The New Colorized "It's a Wonderful Life" and the Return of Colorization Inventor Barry Sandrew

The creeping flesh of colorization for black and white movies is back! Well, this time it's with reportedly much better flesh tones. Just when you thought those Ted Turner-instigated and nightmarishly awful color prints of your favorite b&w movie went long-ago out of vogue (roughly around the early 90's when people wised up and b&w movies finally started to be appreciated), the inventor of the process, Barry Sandrew, goes and vastly improves the formula. And what film did his new digital media company, Legend Films, most recently decide to release to capitalize on this new and supposedly improved concept? "It's a Wonderful Life" went through at least two previous colorizations that made more than a few people sick fifteen to twenty years ago when those versions aired on local stations and then countless Turner-owned cable stations around the clock and around the holidays. The first colorization done on the film in the mid-80's was when the film was still in public domain, too, which meant occasionally seeing cut versions (to fit into a two-hour slot) along with the quasi-primitive color process that gave you a headache to look at. Yes, "It's a Wonderful Life" has been through the halfwit corporate ringer more than once before finally getting restored to what it was intended to be by the 2000's. So why are people suddenly raving about a newly colorized "IaWL" that was just released in a two-disc DVD set in November of this year?

Let's be clear about the new release: The first disc provides last year's 60^th anniversary disc containing the original b&w print. It's the second disc that contains the new color print that some people say finally gets colorization right in the variety of colors and tonal balance. Maybe this finally gives some validation to Barry Sandrew who ended up walking away from a promising neuroscience career at Harvard in the mid-80's formulating a process of colorizing 3-D CAT scans to sit behind a computer terminal with a crack team at a company called American Film Technologies colorizing classic MGM movies then just acquired by Ted Turner. How someone could be persuaded to do that over something more meaningful to the healthful well-being of human beings on the planet is a bit of a mystery--until you see the amount of money Sandrew was offered for the job. It reportedly was double his neuroscience salary back in 1980's money. I leave it up to you by the end to decide whether it was signing a devil's contract.

Back in 1986--an apparent stigma had been built in at least America on black and white movies shown on TV being "boring." Perhaps it was a psychological response to seeing old, washed out prints of classic movies lapsing into public domain and on local TV stations for most of the 70's and 80's. Even I grew up with a lot of classics on local stations that I initially thought (through young naivete) really did look that bad...until finally getting a chance to see them restored on Turner's cable stations, DVD, or real movie theaters later during the 90's and 2000's. "It's a Wonderful Life" quickly became a favorite holiday family film that you'd see on local stations through the last half of the 70's and into the mid-80's...sometimes aired on Thanksgiving evening (as it did for years on one of my local stations). It seems odd to me that anybody would accept a colorized version after close to twelve years of the film being shown in the original black and white--albeit quite a faded (but not horrible) print. But it's not as if Ted Turner decided to poll America about it.

When Sandrew was given complete control over American Film Technologies in the late 80's--they became the next company to try colorizing "It's a Wonderful Life" so it wouldn't look like it was using a late-1920's two-color Technicolor process where everything was either black, white, red or green. Well, third time's a possible charm, I guess. I sat through a TV airing of that AFT colorization of "IaWL" at some point in the early 90's and just sat there disgusted that a company couldn't even dictate logical colors in the film let alone dozens of other classic films being colorized around that same time that I happened to be tortured with on occasion. The walls in the Bailey house were a light shade of green, we just had to assume that one of George Bailey's ties was red, and all flesh tones looked like they were colored in with a pink crayon. At least they didn't make Mr. Potter's gray hair purple or Clarence's nose Rudolph red.

Everybody realized that this was becoming a dreadful mistake in the film industry--thus it finally hitting a brick wall around 1993. By that time, Ted Turner (who'd given Sandrew and his company complete creative freedom on the colorization starting in 1988) decided that it truly was a blunder in his business endeavors and pulled all colorized films he owned from the market--plus let his contract with AFT lapse. This left Barry Sandrew without a job. But this guy is a noted brilliant business man on the level with Ted Turner, and he rebounded quickly to other business and media interests with much more dignity. What's odd (or just a mystery) is his deciding to go back into colorization ten years later under a company with a new umbrella title.

The great colorization dupe of the 1980's...with Frank Capra and Cary Grant initially being swayed...

A lot of people remember the late, great Jimmy Stewart, Frank Capra and other Hollywood legends speaking out against the colorization of classic films in widely-seen press conferences around the late 80's and early 90's. Some of those impassioned quasi-patriotic speeches were parodied (particularly on "SNL")--even though those speeches created the turns of the tide in getting rid of colorized films until recently. What a lot of people may not know, though, is that some of Hollywood's luminaries initially loved the concept of colorizing movies for the TV syndication market. According to stories, Cary Grant was approached about supporting the colorization of his classic "Topper" for syndicated TV airings in the mid-1980's during a time when the process was just getting started in America. He was said to be highly enthused over it after seeing a print--and, obviously, getting his approval was intended to give the technology credibility in the industry. It isn't known what his reaction was to other films horribly colored that year, but he died in 1986 before it became full-fledged anyway. Somehow I picture him joining Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra in the late 80's to speak out against it had he lived longer. Had he been there to do that, colorized movies could have gone away a lot sooner than they did.

Well, we all remember Frank Capra (in frail health at the time) speaking out against colorization. What'll surprise many people is that he also supported the idea when approached by a different company experimenting with colorizing black and white movies. This company was called by the contrived and non-creative title of Colorization, Inc., which was the same company that approached Cary Grant about promoting the colorization of "Topper" (which is on record as being the first American b&w classic movie to be digitally colored). This was the company that did the first butchered color job on "It's a Wonderful Life" that ended up on local stations until American Film Technologies did a (only slightly) better one a few years later.

It might seem strange that Frank Capra would be sold on the idea of coloring one of his greatest films. At the time, though, he may have needed the money--because he was given the opportunity to invest in the company. This was also based on test scenes in color that he reportedly approved. But when the CEO's from Colorization, Inc. found out "IaWL" was still in public domain--they promptly gave Capra his investment money back. It turned out to be a bad business deal that Capra ultimately turned the tables on later. With that scenario, it makes you wonder if Frank Capra's later criticism was just getting even with a company that cheated him out of possibly needed funds--or if he truly was against colorizing "It's a Wonderful Life" and other films. I'd say it's a safe bet to say that he wasn't crazy about colorization from the start and just went along with a money-making opportunity as some people have to do in order to get ahead financially to pass on to their heirs. Hollywood works that way, unfortunately, especially when some in the industry haven't worked in a long time (Capra hadn't) or made much in the way of residuals off their work.

Night of the living colorization...

It's a circular process that everything bad that goes away for a while frequently comes back to haunt the world again as the living dead once did in a particular horror film. Now we have a major mystery as to why Barry Sandrew decided to start another media company (Legend Films) in 2001 to bring back the method of colorization in the age of the internet. He must have been onto something perhaps--because he's a wizard of a businessman. Advancements in technology at least give us an opportunity to give a second chance to something in media that was controversial in the past. Some of the more recent colorization software Sandrew helped develop gives more of an intuitive feel to the color--making it richer and giving more logical color selections to certain objects rather than a more ridiculous choice as in the past. Sandrew apparently thinks that a new generation who weren't around when the old colorizing process was around will become enamored of the richer and more natural process. In the age of the internet--he probably thinks that it could become a lucrative media market that other people turn a cheek to at the moment.

I have to admit that I haven't seen a full film in this new colorization process and don't really plan to. However, I've seen some small scenes and still shots in comparison to previous colorized movies. It admittedly does look more natural--and the new colorized "It's a Wonderful Life" has received raves here and there...but not overwhelmingly. What's interesting, however, is that Shirley Temple, Jane Russell, Terry Moore and Ray Harryhausen have consulted with Sandrew's Legend Films in the last five years to create colorized versions of their films to be sold on DVD through TV offers (in the case of Shirley's 1930's films) or on the wide market. Are those more examples of commerce over the art? It's hard to tell sometimes--especially when Shirley Temple probably doesn't need the money.

The best compromise here is that at least the b&w versions are given as the first choice over the colorized version on some DVD's. It seems to me now that if this new colorization process catches on--it'll just be used out of curiosity rather than being the ultimate preferred way to see a classic film. Besides, colorizing is still GUESSING at what certain objects in a scene are. I don't know what color they make George Bailey's tie in the new colorized version of "IaWL"--but I still picture him wearing a muted color and not a primary one. I hope the Bailey home doesn't have those green walls any longer either.

___

It's said that everybody naturally gravitates to appreciating b&w films once they get older. I've seen an evolution since those colorization days of the 80's and 90's of all ages appreciating the original vision of films during the age of Turner Classic Movies. If you have kids, try to turn them on to a film's original b&w cinematography early...because they'll accept it if they see it in their formative years. Barry Sandrew may have some backing by legendary stars for the new automated colorizing process, but we'll just assume that he fully understands it as something that people will watch second rather than usurping the original intent.

After all, it's quite telling when NBC still airs the original b&w (and digitally pure) version of "It's a Wonderful Life" twice a year around the holidays--and probably always will during its contract run...