B&W to Color

First of all, let me say this: if you are going to watch classic movies (and I really think you should), you have to get over the black & white thing. The great bulk of classic film is shot in black and white. Accepting that truth and either finding its inner beauty or realizing that you simply have to put up with it in order to enjoy some of the best film ever made, will be the best course of action. Once you and your kids get used to black and white, chances are you may even consider it beautiful.

... A funny note on that-- We'd been watching weeks of classics and were becoming quite comfortable with black and white when we got to Shirley Temple's Heidi (1937). The dvd we checked out from the library contained both the original black and white and a colorized version. The boys wanted to try the colorized version, but almost immediately we realized it was a mistake. There was something so glaring and wrong about the way it looked. The color was too bright and didn't seem natural. The backgrounds, in particular, looked fake. We switched to black and white where the beauty was told through contrast, in subtler ways and I thought about how, just as with the transition to sound, simply slapping color (or sound) on top of what is already good, doesn't "improve" it. Either the director works with colors in a seamless and integrated way as part of the artistic vision (see, Meet Me in St. Loius, for instance), or it is just a fake layer being added on.

In any case, the idea of "colorizing" is actually a good place to start this discussion because it is where the industry really began with color. Nothing prevented people, even way back in the day, from adding color on top of the negatives, once they'd been shot. From the earliest moments in cinema, directors were having colors applied to the film strip to create special effects. (The Great Train Robbery, 1903, is an example).

Before the successful use of film that could photographically record the colors of reality in the camera, color was achieved in a couple different ways. One is that people would literally draw the color onto the images after they were shot. Alternatively, film could be tinted, toned, or dyed in a way that caused the whole piece of film to take on a color cast. This second approach was used famously in Intolerance (1916) with four different colors employed (separately on different scenes) to distinguish the four time periods that were being followed throughout the film.

Because black and white film employs light-sensitive silver halides in its emulsion, and those halides are capable only of recording how much or little light gets in to the camera, it cannot distinguish various colors. When taking a picture of a man wearing a dark hat, less light gets into the camera (for the silver halide to respond to) where the hat is dark. Therefore the film will "see" less light in the hat area and, on the negative, the hat will look light. When the negative is printed, by shining light through it, more light is going to get through that part of the negative and onto the paper, so the paper will pick up more light and once again the hat will look dark. The whole process is beautiful and simple. But contains no mechanism to record anything having to do with different hues.

In order to film something in color, there must be a process whereby the emulsion chemicals are sensitive to various colors and not just to light. Color photography is therefore chemically quite distinct from black and white. Such color sensitive chemicals and processes had long been experimented with, and the beginnings of color photography date back to the beginnings of photography, or at least to the mid- 19th Century, but the process was nowhere near as successfully utilized as the black and white one until much much later.

So, lets pause that discussion for a moment and cut to the chase. If you are here reading this, what you probably want to know is "when did they start making films in color?" The answer is that Becky Sharp (1935), was the first feature length, major commercial film, shot entirely in full-color. Notice all those qualifiers? That's because, long before Becky Sharp, people were: (1) using color as a special effect (as discussed above), (2) making technical short films that demonstrated color photography, (3) using two-color Technicolor, (4) augmenting some portion of their films with full-color scenes, or (5) making short films in color. It was not until the late 1930s that some high quality, big budget feature-length Hollywood films were made in full color.  (Examples are Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). Even then, color did not take over the motion picture world the way sound had done just a few years earlier.

Unlike the transition to sound which was complete within about 5 years from its introduction in The Jazz Singer (1927), the transition to color films was really not accomplished for film until at least the mid to late 1950s! (20 some years after Becky Sharp). Up until that point, color was usually used mainly in big budget spectacle productions. As to "why"?: the answer really comes down to economics and commercial demand.  Unlike with sound, the public did not clamor for color in the same way they demanded sound. Audiences seemed perfectly ready to continue to accept black and white for a long time after color was plausible. Of course, the public loved color when they got it, but economics prevented them from getting it all that often.

Technicolor (or "glorious Technicolor" as it was often marketed as) was the company with the best commercially-viable system that was both gorgeous to look at and basically useable. But, Technicolor, the company, has its own fascinating story.  Technicolor, the company, actually owned the process and the equipment related to it. So if a film was going to be shot in Technicolor, studios had to rent the equipment from the company and were required to work with Technicolor's own advisors on set. This did not go over well (as you can imagine) with the major studios who were used to pushing everyone else around, not being pushed around themselves.  In addition, the process was slow, the equipment heavy and bulky and filming required intense lighting. These production problems were really just never overcome. Still, the quality of the color was breathtaking, so color tended to be used only for the big production, flashier films, and black and white continued to be the Hollywood standard for many years.

By the 1950s however, different competing (and simpler) color processes were finally made functional and of high enough quality, that color was positioned to start its true rise. Film that was capable of capturing the full range of color on a single negative (rather than Technicolor's three separate strips) began to be used in production and the bulky, expensive Technicolor process lost its steam. The last American feature film to be shot in three strip Technicolor is said to be Foxfire in 1955. After that, Eastmancolor single strip process became common for color films.

The upshot to the single-strip color was that smaller, more portable cameras were much simpler and cheaper to work with, and maybe, best yet, anyone could manufacture them. So the era of Technicolor-brand control was over. Some say the era of glorious enduring and richly dramatic color ended then too.