate recording on audio tape.
4.5mm x 3.3mm (0.177 in x 0.130 in) (CinemaScope 8); 5.79mm x 4.01mm (0.228 in x 0.158 in) (Super CinemaScope 8).
Kodachrome reversal.
Standard Eastman Kodak edge markings.
History
CinemaScope 8 and CinemaScope Super 8 were amateur widescreen formats that were shot and projected using an anamorphic lens, squeezing a wide image onto a narrower frame on 8mm or Super 8 film. This created a widescreen home-viewing experience that evoked the CinemaScope process.
The formats were developed in 1966 by high-school friends Paul Grenadier and Richard Orton for their amateur filmmaking group, Riverside International, based in Birmingham, Michigan. The films that Grenadier and Orton made for Riverside International used their friends as actors and were screened in Grenadier’s basement.
Grenadier and Orton were inspired by 20th Century Fox’s CinemaScope format and wanted to use it in shooting their own 8mm and Super 8 amateur fiction films. Grenadier was the engineering mind behind Riverside International, while Orton focused on the creative aspects of the filmmaking process. Grenadier came up with the idea of using an anamorphic lens on an 8mm camera, mimicking the technology that Fox used for its CinemaScope process. He pursued this by building a mount to attach a 16mm projector lens to an 8mm camera, or projector, thus enabling a widescreen image for 8mm (and later Super 8) film.
Not only did Riverside International copy the technology behind CinemaScope, they also reproduced the 20th Century-Fox CinemaScope fanfare for the company’s opening credits. In the original 20th Century-Fox version, the studio’s logo dissolved into a CinemaScope logo. The Riverside International logo did this as well. Riverside International made eight films in total, however only three of these were made in widescreen using an anamorphic lens. The Children’s Hour (1966) was filmed in the regular 8mm format, while Footbridge (1967) and Die! Die! My Roommate (1969) were filmed using Super 8 film.
Grenadier and Orton continued to make films for Riverside International throughout high school and college. After college, both went to graduate school to study filmmaking – Grenadier to the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA, and Orton to University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), CA. After graduate school, Grenadier worked as an afternoon television show host for a station in Michigan, and later produced commercials for an advertising agency in Los Angeles. He sadly passed away in 1991. Meanwhile, Orton worked at a small industrial film company making films and then worked at the May Company, designing their direct mail catalogs. He also worked for Belkin computer products designing their packaging, before retiring. He currently lives in Santa Monica, California.
Selected Filmography
CinemaScope 8. The only film made with regular 8mm film. Silent. A film about two children who are kidnapped for ransom money, and the hero who rescues them.
CinemaScope 8. The only film made with regular 8mm film. Silent. A film about two children who are kidnapped for ransom money, and the hero who rescues them.
Super CinemaScope 8. Silent. A freshman in college plots ways to rid himself of his obnoxious roommate.
Super CinemaScope 8. Silent. A freshman in college plots ways to rid himself of his obnoxious roommate.
Super CinemaScope 8. Silent. Inspired by the MGM film Waterloo Bridge (1940). Young lovers meet by a footbridge and quickly fall in love, but are soon separated by the Vietnam War. A low-resolution copy of the film can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG3R9qrYGVU
Super CinemaScope 8. Silent. Inspired by the MGM film Waterloo Bridge (1940). Young lovers meet by a footbridge and quickly fall in love, but are soon separated by the Vietnam War. A low-resolution copy of the film can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG3R9qrYGVU
Technology
Around 1962, Paul Grenadier and Richard Orton were members of their high school’s audiovisual club, where they would watch clips of movies during their lunch hour. The films were rented from the non-theatrical distributor Films Incorporated, which supplied 16mm prints of educational and feature films. Customers were also able to purchase an anamorphic projection lens from Films Incorporated to watch widescreen prints. Grenadier and Orton bought one of these 16mm projection lenses, manufactured by Keihan Optical Co. Ltd, Japan, with the intention of using it to shoot and project their own films. In order to make it compatible with their 8mm (and later Super 8 equipment), Grenadier built a custom mount using an erector set, which fixed the lens to the camera. Grenadier and Orton made their first CinemaScope movie, The Children's Hour, using the anamorphic lens in 1966.
When the lens was used on their Honeywell Elmo Dual-Filmatic Super 8 camera, the image was condensed or squeezed horizontally by a factor of two – so that a widescreen image would fit within a standard film frame. When the lens was used on a projector, the opposite distortion would occur – the image would expand horizontally, creating a widescreen projected image. The 1.33:1 frame on 8mm became an extra-wide 2.66:1 image, while the 1.36:1 Super 8 frame was expanded to an even wider aspect ratio of 2.72:1. These results were wider than the common CinemaScope aspect ratio of the time, which was 2.35:1
Due to the lens’s design not being fully compatible with an 8mm, or Super 8mm, camera, subtle vignetting was observed at the outer edges of the captured image.
References
Anon. (c. 1970). The Riverside International Fabulous Film Festival, advertising flyer for film festival. From the collection of Richard Orton.
Anon. (1982). The Program Riverside International Retrospective. From the collection of Richard Orton
Egido, André (2003) Super 8 Database, “Elmo C200”, www.cine-super8.net/Super8data/database/cameras_list/cameras_elmo/elmo_c_200.htm (accessed Feb. 1, 2025).
Orton, Richard (2016). Interview with Richard Orton by Susan Etheridge (Santa Monica, CA, August 13).
Spottiswoode, Raymond (1969). Focal Encyclopedia of Film and Television Techniques. London: Focal Press.
Patents
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Author
Susan P. Etheridge works as the lead film technician for the Hearst Newsreel Project. The project is a joint enterprise, supported by Packard Humanities Institute (PHI), Los Altos, CA, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), CA, to digitize 27 million feet of the Hearst Newsreel collection, held by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Susan got her start working as a film technician at Colorlab in Rockville, MA, which led her to obtain her master’s degree in Moving Image Archive Studies at UCLA. After graduating in 2014, she briefly worked at FotoKem, in Burbank, CA, as a film technician, before transferring to the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and later PHI. Susan has also carried out freelance research work for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for their visual history interviews that focus on motion picture film laboratories. Susan received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC.
Richard Orton, Dino Everett.
Etheridge, Susan P. (2025). “CinemaScope 8”. In James Layton (ed.), Film Atlas. www.filmatlas.com. Brussels: International Federation of Film Archives / Rochester, NY: George Eastman Museum.
