Filmgoers today are so accustomed to watching films in 35mm Panavision, with the standardised aspect ratio of 1.85:1, that they tend to forget the excitement that such wide-screen processes generated about five decades ago. Richard Moore, who has died aged 83, was one of the pioneers of the process that is now used for the majority of commercial films.
In the early 1950s, Hollywood, desperate to entice people away from their 21-inch black-and-white television screens, offered the public a complex series of devices and gimmicks (from 3-D to Cinerama, which employed three projectors). The most enduring were the wide-screen processes using the anamorphic camera lens, which compresses the horizontal axis of the image to half its size to fit into the width of the film's frame, and the projector lens that expands the image back to its normal width on screen.
In 1953, Moore, still in his twenties, teamed up with Robert Gottschalk to form the Panavision company. It was a propitious moment because it was the year that 20th Century-Fox released The Robe, the first feature in CinemaScope, which used an anamorphic lens with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. Moore and Gottschalk developed an anamorphic lens attachment for a 16mm camera, which Fox needed to be able to show its CinemaScope pictures worldwide. From then on, the company grew and grew, always experimenting and coming up with new advances in cinematic technology.
Moore, who was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, spent his earliest years on a farm before the family moved to Los Angeles during the early 1930s. He subsequently graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in naval science and cinema, with an emphasis on cinematography. "In those days," Moore recalled, "there were no jobs at the Hollywood studios, and the guilds weren't open to outsiders."
Nevertheless, he did manage to shoot several 16mm documentaries and travelogues. With the pay from one of them, Moore visited Munich, where he met Dr August Arnold, the co-founder of Arriflex, who developed a lightweight hand-held camera with an innovative reflex viewfinder that allows the operator to view the scene being photographed.
"I exaggerated by telling Dr Arnold that I was a Hollywood cameraman. That's how I became the West Coast distributor for Arriflex for a brief period. I didn't sell a single camera. The heads of the studio camera departments thought they were too noisy, and couldn't conceive of using a handheld camera." (Some years later, Panavision introduced the first handheld 65mm camera.)
Not long after his experience as a salesman, Moore met Gottschalk while they were both working at a camera shop. They soon set up their Panavision company in Gottschalk's Los Angeles garage. After developing different wide-screen lenses, they came up with Ultra Panavision, which used an anamorphically squeezed image on a 65mm negative and 70mm print to project a picture with a ratio of 2.76:1.
MGM trumpeted its use of the process, which it renamed MGM Camera 65, to make Raintree County (1957), though it did little to earn back the $6m spent on the film. Realising Raintree County was a dud, MGM released it in 35mm, unlike the studio's Ben-Hur (1959), which was shot in MGM Camera 65 and shown in 70mm. A year later, Moore, Gottschalk and Douglas Shearer (an MGM sound engineer) won a scientific and engineering Academy award "for the development of a system of producing and exhibiting wide-film motion pictures known as Camera 65".
In 1962, wanting to use the camera equipment he had helped design and build, Moore left Panavision to become a director of photography. One of his first jobs was in the Bahamas as an underwater camera operator on the Sean Connery Bond movie Thunderball (1965), memorable for the underwater battle between CIA frogmen and Spectre frogmen. Moore soon became a fully fledged cinematographer on two low-budget Roger Corman biker movies, The Wild Angels (1966) and Devil's Angels (1967), then moved into the mainstream working mainly for his friends John Huston – The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972); Annie (1982) – and Paul Newman, as director in Sometimes a Great Notion (1970), and the star in Winning (1969), Moore's favourite among the films he worked on. For this movie, which focused on Newman as a Formula One racing driver, Moore designed and built a remote-control system that enabled him to operate a camera mounted on the car driven by Newman. Moore followed behind Newman with an Arriflex camera and a monitor enabling him to pan, tilt and zoom.
Moore directed one film, a bizarre martial arts fantasy, Circle of Iron (1978). Originally written for Bruce Lee almost a decade earlier, it was shot (by the British cinematographer Ronnie Taylor) in Israel, and starred David Carradine as a Zen guide, a blind man, a monkey man and Death.
In 2005, Moore received the annual presidents award from the American Society of Cinematographers, reserved for an individual who has made exceptional contributions to advancing the art of filmmaking. "What I find fascinating," Moore declared recently, "is that at the time Panavision got its start, there were a lot of exciting things coming along, such as the zoom lens, the Steadicam, the Tyler helicopter mount, faster colour film and new lighting equipment. There were big leaps forward, and then things settled. We're now experiencing another huge surge by virtue of digital cinematography. I wish I could be around for another 50 years to see all the exciting things that are going to happen."
Moore is survived by a son and a daughter.
• Richard Moore, cinematographer, camera technician; born 4 October, 1925; died 16 August 2009