A famous scientist in Buffalo, Professor O’Brien of the American Optical Com pany, who designed a colossal panoramic ‘fish-eye’ lens for him; this gave birth to the Todd-AO process, and to a deal with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Ham merstein (‘R & H’), who wanted to film Oklahoma! in the new medium. […] Todd and Arthur Hornblow proposed me as the director: R & H seemed pleased with the prospect and I was eager to ac cept. The idea of exploring new avenues of movie making was most exciting. Be sides, I was enormously fond of Oklaho ma! and of the radiant optimism and joy of life it had projected during the gray days of World War Two. My enthusiasm was so great that I agreed, without first asking Abe Lastfogel, to a much smaller salary than I should have accepted. To quote a witty colleague, the story re volved around the question of “whether a cowboy would or would not take a farm girl to a county dance”. The possibility of taking a Broadway musical and relocating it in the wide-open spaces of the great West, of filming Agnes de Mille’s dance numbers in natural outdoor surroundings, seemed too good to be true. Of course there were hundreds of pioneering problems to be overcome before shooting could start; there was only one ‘fish-eye’ lens in existence, and although more had been ordered and the delivery date guaranteed, we would have to start production with just that one lens and nothing at all to back it up. This caused considerable scratching of heads, and in the end, for protection, it was decided to shoot, simultaneously, a second negative in Cinemascope – in fact to photograph every single scene twice! […] Oklahoma! was intended to be a large spectacle. The film is, of course, at its best when shown in the Todd-AO process for which it was created; unhappily, the facilities for screening it in that manner are hardly available. It is at its second best in Cinemascope. […] It remains as one of the most joyful and untroubled experiences in my own mem ory, the starting point of many lifelong friendships.

Fred Zinnemann, An Autobiography, Bloomsbury, London 1992