Gilda

Some directors do, Stanley Kubrick for example in my previous post, and Richard Donner did the same thing with the Back to the Future movies.

Most of Disney's movies in the late 70's, when the Woderful World of Disney was big on tv, were filmed this way. They were filmed full frame, released theatrically masked down to 1.66:1 (Disney prefers this ratio to the standard American 1.85:1) then shown full frame on the Disney tv show withing a few months. These were essentially made for tv movies that got a brief theatrical release. Most of them were cheaply made comedies starring Kurt Russel, Ken Berry, and Sandy Duncan.

However, you have to keep in mind that theatrical movies are created primarily for the theater, and the screen in a movie theater is much wider than that of a typical tv. When filming a movie, the primary focus has to be on how it will look on that wider movie screen; how it will look on a tv screen is of much lesser importance. Many directors simply don't care about what it will look like in 4:3, and consider the alterations necessary for tv broadcast (time, commercials, language, sex, and violence editing) to be such major changes that they refuse to accommodate any of them in any way that will compromise their artistic vision, and I completely agree with them. Many will actively campaign to prevent their careful compositions from being released in pan n scan. Steven Spielberg hates pan n scan and won't allow his movies to be altered from their OAR for video release.

In addition there is another format, anamorphic, which uses a special lens to squeeze a much wider feild of vision onto the standard film frame. A matching lens is used in projecting to spread the picture back out. This is usually at a 2.35:1 aspect ratio and in these films, there is no extra information at the top and bottom to be used.