If you have the requisite cones and rods, the moment is imprinted on your retina: Dorothy Gale awakens from a nasty bump on the head, opens the door of her drab sepia-toned farmhouse, and crosses over into an eye-popping realm of dazzling primary colors — ruby slippers, yellow brick roads and emerald cities.
Not only aren’t we in Kansas anymore, we aren’t in Hollywood anymore, at least not the usual black and white palette of all but 15 feature films that year. The portal into Oz did not open the curtain on cinematic color — nor was it alone in showcasing the polychromatic spectrum that year — 1939, after all, also saw the release of Gone With the Wind, whose painterly swatches of shimmering golden-hour hues made Oz look garish. But The Wizard of Oz drew the most vivid contrast between two possible screen worlds, a grim monochromatic Depression-scape and what was called (the modifier was almost part of the trademark) Glorious Technicolor.
The news of Technicolor’s fall in recent weeks is the latest melancholy death notice for a venerable Hollywood logo, this one part of the language. In 1965, when twenty-two of Hollywood’s twenty-five all-time box office hits were shot in Technicolor, the word entered Webster’s Dictionary, albeit with a small “t,” a diminution that, if repeated in a newspaper, would be corrected by a copyright lawyer.
Hollywood always got the spelling right. In its glorious days, Technicolor was billed in the opening credits, often celebrated with its own title card, and spotlit in posters and lobby cards in splashy red-blue-yellow lettering. In 1941, fed up with the drumbeat of ballyhoo for films shot “In Glorious Technicolor,” writer-director Preston Sturges tried to get Paramount to preface Sullivan’s Travels (1941) with a title card reading “In Beautiful Black and White.” The studio nixed the idea.
Full-spectrum color had been a photographic dream since the first Daguerreotypes, and early moviemakers were no less determined to conjure a celluloid canvas that reflected life in all its splendor. Silent films tried it with tinting (basically dumping a negative into a tub of dye) and coloring (frame by frame hand stenciling), but the aspiration was to capture the image in the camera on the celluloid film stock. In 1911, motion picture pioneer John J. Murdock invested $6,000,000 into a company called Kinemacolor, which used red and green filters in photography and projection. The process was plagued by “fringing” — double imaging that might make a horse’s tail seem first green and then red.
Technicolor — the first practical and commercially successful solution — was the invention and life’s work of Herbert T. Kalmus, a brilliant chemical engineer trained at MIT and the University of Zurich. In 1915, he founded the Technicolor Motion Picture Corp. and applied himself with Edison-like dedication to the development (in both sense of the term) of color photography. An early iteration of Technicolor (“a double coated relief image in dyes”) was showcased in the miscegenetic melodrama The Toll of the Sea (1922), produced by Joseph and Nicholas Schenck, directed by Chester Franklin, and starring eighteen-year-old Anna May Wong, whose own hues were neither black not white. “The silks and the kimonos registered perfectly,” observed Billboard. “None of the objectionable features which entered into the making of other color films are noticeable here. There are no raw fringes [and] no quivering flashes of red.” Along with brief sequences in The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Ben-Hur (1926), Douglas Fairbanks’ counterintuitively titled The Black Pirate (1926) raised the profile of the Technicolor brand. Neither Kalmus nor Fairbanks could “imagine piracy without color.”
As Kalmus hustled to sell Technicolor, he continued to experiment with different filming and developing techniques, incrementally improving color registration and dye transfer. In 1926, he and his crew (Technicolor historians give much of the credit for key innovations to the gifted scientists and technicians he employed) devised a special Technicolor camera that used a beam splitter to separate red and green light onto a single strip of black and white film. The developing phase in the Technicolor laboratory then used what Kalmus (who seems to have assumed everyone shared his expertise in dye transfer systems) described as a “two-component subtractive inhibition process” meaning the colored dye was “imbibed” — that is, absorbed — to create the negative from which to strike prints.
The two-color Technicolor process was, for a time, enormously successful. Technicolor cameras “operated day and night,” recalled Kalmus, who estimated that some 40 shorts and features were produced during the two-color boom, including King of Jazz (1929), starring cultural appropriater Paul Whiteman; Whoopee! (1930), starring banjo-eyed comedian Eddie Cantor; and Warner Bros.’ Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). But graininess and garishness killed the vogue. “It hurts the eyes,” complained moviegoers.
The big breakthrough came in 1932 with development of the three-strip Technicolor process by Technicolor vice president and technical director J. Arthur Ball, the format usually thought of as classic Technicolor. Not to get too technical (as if I could), the three-strip Technicolor process required the exposure of three negatives in the camera, each of which ran behind a single lens; a prism then split the light from the image onto the three separate negatives — green, red, and blue, respectively. In the developing lab, in a method akin to lithographic dye printing, the three dyes were applied separately to the film base for the “imbibition” process (hence the less tongue-twisting shorthand “IB Technicolor”). With his, Technicolor had reached its peak configuration, what an admirer called “a complete studio and laboratory service, from filming to the production of release prints.”
Once Technicolor was perfected, the problem was to get Hollywood to gamble on the exquisitely exacting and expensive process (three to four times more costly than reliable black and white); to rent Kalmus’s Technicolor cameras (which cost $30,000 and weighed 750 pounds); and use his Technicolor labs.
The far-sighted Walt Disney was Kalmus’s first big client. In 1932, Disney signed a contract to produce the next year’s slate of Silly Symphonies cartoons in Technicolor, which paid off early with a special Academy Award for the seven-minute Flowers and Trees (1932). “Easy on the eyes,” said Variety. “Maybe the color technicians can explain why that is.” However, the Disney cartoon that confirmed Technicolor as the format of choice for animation was the Great Depression sensation The Three Little Pigs (1933), where the Big Bad Wolf huffs and puffs until he is literally blue in the face. The next year, Pioneer Pictures head John Hay (“Jock”) Whitney beat out Disney to produce the first live-action musical short in Technicolor, La Cucaracha (1934), which “flooded the screen with rich and glowing color harmonies never before realized!”
Of course, the live-action feature film was the real market to crack. Again, Whitney first rolled the dice with Becky Sharp (1935), the picaresque tale of “a late Napoleon-era strumpet” directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Mamoulian flourished his new set of watercolors in an extravagant ballroom sequence set on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo — a kaleidoscope of ladies swirling in blue, green, and yellow gowns and men strutting in bright red uniforms. Spellbound audiences burst into spontaneous applause. “Up to now, the moving picture industry has been like an artist allowed to use only pencil,” said Mamoulian. “Technicolor has given us paints.” Watching Becky Sharp, the critic for the New York Post heard “the death knell of black and white pictures.”
The obituary was premature, but Technicolor made steady progress in the next few years, mainly in genres trafficking in escapism — musicals, costume dramas, travelogues and animation. Walter Wanger’s Vogues of 1938 (1937) received better reviews for the multi-colored fashion parades than for the pallid musical numbers. The Goldwyn Follies (1938) was so successful that an exuberant Sam Goldwyn declared that henceforth all his films would be in Technicolor, a pledge he reneged on. For The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) not even Technicolor was more of an attraction than Errol Flynn in tights, but moviegoers were also urged to appreciate no fewer than 1182 Technicolored “figures in flowing capes, brocade vestments, and various shades of satin.”
The publicity for Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the first feature length Technicolor cartoon, emphasized that the animation was shot “in marvelous multiplane Technicolor,” meaning that the camera was mounted to shoot downward with the lens above the horizontal drawing board to give the illusion of depth.
If Herbert Kalmus was the scientific genius behind Technicolor, it was his wife Natalie who was the high priestess of its aesthetic conventions. As head of the Color Advisory Service of Technicolor, she laid down the law for the proper use of the color scheme. (Herbert and Natalie had a complicated relationship: married in 1902, they officially divorced in 1921, but the couple continued to work and live together. In lieu of community property, presumably, Natalie chose to stay active with a day job: she came with the camera, the film stock, and the lab.) “She can split the spectrum as easily as a film executive can split an infinitive,” quipped The New York Times in 1939, lauding her as the “ringmaster to the rainbow” and “chatelaine of three Technicolor factories.”
By all accounts, Mrs. Kalmus was a strong personality with firm opinions, qualities that did not endear her to art directors, set designers, and directors. She adhered to her own grand theories of “laws of emphasis” and “color separation” that determined how color should enhance a film’s dramatic mood but never draw undue attention to itself. Kalmus drew up a famous chart where specific colors were yoked to emotions. Scarlet was “the come-hither color,” blue “represents peace harmony and home,” and green was “both a sedative and a stimulant depending on the person.” Photoplay published her color codes so shopgirls and housewives, like movie stars, could get “the right color vibrations which will help you along the road to success and happiness.”
Under Hollywood’s star system, Rule Number 1 was that the color scheme of the mise en scène should be built around the looks of the lead actress — her hair, eyes, complexion, and costume. As with the transition to sound, to which the onset of Technicolor was often compared, some actresses fared better than others under the new lens. The luxurious red hair and fiery green eyes of Maureen O’Hara were picture perfect for a three-strip closeup. Another redhead, Rita Hayworth, was hailed as “nature’s gift to Technicolor,” who was not to be confused with Joan Bennett, then in her blonde period, who was “god’s gift to the Technicolor cameraman,” or with green-eyed brunette Yvonne De Carlo, who was “Hollywood’s Number One Technicolor Girl.” By contrast, Joan Crawford, another natural redhead, did not shimmer in Technicolor: she had a face for black and white.
Predictably, old school Hollywood filmmakers — actually, they were all old school — resented Kalmus’s big-foot interference. On location for Gold Is Where You Find It (1938), the irascible Hungarian import Michael Curtiz yelled, “Mrs. Kalmus don’t shoot my goddamn picture!”
As filmmakers became more confident with their own eye for Technicolor, they rebelled against the Kalmus codes. “Technicolor wanted light every place, under the table, God knows where else,” recalled the veteran cinematographer, Stanley Cortez. Producer David O. Selznick and costume designer Walter Plunkett found Kalmus’s costume suggestions for Gone With the Wind far too drab, so they went over her head to Herbert to get the desired results in the lab. Vincente Minnelli ignored Kalmus’s advice to tone it down for Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), with astonishing results. “Technicolor has seldom been more affectionately used than in its registration of the sober mahoganies and tender muslins and benign gaslights of the period,” marveled film critic James Agee.
Not even World War II stopped the yearly uptick in the production of Technicolor films: 50 were on the slate for 1944-1945. Although the motion picture memory of the war is in newsreel black and white, Technicolor was used to valorize America’s warriors, as if the prestige format should not be reserved exclusively for Hollywood entertainment. Military-made combat reports such as At the Front in North Africa with the U.S. Army (1942), The Battle of Midway (1942), With the Marines at Tarawa (1944), and To the Shores of Iwo Jima (1945) all got the full 35mm Technicolor treatment after filming on the battlefield. (The Pacific Theater received more color coverage than the European Theater because the color film stock could be refrigerated on battleships.)
Far and away the most popular of the Technicolor combat films was William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle (1944), the story of a B-17 on its 25th mission over Nazi Germany. Shot on hand-held Cine-Kodak cameras using 16mm Kodachrome film, the film was enlarged to 35mm and processed at the Technicolor lab in Hollywood. Fifty prints were struck for what was billed as “the Technicolor saga of our air heroes.” “If the quality of the color suffers by comparison with that of the standard Technicolor brand, it is understandable since at no time were the camera boys able to get set for the fast and furious action they were seeing before them,” explained The Hollywood Reporter.
Kalmus’s reign as queen bee of Technicolor ended in 1950, when her idiosyncratic relationship with Herbert became a legal matter. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1952 ruled she was not entitled to be a full partner in Technicolor.
With Natalie Kalmus out of the picture, swatches of Technicolor lost all inhibitions. In the 1950s, along with widescreen spectacle and casts of thousands, its brushstrokes were brandished to lure viewers away from the pitifully small black and white square in the living room. The tactic was memorably satirized in Cole Porter’s tune for MGM’s musical Silk Stockings (1957), “Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking Cinemascope, and Stereophonic Sound,” a number that was only two-thirds self-reflexive because it was shot in Metrocolor.
Metrocolor — see also Warnercolor — was one of the many rival color processes that emerged to compete with Technicolor in the 1950s. Most were variants of Eastmancolor, introduced by Kodak in 1950. Cheaper and more convenient, Eastmancolor used a single-color negative with three light sensitive emulsions. In tandem with rival developing labs that used less expensive but more unstable dyes, the new color processes edged out the old one.
The last American film made in the classic Technicolor process was Universal International’s Foxfire (1955), starring the raven-haired Jane Russell and the silver-haired Jeff Chandler. It marked the end of the three-strip Technicolor era, a fact that went unmentioned in reviews and ads.
Kalmus being Kalmus, he introduced a new process to compete with Eastmancolor. “The advent of an improved new Technicolor process is a milestone not a terminus,” he insisted in a company history written for The Hollywood Reporter in 1955 for Technicolor’s fortieth anniversary. His new Technicolor camera used a single negative, but the imbibition process was retained for striking prints.
But Eastmancolor was the format of the future. For Technicolor, it was a slow fade out. The Technicolor imprint seen on the films that followed — “Color by Technicolor” or “Prints by Technicolor” — did not necessarily designate the full-service camera-to-lab process, just the lab work. In the 1970s, finally defeated by the low-ball alternatives, Technicolor shut down its labs in Hollywood, Rome, and London. When the London plant sold off its equipment to China, Variety couldn’t resist the headline: “Technicolor Sells Plant to Red Chinese.”
After a hiatus of twenty years, however, the original Technicolor dye transfer process was revived and refined for Batman and Robin (1997) and then used in a handful of other films such as Godzilla (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), and Pearl Harbor (2001). The brief rebirth ended in 2001 when Thomson Multimedia acquired the company and pulled the plug.
By then, digital technologies were supplanting not just the imbibition process but celluloid. “The [Technicolor] technology is basically extinct,” laments James Layton, archivist at the George Eastman House and author, with David Pierce, of The Dawn of Technicolor 1915-1935, published in 2015, who likens each Technicolor print to a unique work of art hanging in a museum. Once it is gone, it cannot be replaced.
Yet Technicolor has gotten a posthumous revenge of sorts. A vintage Technicolor print retains its luster and color separation; old Eastmancolor circa 1950-1975 bleeds into washed-out pinks. In 1980, director Martin Scorsese recalled the trauma of watching a retrospective in inglorious Eastmancolor “It was a horror show,” he shuddered, “an absolute horror show.”
Today, an entire generation of moviegoers may never have seen a 35mm Technicolor print shining through the gates of a projector — hence the melancholy dedication film historian Fred E. Basten makes in his invaluable Glorious Technicolor: The Movies’ Magic Rainbow, published in 1980: to “the future millions [of moviegoers] who probably will never see that glorious color on the motion picture screen.” The only way to behold the glory that was Technicolor is to seek out a repertory house or museum with the wherewithal and color consciousness to mount a series on the lost art. In 2024, for example, the Vista Theater in Los Angeles programmed a month-long menu of films in I.B. Technicolor culled from Quentin Tarantino’s personal collection.
One afflicted subset of the moviegoing population — around 8 percent of males and 1 percent of females— has a special reason to seek out the format: color blind people report that they can see gradations of color in a Technicolor film they cannot see in real life. Trust me on this.
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