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Altered Images: Colorization
About thirty-five years ago the top bosses of my then-employer, the American Film Institute, got us into a real jam with our funders. Taking a stiff-necked, self-righteous pose, AFI impulsively issued strong statements and held an urgent press conference in support of a new artists’ rights movement headed by longtime board members and all-around AFI pals Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Saying yes to them must have seemed like a no-brainer. What, after all, could be controversial in 1980’s Hollywood about backing Steven and George? And they had allies; the film directors’ guild, as well as groups of film critics and other intellectuals, were coming out in force against a new media technology that they sternly called a mortal threat to America’s film heritage.
The new technique, supposedly so dangerous to preserving American culture on screen, was called colorization, using video technology to allow hand-coloring of black-and-white films and TV shows. In retrospect, it was one of the most overblown film controversies of the mid-Eighties. But the way it worked out set business precedents that still guide media law to this day, and shape the battleground over censorship and online cancel culture. Withdrawing Song of the South from general circulation, or turning police guns into walkie-talkies in E.T., cutting a Donald Trump cameo appearance out of Home Alone 2 or removing Kevin Spacey from All the Money in the World, —they were all affected by what happened in courtrooms and offices in the nearly-forgotten Colorization War of now-distant 1986.
The studio bosses, the guys who in fact ultimately paid AFI’s paychecks, were solidly on the other side of this new technical issue and resented AFI’s well-intentioned meddling. Ted Turner was pissed with us, man. “They’re my movies, and I’ll do what I want with them”, he snapped. Disney and Paramount weren’t happy either. Once AFI got the word it did some frantic, face-saving back-pedaling. We hadn’t intended to bite the hand that could strangle us.
The basic idea of colorization goes back to the earliest days of film. Rows and aisles of retouching artists, generally women, sat at flat, glowing glass tables equipped with big magnifying glasses. They used sable brushes to paint colors directly onto each frame of film. It was a crude process, but it delighted the audiences of 1907. By the ‘20s, movie photography began to include color, though rarely, and the paintbrushes were put away.
The vast majority of old movies continued to be black and white until the ‘50s. Then increasing the proportion of color films gave the theater screen something that early television couldn’t compete with. By 1965, after a half-billion-dollar effort, television caught up with color, and basically everything had to be made in color from then on. That left Hollywood with a huge inventory of black and white titles, feature films, and TV series, that were now worth far less money. Film companies couldn’t sell nearly as many of the “b&w”s to local television or basic cable—almost their sole markets—as they could sell even mediocre color programming. On Mannix, they still use dial phones and record players. Every adult seems to smoke. Women wear mini-skirts. Quaint! But to casual viewers of MeTV or AntennaTV, because it’s in color it’s instantly accepted as part of our everyday world in a way that (black and white) M Squad or Peter Gunn can never be. Rapid depreciation of black and white meant less studio equity, less collateral for loans. They took the hit on their books, wrote off the loss, and moved on.
Decades later, at the dawn of the ‘80s, the studios were offered a chance at partial recoupment of that loss, at a price. New analog technology allowed video frames to be painted and stored electronically, one at a time. Emerging digital technology was capable of much more, such as auto-following a colored-in shape from frame to frame, and a more subtle, deeper color palette. The new media tech was now accompanied by one of capitalism’s most unmistakable cues, the sound of big money hitting the table.
Then the guilds threw a fit and everyone ended up in court. (Why, exactly, did the Writers Guild have any sort of standing? Did their members really think they had a legal right to have their words read aloud in black and white rather than color?)
After the expensive legal wrangling, a consensus formed around two points:
First, the big picture: The studios won, make no mistake about it. They outright own the material and can do what they want with it, provided all existing contracts are observed and all profit participants paid. The grandly European concept of artists rights beyond the contractual, the goal of the arts guilds, was largely ignored or legally rejected, though Congress did give the complainants a fig leaf to hide their defeat, a requirement that colorized video should bear a notice that the original work was in black and white.
Second, the artists lost, but the studios admitted that artists’ rights mean something, as long as that “something” was abstract and didn’t cost major money. In case of alterations of library content, whether by censorship or by more routinely commercial reasons, the studios voluntarily promised that the original version would be saved in the archives, so a decision, say, to colorize or censor, can be changed or reversed, years later. This is essentially a handshake deal. There’s no real enforcement mechanism, but nobody wants to be that one schmuck who breaks a deal and faces the wheel. As of the time you’re reading this. the original negative and soundtrack of Song of the South are sitting, peacefully intact, in Disney’s film vaults, and a few miles away in Burbank, the original B&W, non-colorized version of Yankee Doodle Dandy is kept by Warners.
That was the truce between art and commerce. That truce line assumed that artists would always be on the side of freedom, and companies would always be on the side of censorship. Bluntly, it was a parent/child relationship and for most of a century, it basically worked. The system wasn’t set up for a situation where art and commerce went to the same colleges, read the same magazines, and essentially thought alike.
So what happened to colorization? It’s there today, it works better than ever, but it’s still rarely used, even as black and white film prints—and our memories—fade. Contrary to Martin Scorsese’s fears, the studios holding rights to historically significant black and white films didn’t knock themselves out in a mad rush to offend purists by colorizing classic films that only purists would pay to see anyway.
Nobody’s even rushing to colorize classic old TV shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show, Sgt. Bilko, or The Honeymooners. Fifty, sixty years after they first aired, people know how old they are, and are accustomed to them in their original form. One minor exception has been very specific, two ABC shows of the early ‘60s, Combat! and Twelve O’ Clock High. Some episodes of both shows were colorized, the rationale being they were World War II shows with a lot of stock footage that already defined them as part of the past.
One episode of I Love Lucy has been colorized twice, giving us a look at how much the artistry behind the technology has improved. IMHO, the outstanding example of what intelligent colorization can do for a movie is They Shall Not Grow Old, which used a variety of novel techniques to turn World War I footage, and our faded memories into a new-for-the-first-time vivid sense that these weren’t mere flickering, herky-jerky shadows on the screen, but men as they actually lived, people once as real as you or me.
Make no mistake about it, turning World War One imagery into color is adding something that wasn’t there to begin with. But paradoxically, it restores an image to a lifelike, if imprecise, and better impression of reality.
Altered Images (aside from being the name of an ‘80s band) will be a short series of posts revealing how, well, motion picture images are altered, with a specific emphasis on changing reality. The next post in the series is likely to be about image smoothing, or frame rate adjustment, and why this seemingly obscure, subliminal technique is going to be important to the way we see the past. Soon we’ll get to how films as diverse as Citizen Kane, In the Line of Fire, and Zelig use these techniques on once-real, now-altered footage.
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Even in my day–generationally, EJ’s as well, though he’s a couple of years younger–men were advised to wear light blue rather than white shirts on color TV. He’s right–it was tough to light and photograph pure white (and silver, BTW). In 1971 I had a lighting class with Imero Fiorentino. Immy was then one of the country’s top experts at lighting for color. He had funny stories. One was about a TV special he’d done two years earlier with Pearl Bailey and Carol Channing. Their skin tones could not have been more contrasty, and the wardrobe designer played into that with pure white and black gowns. It drove Fiorentino nuts. The designer was bitchy about it. Immy was no slouch in the bitchy department either, and he had the clout to win. The white gown was washed IIRC in weak tea, anything to take it down a few footcandles.
Screw the vault! I’ve got a trio of laserdisc boxes of the original trilogy just the way George made ’em (and better than George re-made ’em). They are, of course NTSC; old, low def TV. But it’s the clearest prettiest low def picture you’ll ever see.
So very true, unfortunately.
I might be over-optimistic about the deepfakes. I don’t say they’ll never be good enough. of course they will, eventually. But we’re not there yet, and they haven’t gotten there nearly as quickly as we all figured a quarter century ago.
I have no way to play it, but I have the VCR trilogy just so I can tell my kids that I have proof that the truth can be manipulated by later “deep fakes”…..
A wonderful and fascinating post, @garymcvey, and I agree with you 100% about We Shall Not Grow Old. Were “history” not so out-of-favor in our educational institutions at the moment, I think it should be required viewing, repeatedly, at all of them.
I have my own issues with colorization, which stem from the fact that I didn’t own a color TV until 1981. When mum and dad went back to the UK three years before that, I inherited the 15″ black-and-white that had served us well for many years, and it wasn’t until that gave up the ghost that I and (by then) Mr. She went looking for a new one, my first experience with color on the small screen.
Since neither my birth nor married family was big on lavish spending for entertainment purposes (and since I’d grown up in several places that didn’t even offer such) and since I’ve never been much of a frequenter of movie theaters, almost all the movies I’d ever seen until I was in my late-twenties were, therefore, in black and white. And I regularly experience a small frisson of irritation when I revisit and oldie-but-goodie, to see that it’s in color. “Damn them,” I say to myself. “This movie was much better in black and white. Why’d they have to mess with it?”
Then, the penny drops . . .
The first decade or so of computer colorizarions were truly horrid — tepid colors or incorrect ones thrown on top of the original monochrome gave the whole thing a sickly washed-out look. The colorization efforts of the past 20 or so years have been far better in matching the colors with what could have been there in real life, even if there are still aesthetic or ethical concerns in changing the original vision of the people making the movies or TV shows.
(The other thing is that for B&W film, color choices were made based on how those colors ‘read’ in B&W, and not for how visually pleasing they were on set. From the TV era, there’s the famous image of the set of “The Addams Family” where the walls and rug look like they could have come from some live-action “My Little Pony” movie, because pink read as gloomy gray on black & white film, while a decade earlier George Burns wasn’t going to pay to repaint the set for one test color episode of “Burns & Allen” so the inside and outside walls of the Burnses’ home are covered in unappealing green paint or wallpaper:)
50, 60 years ago, NBC used to run The Wizard of Oz once a year. (NBC’s parent company, RCA, was the principal investor in developing color television, and was stuck with the job of getting it to break even). So each year, a relative handful of families discovered for the first time that the movie changes to color.
Even in adult life, while watching reruns I was surprised that The Adventures of Superman was in color; in its original run in the Fifties, only perhaps one out of 100 viewers saw it that way.
Video games and other non-capture content (like animated films, for example) have been gradually shifting from SDR to HDR since 4K TVs introduced broader color gamuts in HDR. There have been problems with both technical and creative aspects during the transition.
The main technical problem is arguably that 4K and 8K TVs vary significantly in regard to which parts of the light spectrum they display and how well they communicate the color data they receive. As I’ve written before, human vision can detect more hues of green than any other color but that is not a strength of most televisions. Some TVs can be brighter or darker. Some better represent particular colors. Some have slower image decay and refresh rates.
The creative problem is what bothers me more. I carefully researched 4K TVs before buying one and selected mine more for the HDR color than for the 4K resolution. My hope was to see richer colors and striking contrasts — which are evident in the photography TV manufacturers display in store showcases and video demonstrations.
But film makers and game designers generally have more ease and interest in focusing on “darker darks, brighter brights.” The result is dark scenes that require you to view the content in a darkened room or else blindingly bright scenes. They are so fascinated with shadows that you can’t see half the stuff they want you to see.
The difference is more noticeable with gaming because the ability of gamers to take screen captures provides us with clear comparisons of the same image in both SDR and HDR.
Lose the shaky cam and properly light the set. Most “fight” scenes in today’s movies are smudgy blurs.
Plus there’s a very subtle touch of class snobbery that, in all fairness, the filmmakers may be unaware of: at work and at home, they’ve got the best screens money can buy. When they look at their own stuff, they glory in the look. It doesn’t occur to them that not everyone else’s set is going to be able to resolve the detail in the folds of a black velvet cloak concealed in shadows at the end of a matte black corridor thirty yards long.
I enjoy quite a few programs in black and white. Perry Mason, The Addams Family…
It’s sometimes amazing how sharp some of the old black and white movies are compared to how crappy some TV from the 80’s is.
Give Burke’s Law, the original 60s version, a try. One great thing about the onset of digital TV has been the sudden proliferation of subchannels, giving local TV stations (and cable systems) the extra channel room to make possible national rerun networks like H&I (Heroes and Idols), Tuff, Grit, and dozens of other ad-supported stations that, frankly, can’t afford to show you anything that costs much. It’s given some commercial value back to the older stuff.
As some of the photo buffs on this thread can attest, like @skipsul, black and white is often literally sharper because the film is almost always “faster” (more light sensitive) than color. If you shoot 35mm film at, say, f/16, unless you can quadruple the lights, you might have to film the same scene in color at f/5.6, and the two members of the camera team who measure and control the focus have a much harder job, with narrower margins for error. If you’re working for Stanley Kubrick, you’d just do the shot seventy times until it was perfect. If you’re on a Universal sound stage in 1974, you’ll accept take five even if the focus is a little soft.
Dr. Who was filmed in color (colour?) from the Jon Pertwee years onward. But the BBC was in the habit of destroying old footage after broadcast, so many of the original color recordings of Pertwee’s episodes are gone, and what survived were only in B&W copies that were made for distribution to commonwealth stations around the world (some wealthier stations did order color recordings, also aiding in later restoration).
With some unusual exceptions:
There was a distribution company here in the US called Lionheart, who took the original episodes, which were 1/2 serials, and stitched together story line sequences into a continuous story, without breaks for credits (they did this too for other serials like Blake’s 7). These were often aired on PBS stations in the 80s and early 90s – usually late on Saturday nights when PBS knew it wasn’t in any position to compete with the Big 3/4 networks – it was filler. Many of the Pertwee color episodes survived only in those forms.
One of the really great (and longest) story lines of that era was Inferno. I saw the whole thing in color in the Lionheart form, and it took I think 3 hours (most arcs, once stitched together, were about 2+ hours).
Well, a couple of years later the BBC released Inferno on VHS, in its episodic form. True to Beeb price gouging standards of the time, the 2 cassette set was $40 (in 1997!), a ridiculous price. And true to Beeb form, it was only the black and white version. I don’t know if they finally tracked down the color later or not – it might be on Britbox, or they still might be stubbornly only making the black and white available. But the color version was saved out there, somewhere, and may still be in various PBS vaults.
The video collectors were in a dilemma: they wanted to let the world know these episodes hadn’t been lost, but they were also wary of being prosecuted for owning bootlegged material. The BBC did something smart: it not only offered amnesty, but turned it into an annual event at the National Film Theatre. Collectors who came forward were celebrated and publicized. It’s a real case of honey catching more flies than vinegar.
Hollywood should do the same. Perhaps we can recall some greats that have been lost.
But I know the studio lawyers would not allow that because it would endorse future content theft.
Almost half of hmm, well, some studio’s employees are lawyers.
Agree. I hate when a show is striving for some mood that makes them film dimly-lit scenes so that you cannot see the picture well unless you are in a windowless room or at night.
Good grief, yes. I hate the damn shaky cam.
Another fine article, Gary. You are one of Ricochet’s treasures.
How could I help but “Like” that comment? Thanks, Randy. You were really the person most responsible for getting me a Contributor line. I’d like to justify that trust.
Judging by the ads I used to see when I watched Big Ten basketball on TV with my wife before covid, I thought we were on our way back to monochrome anyway, with a dark bluish palette being used to make everything dark and unpleasant. I also get this idea from watching YouTubers explain how to use DaVinci Resolve to give your video footage a “cinematic” look. Bleah. It would be better if they just went black and white.
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How about the pulsing ambient soundtrack music used so often that is so bass-y it rattles the speakers and the TV?
At least when you are watching a movie at home, you can adjust the volume up and down and up and down. I’ve mentioned this before in a Gary McVey movie post; I have read that the number one complaint of movie goers is the volume. Gary said it is the director who is typically to blame for movies where in order to hear dialog the volume has to be turned up to a certain level, then when there is an action scene or even just an orchestral interlude the volume is so high it is painful. When I saw Bladerunner 2049 it was so [expletive] loud I actually put my fingers in my ears during parts of it. Looking around the theater, I wasn’t the only one.
It’s true; it’s never, ever loud enough for the director. I knew a projectionist who ran an out-of-town test screening of The Good Mother in 1988. Leonard Nimoy was the director and he kept coming up to the booth to ask him to turn up the sound. Nimoy was also increasingly drunk as the evening went on. Both are common reactions of directors to test screenings.
But you turn the volume down, and the dialogue also goes down. To my ears, the music in TV is way too loud, in relation to the dialogue.
And I may be an oddball, because I would prefer no music in movies or TV shows, except during the credits.
TV shows here in Korea rely on music SO much to set moods, it’s startling.
Right, that’s my point. It’s better to watch some movies at home because then at least you can turn the volume up to hear the dialogue, and turn it down when the music or car crash is too loud, then turn it up again when people are talking. In the theater, you just have to endure it and curse the director.
Often they are going at the same time. That’s my experience. Otherwise, I just turn the “gurgling stomach” music down, like ye said.
Mumble mumble mumble BLARING CRESCENDO OF MUSIC mumble mumble mumble ACTION SEQUENCE!!!! mumble mumble mumble mumble
This was my wife’s description of trying to see Tenet in the theaters.
This really bugs me. A lot of movies and shows are just too darn dark.
Gary, thank you for another simply fantastic and informative post. I think I learn more from you than from anyone else @ Ricochet.
As the old saying goes, there is nothing worse than a drunken Vulcan.