Film producer Michael Todd was one of the major contributors to technical innovation in the film industry in the 1950s. Having worked with Fred Waller and Cinerama, he got tired of the three-panel format, left the company and tried to find the process for making "Cinerama coming from one hole". He joined forces with the American Optical Co. and developed a system using 65mm cine cameras at 30 fps and wide angle-photgraphy (approx 150 degrees). The system was named Todd-AO after its inventors and was by far the best big-screen system ever seen, when it was introduced with Oklahoma!. The Todd-AO prints used 70mm film with a 2.2:1 ratio. Sound was six-track magnetic only, with five channels behind the screen and one surround channel, with Perspecta coding (a switch stereo device) The 70mm Todd-AO productions were premiered thrugh Magna Theatre Corp., wich also co-produced the pictures. Due to the non-standard speed, the first two Todd-AO pictures (the other was Around the World in Eighty Days) were parallell-shot in 35mm CinemaScope with 24 fps for general release, but for the third production, South Pacific, the Todd-AO pictures were all shot in 24 fps. Todd was killed in a plane crash in 1958, but his system lived on, adopted as the wide superformat of 20th Century-Fox, which used it all through the 1960s. During tht period a number of alternate processes developed, of which Superpanavision became the most used.


Co-developed the Todd A-O sound system. [1955] Todd had previously (1946) produced an elaborate Broadway musical version of "Around the World in 80 Days." Despite mammoth production values, a Cole Porter score and a cast headed by Orson Welles as Phineas Fogg, it was a notorious, costly failure, losing nearly all of the money invested in it. Killed, along with journalist Art Cohn, when his private plane went down in a blizzard just outside of Albequerque, New Mexico. The plane's ironic name was "The Lucky Liz." He was preparing a lavish film version of "Don Quixote" at the time of his death. Todd's version was never made. His biographer, Art Cohn, died with him in the plane crash that took Todd's life. The biography was nearly finished and was completed by Cohn's wife and published as "The Nine Lives of Mike Todd" in 1958. His penultimate show was entitled "Michael Todd's Peep Show," running at the Winter Garden Theatre from June 28, 1950 to February 24, 1951 for a total of 278 performances. The music and lyrics for this musical revue, which featured female nudity, were by Prince Chakrband Bhumibol, who became the King of Thailand! In Art Cohn's posthumous biography of Todd, "The Nine Lives of Mike Todd," it is revealed that the naked girls featured in the show's mermaid sequence had difficulty getting the blue dye used in the water out of their pubic hair. He had committed himself to provide financial backing for Laurence Olivier's most cherished project, a film of Shakespeare's "Macbeth," shortly before his fatal plane crash. But after Todd's death, the funding didn't come through and Olivier was forced to abandon the project.