Movie copyrights - roman numerals

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The US copyright office requires Roman numerals. So that makes it a hold over from Demetrus Zanuks 20th Century Roman Studios. That place they invented the CinemaStink wide screen process....

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

The only problem with Roman Numerals is that they don’t have the number zero. Without a zero, you lose the concept of shifting digits to the left, making arithmetic significantly more difficult.

Unrelated, 20th Century Fox did not invent anamorphic (CinemaScope) lenses. It is a French invention that Fox bought the rights. Like all successful inventions it solved a need at the time, which was to present a bigger higher resolution image than spherical lens of the 1950’s could produce.

[Gordon McLeod]

The only problem with Roman Numerals is that they don’t have the number zero. Without a zero, you lose the concept of shifting digits to the left, making arithmetic significantly more difficult.

Unrelated, 20th Century Fox did not invent anamorphic (CinemaScope) lenses. It is a French invention that Fox bought the rights. Like all successful inventions it solved a need at the time, which was to present a bigger higher resolution image than spherical lens of the 1950’s could produce.

Actually they bought the rights to something that was no longer patented and the persion they delt with Chretien was only one of several makers of anamorphic lens the CinePanoramic was pre dateing the Cscope lens that fox bought and they went on to be used by Republic as Naturama and in france as DyliaScope and HammerScope/MegaScope in the UK

[Martin Brooks]

By all accounts, Henri Chrétien invented Anamorphoscope in 1926 and tried to get the studios interested, but no one was. What's puzzling is why he didn't provide enough modifications to the system to maintain new patents. But Fox paid him anyway, because they bought his lenses, although I've never seen documented exactly how much. He died in February of 1956 at 87, only 2 1/2 years into the release life of Cinemascope.