Remember Omar Sharif’s marathon entrance in “Lawrence of Arabia”? First appearing as a tiny black speck on the distant desert horizon, he slowly, relentlessly grows in the frame to come barreling gloriously up on horseback, practically crashing through the camera lens. On a TV, that speck is initially so miniscule that it’s virtually invisible for the first half of the scene, rendering the shot more than a little confusing, and completely wrecking what otherwise was one of cinema’s most audacious reveals.

Music Hall film programmer Bill Pence laughs. “That’s the first movie everyone brings up when we talk about this series,” he says, referring to The Music Hall’s summer-long “Scope!” program. The series features classic films that beg to be seen on a really big screen each Wednesday through the first week of September.

“As more and more people are getting their movies in smaller and smaller forms, we thought it was a good time to remind them that movies were meant to be seen on a big screen, and that some of the best of them simply don’t work small at all,” Pence says.

Widescreen formats, such as Cinerama, Panavision and, later, the more widely accepted Cinemascope, first evolved in the early 1950s as a response to the trend of people staying home to watch their new-fangled television sets. “It was really just a promotional gimmick,” says Pence. “Theaters were losing audiences, and the studios were looking to create a value—an experience that they just couldn’t get at home.”

With the rise of digital and on-demand formats that invite modern folks to watch their movies on their computers and (shudder) phones, history seems to be repeating itself. And so The Music Hall is responding in kind.

The original concept for the “Scope” series was to feature only movies shot in Cinemascope’s wide 16:9 aspect ratio, but the idea expanded to include other formats, as well. “There are so many great movies that weren’t filmed in Scope that also need to be seen as big as possible,” Pence says. “‘King Kong’ could become a kids’ movie on a TV, but on a big screen it has a tremendous impact.”

Similarly, he points out, the flash and dazzle of “West Side Story” is terribly corrupted by smaller formats’ necessity for the “pan and scan,” which inevitably blocks out large percentages of the original frame. “It could honestly be said that if you haven’t seen these movies on the big screen, you really haven’t seen them at all.”
Pence adds, “Many of these films have roots for me in my work with The Telluride Film Festival.” Pence co-founded the festival in 1974 and retired two years ago.

“King Kong” was the only movie ever to receive a Telluride tribute of its own, and the festival’s 1979 screening of a remastered and restored print of  1927’s groundbreaking silent “Napoleon” (with 90-year-old director Abel Gance in attendance) sparked a watershed of interest in the industry for rescuing silent films that could otherwise easily have faded into oblivion.

Including drama, dance, westerns, wartime, sci fi, foriegn and silent films, the “Scope!” lineup represents some of the most respected, influential stories told in the last century, prepared by some of the finest artists in the history of cinema to be experienced in the grandest manner possible. They knew what they were doing. Do yourself the favor, turn off your cell phone and get over to Chestnut Street in Portsmouth to see these movies the way they were meant to be seen.

Advanced tickets are available at The Music Hall Box Office at 28 Chestnut Street, Portsmouth, by calling (603) 436-2400 or at www.themusichall.org.