Ethan Trex
How (and Why) Are Black and White Films Colorized?
by Ethan Trex - January 25, 2011 - 11:11 AM

Anyone who spent time flipping channels and watching movies on cable during the 1980s and early 1990s probably remembers screening a few colorized films. The films, which had originally been shot in black-and-white, didn’t look quite the same as “real” color movies, but they seemed a bit more familiar than the old black-and-white prints. How did that colorization process work, though? Let’s take a look at the controversial technique.

Early film colorization dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. These processes were decidedly low-tech, though; artists would hand color copies of films before sending them to theaters. The computerized colorization process with which we’re familiar didn’t come into play until former NASA engineer Wilson Markle invented it in 1970. Markle’s first project involved adding color to the original moon landing footage, but he gradually turned his eye to commercial projects and founded Colorization, Inc. in 1983.

Markle’s process required a lot of technology, but its underlying concept was simple and fairly elegant. His technicians would make a copy of a film and feed it into a computer that would determine the precise shade of gray of every object in a scene. The technicians then used a palette of over 4,000 shades of color to color the first frame in each scene. For each successive frame, technicians only had to recolor any pixels that had moved.

The process wasn’t completely digitized, though. The technicians had to figure out what color to assign to certain objects in each scene. As the Museum of Broadcast Communications notes, some objects would get their colors assigned via common sense (e.g. the ocean is usually blue), but others required technicians to engage in a bit of movie archaeology. Studio photographs of productions and romps through studio costume shops often helped determine what color a prop or costume really was. If those methods failed, technicians could fall back on coloring items at their own discretion. As you might expect, this process wasn’t cheap; it set producers back upwards of $3,000 per minute of film.

Why did studios and copyright holders go to all the trouble of colorizing films? It was an easy way to breathe new life into their back catalogs. Audiences didn’t want to watch old black-and-white films, but they would show up in droves for colorized versions. The Museum of Broadcast Communications cites a 1988 Variety report that estimated the cost of colorizing a feature film was somewhere around $300,000. The average revenue generated by re-releasing the films topped $500,000, though.

It’s easy to see why studios loved colorization. What business wouldn’t like a little trick where it could nearly double its investment just by dusting off an old product it had sitting on the shelf? Filmmakers weren’t as crazy about it, though. They had spent hundreds of hours painstakingly crafting their films, and they didn’t want anyone mucking around with their visuals.

Ted Turner was perhaps the most visible proponent of colorizing films throughout the 1980s. Turner International owned a gigantic library of old films, and Turner reasonably saw these old movies as a potential cash cow.

This position didn’t endear Turner to directors, though. In 1985, Turner announced that he was considering colorizing Citizen Kane. Orson Welles was in failing health by then, but just a few weeks before he died he asked a friend, “Don’t let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons.” Turner eventually opted not to touch Citizen Kane.

Other filmmakers had tougher sledding in battles over colorization. In 1988, Turner International licensed the French broadcast rights to John Huston’s 1950 film noir masterpiece The Asphalt Jungle to La Cinq. Huston had died the previous year, but his daughter, actress Anjelica, was horrified at the thought of her father’s dark heist film being colorized. She sued in France to stop the airing of the colorized version of the film.

Huston initially won a lower court ruling, but after a series of appeals her case ended up in front of the French Supreme Court. Finally, in 1991, the court ruled in favor of Huston by saying that creators and their heirs had a “moral right” to determine the ultimate fate of their works of art. (It’s worth noting that not all artists loathed the colorization process; Cary Grant was said to be a big fan of the 1985 re-release of his 1937 comedy Topper.)

By the early 90s, though, film colorization had pretty much burned out as a hot-button Hollywood issue. Audiences stopped clamoring for colorized versions of classics, and such an expensive process needed strong, steady demand to remain lucrative. Colorized versions of movies still pop up occasionally – Legend Films released a new colorized DVD of It’s a Wonderful Life in 2007 – but the raging debate from the 80s is all but dead.

More from mental_floss…

7 Hollywood Ripoffs With Titles (and Posters, and Plots) You Won’t Believe
*
America’s Jiminy Crickett: The Ted Turner Story
*
10 Works of Literature That Were Really Hard to Write
*
Weird Moments in TV History: The Max Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion Incident

twitterbanner.jpg

« Previous Post   -   Next Post »
Click here to get a Risk-Free issue of mental_floss magazine
Comments (38)

  1. 3-D is new colorization

    posted by 9-Fingered Frodo on 1-25-2011 at 11:53 am

  2. I love old black and white films…especially the musicals. You didn’t need special effects and gimmicks to carry it.

    posted by Meg on 1-25-2011 at 12:05 pm

  3. Put me firmly in the camp of equating colorization to using crayons. Great line from Orson Welles. I also get a kick out of technicians doing prop research. What did they do when they found out a significant background prop was painted bright yellow or flaming orange and totally out of context within its scene? Off the wall colors were commonlly used by directors to create a desired shade of grey. Ruinous is the best way to describe my feelings about colorization.

    posted by gwdMaine on 1-25-2011 at 12:06 pm

  4. I’m in college and love black and white movies. They should not be ‘colorized’

    posted by GH on 1-25-2011 at 12:07 pm

  5. This Christmas season I ran across a colorized version of “Miracle on 34th Street,” so I did what I always do in that circumstance — turned the “color” setting on the tv to zero so that the movie was back to black and white, and confused everyone who walked into the room and asked “why aren’t the commercials in color?”

    posted by Sam on 1-25-2011 at 12:09 pm

  6. I’m in the minority camp. There’s something about overly saturated colorized movies that appeals to me. I too love B&W movies – I’d say 80% of my Netflix queue consists of pre-1950 films – but I don’t see anything wrong with the occasional “update”, as long as the original is still available.

    I’ve heard the suggestion before of “if you don’t like it just turn off the color” but purists replied that it still looks different. I didn’t see the difference.

    One other thing – Ted Turner is someone I have an enormous aversion to for various reasons, but I can’t totally reject someone who (1) promoted colorization and (2) more importantly, came up with the absolutely excellent TCM.

    posted by tressel on 1-25-2011 at 12:16 pm

  7. It’s a shame that “It’s a Wonderful Life” was ever colorized. Jimmy Stewart was a staunch advocate against the process and a big advocate FOR film preservation.

    posted by nihil on 1-25-2011 at 12:40 pm

  8. “tougher sledding”. HA!

    posted by John on 1-25-2011 at 1:15 pm

  9. They don’t colorize the teeth… they are still in black and white. ICK!

    posted by LA on 1-25-2011 at 1:21 pm

  10. The biggest thing I have against colorization is that it destroys the work of the Directory of Photography. Some of my favorite old movies were visually designed by DPs who knew how to get great nuance out of Black & White film. Also, B & W horror movies just look creepier in B & W. Seeing “Psycho” or “Turn of the Screw” in color would dull the impact of these films considerably. Plus, would “Young Frankenstein” have been as funny in color as B & W? I think not. Blucher!

    posted by Tim S. on 1-25-2011 at 1:25 pm

  11. I hate hate hate the re-colored Night of The Living Dead. It looks horrible to me. I’m not opposed to it being done, but when it sometimes becomes hard to find a B&W copy of a beloved movie, I heartily oppose the process.

    posted by Sarah on 1-25-2011 at 1:39 pm

  12. While I can agree that colorizing classic films is a big no-no (and really, what’s so bad about black and white, anyway?), I have to admit that, given the choice, I prefer the Guy Williams Disney Zorro TV show colorized over black and white. The crazy costumes Don Diego wore are so much more enjoyable in the bright blues, reds, and yellows.

    posted by WVC on 1-25-2011 at 1:41 pm

  13. The article omits a huge facet of this era: there were even congressional hearings on the colorizing of black and white movies. Directors like Steven Spielberg, James Stewart, Woody Allen, John Huston and George Lucas testified before Congress in order to enact legislation that would protect artists from having their work defaced as well as ensuring the public had access to classic films–their cultural heritage–in the original form. This was sought through entering the Berne Convention for the issue of Moral Rights, a law which exists in many European countries. The United States did eventually recognize the Berne treaty, but this wasn’t extended to motion pictures because of their complex and collaborative nature. Hollywood had failed. Which is why George Lucas today gets away with altering the Star Wars films and suppressing their original forms–there was no law passed that would have stopped people like him. His younger self, however, fought against the very things his future self would do, not even a decade later. In 1988, Lucas issued a statement before Congress. In it, he gives a very heartfelt and passionate speech about the importance of cinematic preservation, with a level of verve and anger that the reserved Lucas could have only found within himself through a prepared statement. He rails on copyright owners for distorting and altering films, and he highlights, more than once, that films belong to the public. Copyright owners are merely custodians, he argues, and it is to the public that cinematic heritage belongs. He urges Congress to enact law in order to protect American cultural heritage and preserve films as they were. He also offers an eerily prophetic warning: that technologies were on their way that would allow copyright owners to insert younger actors, alter the music and color, and change scenes to suit the philosophic tastes of the moment, as well as making new digital negatives at the expense of the original version materials. In short, everything that Lucas would later do with the Special Editions.

    posted by MattG on 1-25-2011 at 2:24 pm

  14. I would like to see more films being released on dvd that have a colorized/uncolorized option like dubs vs subtitles. Some films used b&w artistically and some used it because it was all they had but being a classic movie fan I rarely see the improvement. A lot of colorized films look smudgier and less crisp to me than the original untouched.

    posted by Angela on 1-25-2011 at 2:29 pm

  15. Black and white cartoons had it even worse. In the 60′s and 70′s the early black and white Looney Tunes shorts got colorized by literally re-drawing them. The result was a sloppy neon-colored mess that not only looked terrible, but also wrecked the timing and animation. Fleischers’ Popeye and Betty Boop shorts suffered the same fate- the process effectively destroyed the amazing special effects the Fleischers were fond of. Sadly, that’s how first knew the Popeye shorts… talk about a bad first impression!

    posted by C.H. on 1-25-2011 at 2:44 pm

  16. I honestly don’t care one way or the other. I like black and white films. I like color films. I like colorized films. But I can see the artists’ complaints about having their work tampered with.

    posted by Heather on 1-25-2011 at 2:56 pm

  17. I received a 2 DVD pack for Christmas a couple of years ago – it had both original and colourized versions of “It’s a Wonderful Life”. After watching the colourized one once out of curiosity, I always find myself watching the B&W one now.

    posted by Kie on 1-25-2011 at 2:58 pm

  18. I like that the picture of Ted Turner is in black and white.

    posted by Patten on 1-25-2011 at 3:47 pm

  19. I hate colorized movies. I am not a purist or anything, but the original work was designed to be in B&W. There is just something in the B&W version that gets lost when they add colors. The mood or intensity of the scene can really change alot when they add color.

    I am glad to see people have grown tired of this.

    posted by Morris on 1-25-2011 at 4:07 pm

  20. One other reason for colorization: copyrights. Many of the films in question were/are public domain. By colorizing it, the colorized version would be played up as more desirable, while not being vulnerable to having EP VHS copies distributed at every grocery store for $1.99.

    Another funny story about color: I’ve heard that some stations air reruns of color Andy Griffith episodes in B&W, as many fans of the show felt the (later) color episodes to be inferior. Since the audience doesn’t know they’re watching a post shark-jump episode, they’re still happy to see it.

    posted by Dave on 1-25-2011 at 4:09 pm

  21. I love the old black and white films, i dont want to see them in color, ;-)

    posted by jennifer on 1-25-2011 at 4:25 pm

  22. I’d like colorized films a lot more if the final product didn’t look so God-awful. You’d think with all the digital magic available nowadays, they’d be able to make Jimmy Stewart look better than that.

    posted by Tim on 1-25-2011 at 5:02 pm

  23. I get really tired of this “artistic vision” argument against colorization. The reason the movies were in black and white — usually, anyway — is that’s what they had to work with. They didn’t have or couldn’t afford color film or the Technicolor process. It wasn’t an artistic decision. “Young Frankenstein” in black and white was an artistic decision. Having the Kansas scenes in “Wizard of Oz” in black and white and the Oz portions in color was an artistic decision. “It’s a Wonderful Life” was shot in black and white because it was low-budget.

    posted by Siobhan on 1-25-2011 at 6:47 pm

  24. @ Siobhan, that may have been all they had to work with, but they worked with it marvelously. As noted above, directors of photography expertly utilized the unique shading that black & white offered. Casablanca, my favorite movie, had stunning images utilizing shadows that would not have translated well to color. Black and white movies rule!

    posted by Tex on 1-25-2011 at 7:42 pm

  25. I can still recall the night they debuted “It’s a Wonderful Life” on TBS in color. The narrator told us “We’re not sure what color Donna Reed’s dress was originally, but doesn’t it look great in yellow!”.

    I love the old B & W (or as my 8 year old calls them “cardboard”.

    posted by gewurz on 1-25-2011 at 8:21 pm

  26. I’m so glad the trend to colorize EVERYTHING has slowed down! I prefer to watch my movies as filmed, thank you.
    About 20 years ago or so, I remember a discussion on some news program about colorizing the beginning and ending of The Wizard of Oz. What? Leave that movie alone!

    posted by Tammy King on 1-25-2011 at 8:40 pm

  27. George Lucas should de-colorize Star Wars and release it in black and white. Storm troopers would look awesome in black and white …

    posted by Derek on 1-25-2011 at 8:49 pm

  28. “Turner eventually opted not to touch Citizen Kane.
    Other filmmakers had tougher sledding in battles over colorization.”

    That jumped out at me. Nice touch :)

    posted by SeanP on 1-26-2011 at 4:15 am

  29. Wait. Let me just interject here. The ORIGINAL film was not tampered with. The original art was and is still in the exact shape the producer and director had in mind.

    The colorized versions are COPIES of the original work.

    So, what is all the hoopla about?

    posted by KJ on 1-26-2011 at 7:43 am

  30. Let’s colorize Clerks.

    posted by Dave on 1-26-2011 at 8:55 am

  31. There are legitimate uses for colorization. When the director wanted to make it in color but couldn’t afford it, for instance. The bizarre cult film “Forbidden Zone” was intended to be hand-colored, but was found to be too expensive; they recently released a colorized version.

    But this only applies when the director wants it and participates in it. Not only did Jimmy Stewart argue against colorizing “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Frank Capra did so too, I believe from his deathbed. Doing stuff like this without the approval of the artist involved is basically on the same level as vandalism.

    posted by Sillstaw on 1-26-2011 at 1:00 pm

  32. The attempted colorization of Citizen Kane is actually a more complicated and interesting story. When Turner announced he was going to colorize the movie, Welles (and then his estate) pointed out that his contract with RKO prevented alteration of the movie without the director’s permission. Of course the clause was originally intended to prevent William Randolph Hearst from conniving to mutilate the movie. But decades later it stopped another film wrecker from getting his colorful way. Crayons indeed.

    posted by Bryan on 1-26-2011 at 1:04 pm

  33. I saw Ray Harryhausen at SDCC a couple of years ago. He’s apparently spending a lot of time colorizing his back catalog using modern techniques which look less false than the older styles. According to him, in many cases, the choice of B&W over color had more to do with budgets than aesthetics; colorizing them is bringing them in line with his original vision.

    posted by Nolly on 1-26-2011 at 2:29 pm

  34. A few points:

    1) The example used by MattG is a little faulty. Sure, Lucas argued against people altering movies, but he’s perfectly allowed to alter Star Wars, which is his *own* creation.

    2) Black and white film was going out of style by the 1960′s. Remember that plenty of movies in the 30′s, such as Gone With the Wind and the Wizard of Oz, used Technicolor. Sure it may have been cheaper to use B&W film in the 1960′s, but would a film studio take this “cheap” financial risk?

    I think many films made in B&W in the 1960′s (for example, by Alfred Hitchcock) were made that way for artistic reasons. Like someone said, Psycho wouldn’t have been as creepy in color.

    For another example, let’s try colorizing Schindler’s List and see how much better it becomes. Oh, wait, it already won numerous Academy Awards, including Best Picture (like Citizen Kane did). So why in the world would any want to make it “better” by colorizing it?

    posted by John on 1-26-2011 at 2:31 pm

  35. Would colorization make the Marx Brothers or Laurel & Hardy any funnier? ‘nuf said.

    posted by Willie on 1-28-2011 at 5:48 pm

  36. I find colorization creepy. There’s something always a little off and I don’t like it. I don’t have any arguements for or against, though. You just won’t see me watching that willingly.

    posted by Wendy on 1-31-2011 at 12:08 am

  37. I want to see what the creative forces behind the film want me to see. If color adds to the film, then color it. If black & white does, then black and white it is. Then you have Conrad Hall and “Road to Perdition” which almost seems to be a mystical combination of both…and so very beautiful.
    But we don’t have any Connie Halls any more. Tom Del Ruth can come close with film…with t.v. he does about the best job around. (These two guys are DPs by the way.)

    posted by M. Forrest on 6-18-2011 at 1:31 pm

  38. My first job was at a company called Color Systems Technology and I remember colorizing a segment from “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” as one of my first big projects. We all thought that the color palette was pretty limited and made things look bad. They got better at it after I left the colorization industry. One of the fun things we did was coloring a segment of “Un Chien Andalou” for a music video. One fringe benefit of the process was that we often had new video transfers done of the films and if people turned the color off, they would actually get to watch a cleaner version of the film than had been available previously. The act of turning the color down often degraded the picture quality a little, though.

    I always thought that if people wanted to watch the b/w version, that they should of course have that choice. I would normally not choose to view a colorized version of any film.

    posted by Spacebrother on 1-13-2012 at 5:19 am

Comment

commenting policy