Over the past few decades, we’ve all been watching the wrong film version of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! As reported by The Wall Street Journal,the original production was filmed twice—once in a new format called “Todd-AO,” named after entrepreneur and innovator Mike Todd, and then again in CinemaScope.
The Todd-AO format required special new 70 mm cameras to be wheeled in, equipped with a special anamorphic lens. Those shots were filmed first, and when the crew finally got around to filming the CinemaScope shots—the ones we’ve been watching—the crew and cast were exhausted. The WSJ notes that the alternate version “is fairly bursting with energy, and watching the restored Blu-ray edition reminds us of the wisdom of hiring Zinnemann—whose specialty was masculine dramas like High Noon and From Here to Eternity—rather than a director best known for musicals.”
