Early Movies in Color

From earliest times in the motion picture industry, attempts were made to add a splash of color- at least a scene of not the whole picture, since the early 1920's. However, these were films made in black and white and hand tinted or using some cumbersome means of adding color to the individual reels. But color would emerge with such innovations as the two-color and then three-color process developed by Technicolor. The new cameras and required lighting requirements added tremendous expenses to the production, but some far-sighted producers such as Walt Disney, felt it was the coming thing, following the revolution of sound. Still, some doubts remained: "But color is not so pronounced a revolution as sound. Sound gave the pictures an appeal to the ear as well as the eye; it created dialogue; it established a whole new set of dramatic values. Color adds no new sense, but it is one step closer to reality than black and white" (Bourke-White, 1). However, from its very beginning, it drew audiences: "Walt Disney saw a sample, liked it, began using color in Silly Symphonies. One of the Silly Symphonies, the Three Little Pigs, stole the program from every 'feature,' and everybody in Hollywood began talking about and thinking of color films" (Bourke-White, 1). This time, the idea of color was to use color cameras, not human tinters who would "paint" each film frame. Tinted films had been around since the late 'Teens and had not really created the success or financial rewards hoped for.

Technicolor's new three-color process now had to be seen beyond just cartoons and short features. So, Pioneer Pictures produced the first full length three-color Technicolor feature film in 1935, "Becky Sharp, the three-color feature film that eroded the widespread commercial viability of all other methods of color photography for nearly 20 years. The picture was produced…in an effort to demonstrate to studios that had tired of imperfect and complex systems that films could be photographed in full color" ("Early color, para. 2). While some pictures still were careful about using color- often only for a scene or two, eventually what we now refer to as "blockbuster films" were mostly in color, including The Wizard of Oz, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and, of course, Gone With the Wind. Not too long after this three-color revolution, making a black and white film either was a "message movie" (such as The Grapes of Wrath) or double-feature pictures and some mysteries (The Thin Man, Maltese Falcon, etc.).

Next came Technicolor rip-offs, legal and patented but often unstable color processes such as early Eastman Color developed by Kodak. There were also movies made in Cinecolor, some Westerns cheaply made with Trucolor, and the studios eventually created their own processes such as Warnercolor and Metrocolor.

While most films today, and there are fewer produced than during Hollywood's heydays in the middle of the Twentieth Century, are created in some sort of color process, it is digitally mastered now.

Color was important, no doubt. But the two words "JOLSON TALKS!!" was never quite replicated with the two words "IN COLOR!" Because of the tremendous competition for people- TV networks and cable networks, video games and smart phones, today's films need a hook, a gimmick like 3-D or adaptations of popular literature, or some important personality to draw huge crowds. The use of some sort of color process is now a given, not a customer lure.

References:

"Early Color Motion Pictures" website for The American Wide

Screen and Film Technology Center, accessed Dec. 5, 2011 on

www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/oldcolor.htm

Bourke-White, Margaret: "What? Color in Movies Again?"

Fortune Magazine ( October, 1934)