Black and White to Color

Factual Questions
1

What was the reasoning that most movies and television programming was black and white until the 1960’s? I know that there has been color films, going all the way back to the turn of the century, and I have also heard that the processing the film to color was an expensive process.

Why didn’t the Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind revolutionize color films? Much like 3-D films are now getting to be the norm now. Did these films make money?

So, why did this process become much cheaper by the 1960’s, and why did it take so long? It seemed like all the networks jumped in and did this all at the same time, around 1964 or so. Were there any tech issues in making a color TV set that were overcame?

It just seems strange to me that color film, pictures and TV weren’t on the scene much earlier.

2

I am guessing you answered your own question.

New technologies are expensive and difficult to obtain.

The first computers cost millions. Now you have more computing power in your phone than those early, million dollar computers. The first microwaves were expensive and beastly large machines. Now there is hardly a home in the US without one.

While some people may have gone to the expense and made color films as a novelty it was generally out of reach for most day-to-day work.

Also remember for things like television it is more than providing a color video camera to TV stations and TV show producers. You needed the broadcasters to upgrade their equipment to be able to broadcast a color signal (read expensive). They are not going to do that till there is some critical mass of consumers who can view the signal on their color TV at home and that won’t happen till the cost of color TVs becomes low enough for the majority of the population to have.

I am 43 and while color TVs had been around awhile I remember getting our first color TV in 1975 and even then we were ahead of many of my friends. Apart from the one main family color TV we had black-and-white TVs in various other rooms of the house well into the 80’s.

3

Initially, color TV was hugely complicated and involved multiple incompatible formats (much like Beta vs VHS) and awkward spinning color wheels on the cameras and on your TV.

Ultimately, the first reasonably affordable mass-produced color televisions didn’t hit the consumer market until the late 1960s, and sales of color TVs didn’t exceed sales of black and white sets until 1972 or so.

4

First of all, color films and color TV are two different issues. Many films were color by the sixties, however, color TV had only been commercialized in 1954. Since there was such a small installed base, broadcasters didn’t see the point in spending all the money to upgrade. It was NBC (whose parent company RCA made most of the early color TVs) who really pushed color TV - they required all of their affiliates to convert to color (completed in 1966), so RCA could sell more TVs. The Disney show “The Wonderful World of Color” in 1961 was the turning point in persuading people to buy color TVs in large quantities.

My father waited until 1964 to buy our first color TV, when a new generation of color TVs (using rare-earth phosphors) became available. The first show I ever saw in color was “Mighty Mouse.”

It was awesome.

5

There’s a sweet story in a book of letters to Mister Rogers from a grown woman who wrote to him about when she was a little girl and (IIRC) met him in person and he promised to wear a red sweater just for her in the next week of shows. She was broken-hearted because they didn’t have a color TV, though, so her dad took her down to the furniture store every day to watch Mister Rogers on the color TVs there until he wore a red sweater for her.

In terms of movies, cheap films like the low budget horror stuff stayed black and white for a long time because it was, you know, cheaper all around. (Cheaper film stock, cheaper processing, easier special effects, etc.) And of course plenty of films used black and white for effect.

6

As far as movie theaters, rather than TV, are concerned, the cost argument does not really hold. Shooting a film in color is not considerably more expensive than shooting it in B/W (the costs for camera equipment and the actual film material are miniscule compared to overall production cost), and the same goes for the screening of films in theaters. For cinema, the reasons why transition took so log were artistic, not commercial. After the rise of color films in the 1930s, a perception arose among both filmmakers and theater goers - especially in Europe - that color is suitable for comedies and popular entertainment in general, whereas more serious picturs with an artistic pretense should be done in B/W. This does not mean that trash was in B/W and “good” films in color - see Gone with the Wind; but many directors considering their films to be art rather than entertainment preferred B/W.

There is a similar effect right now, with many directors still preferring 2D on the grounds that they see 3D as a thing for mass entertainment overshadowing the actual cineastic value of a film.

7

There actually is a connection between the timing of the prevalance of color movies and color TV.

As the OP notes, color movies became possible quite early, but B&W movies were still quite common until just around the time that color TVs were coming out. This is not a coincidence.

What happened is that the movie studios started to see that selling the rights to show their films on TV was becoming a profitable secondary market, and it was the TV networks that very quickly decided they didn’t want to buy B&W movies because they didn’t look good on color TVs. So the movie studios stopped making them, for the most part.

8

That was the reason. People would go see B&W films as well as color. Why spend the money on a low-budget film that only has a limited audience (as most films were in the 30s and 40s)? You only did color for “prestige” films – those expected to draw a large audience and where the color might be a draw.

[qutoe]Why didn’t the Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind revolutionize color films? Much like 3-D films are now getting to be the norm now. Did these films make money?
[/quote]
Well, 3D is far from the norm; the wave is faded, though it seems to still be used for things like animated films. No one does a serious dramatic film or comedy in 3D.

And “The Wizard of Oz” was not a big hit at first. It grossed $3 million against and $2.8 million cost. If anything, it told executives to stop doing color; they could have made a bigger profit if it were in B&W (a rerelease in 1949 earned enough to make it a success and color probably contributed to the decision to do it – it it were B&W, they profit made would have been thought to be enough without another release).

The switch to color films began in earnest in the 1950s, not the 60s. Color was one thing movies could offer that TV could not (the other was widescreen). By 1960, B&W films were rare (and the low budget filler films – all B&W – were no longer made, since TV took their place). Hitchcock, for instance, made a deliberate decision to film Psycho in B&W when his previous few films were in color, as expected for the time. Anyone do did B&W in the 60s was doing it for a deliberate reason (not counting low-budget drive-in films), that didn’t involve money.

In 1961, NBC’s Satuday Night at the Movies started showing recent Hollywood films, opening a new source of revenue for the studios. And since NBC was pushing hard for color, they wanted color films. Now there was a new source of revenue to cover the cost of filming in color, so the last holdouts switched over.

9

Yes and no. While the color film stock may not have been that much more expensive, it had to be lit, filmed and processed differently. Technicolor wasn’t just a process, it was an entirely different company that owned the cameras and processed the film for the major studios. Then the studios had to have copies made for distribution to theaters. These costs made shooting impractical for the majority of studio movies.

As for TV, the original CBS “spinning disk” system was cheaper and produced better colors. BUT, the original system required more than twice the bandwidth of a TV channel (14 mhz vs. 6 mhz). It would have made obsolete not just existing TV sets, but whole chunks of broadcasting equipment, as well. Also, that spinning disk was larger than the TV itself and revolved at 1,440 rpm. Rarely (but every once in awhile) the disk would fail spectacularly. While CBS tried to overcome those problems, RCA was catching up with its technology.

Our neighbors got a color TV quite early. It cost a lot. In 1960, an RCA 21" color TV cost $495 – you could get a roughly similar b&w model for $295. And, as I recall, the colors couldn’t be called exactly lifelike.

10

I don’t quite get what you’re getting at. Do you think what was prohibitive was the cost of processing color film because this process is technologically more elaborate than that for B/W? While this is certainly true, I still think - although I admit I don’t have robust figures at hand - that these extra costs are negligible, considering the overall costs of shooting and distributing a movie. The cost of the actual physical stock is just too small an item there.

Or do you want to say that Technicolor kept processing costs artificially high as compared to B/W, higher than what one would expect considering the difference in technology and the actual process? Well, while Technicolor pioneered color film, it certainly had no monopoly on it unless for the first few years of color film. As early as the 1930s and 1940s, several competing companies sprung up offering color film solutions, making it impossible for Technicolor to charge monopoly prices (which Technicolor as a monopolist would presumably not have set at a prohibitively high level anyway).

Or do you want to say that what was prohibitive was the expense of having two technologically different processing lines parallelly, one for color and one for B/W? I can see the point in that, this might explain while it was difficult for color to get started; but once a critical mass of productions in color had been reached, this effect would be more likely to accelerate transition to an all-color movie industry, rather than having the two technologies in parallel for decades, as was the case.

11

There is an excellent article about Technicolor here.

Here is an excerpt discussing the not-inconsiderable costs that filming Gone with the Wind in color incurred:

12

there were competing electronic color tv systems. there were some better performing though the system adopted was one that was compatible with existing b/w sets which allowed them to still be used.

13

The three main competitors on the market were NTSC, which was a North American standard; PAL from Germany; and the French SECAM system. All of them were (and still are) compatible with previous B/W sets. Up to this day, the TV world is neatly divided into NTSC, PAL, and SECAM blocks.

14

the proposed electronic color systems for use in the USA were not all compatible with existing b/w sets.

15

It wasn’t a tech issue, so much as an economic issue. RCA owned NBC until 1986. RCA manufactured its first color set in 1954 and used NBC as a sales tool by broadcasting a high percentage of its shows in color to stimulate color TV sales. ABC, and of course CBS had no such incentives. By the fall of 1965, 95% of NBC’s programs were in color. It was about this time ABC and CBS started broadcasting the same amount of color programs in response to NBC. Color TV’s were coming down in price and starting to penetrate the market, so it made more economic sense for ABC and CBS to compete with NBC on its own turf.

16

Interestingly, the transition to color followed a similar pattern IIRC. Spectacles were in color before straight dramas and comedies, then comedies went color as a rule, and straight dramas were among the last to switch over. (I cite Perry Mason, which aired from 1957-1966, and had exactly one episode in color.)

Not that I’m petitioning for 3D to become the norm. I find it gimmicky and unnecessary.

17

You still get this attitude with still photography. Want to make your photography look arty and deep? Go into Photoshop and make it B&W.

18

You have to remember color came out with the country still in the Great Depression. Then came WWII and that limited resources. WWII was uniqure that it was really the only time people as whole got together and looked down at anything that might be viewed as hurting the war effort.

Even if it had no basis in reality. It would come back with “Why did you spend that when it could’ve went to purchase war bonds.”

Plus radio was providing huge competition to the movies.

So you have people who weren’t rich, had lost pretty much everything and trying to get bck on their feet, and now WWII.

It wasn’t after WWII when the economy was recovered and people could seriously get into the business of improving technology. Then the studio system collapsed, so that set it back a few years till they could work that out.

TV was a different matter. TV was rushed out and it was a mess. The FCC froze allocations and that was supposed to take months to work out, but instead took years. This left some cities with only one or two channel. TV was in its infancy and the emphasis was getting the product out there, not necessarily producing quality.

Movies were dead set against TV, some threatening to boycott actors who appeared on TV shows, radio was also against it.

So by 1960 movies had reorganized from the studio system, there was no shortage of materials (real or just preceived), the economy was good and most importantly TV and Movies had reached a “gentleman’s agreement” where both realized they could survive.

TV was still coping with a lack of channels. In 1964 UHF tuners were made manditory but even then it took a decade (or more) for the old TVs without UHF to wear out and be replaced.

People are now much more comfortable with changing formats then they were then. People accept now that you buy something and in five years a better format will come along and they’ll have to repurchase.

All these things in their own way add up to a simple thing: delay after dealy :slight_smile:

19

*NTSC is at war with PAL.

NTSC has always been at war with PAL.*

20

SECAM has always been our ally?