Why were movies, tv shows, etc. filmed in Black & White when Colour became available?
Did colour film come before or after “talkies”??
Technicolor developed the ‘two strip process’ in 1917. I think the ‘three strip process’ came about in the mid-'20s. IIRC, some scenes in Phantom Of The Opera were hand-tinted.
One reason why B&W was used even decades into the availability of colour film is that it’s cheaper. Into the 1950s and 1960s, people didn’t really care if movies were B&W. Eventually audiences came to expect colour films, and the cost savings of B&W had to be weighed against the possibility of reduced ‘box office’. Later, many filmmakers used B&W for artistic reasons. There are probably almost as many of these reasons as there are filmmakers, but IMO it comes down to a few. For example, the filmmaker wants to capture the ‘feel’ of earlier films or he wants to capture an ‘era’. B&W also offers stunning contrast as well as beautiful lighting possibilities. I wrote a script for a short film. My intention was to make a little film that could be shot in a couple of weekends, and would be inexpensive. I’m also a Jim Jarmusch fan and I like his B&W films. So my ‘vision’ was in B&W. I never did get round to shooting it, but it’s on the list. I could shoot it in digital video now, but I’d still do it in B&W because that’s the way it’s supposed to look. It just wouldn’t work in colour.
So: B&W is cheaper, and it is also used for artistic reasons.
The technology for capturing and projecting color existed from the very start of cinema, and was used often in the silent period.
The two biggest things to look at are cost and unnecessary complexity in equipment.
Let’s look back at one of the earliest examples of a color movie, from 1899. It used a camera and project that ran at three times the speed of a normal camera or projector and used a spinning three-colored filter over the lens to capture the reds, greens, and blues of the scene separately. This was extremely expensive, requiring three times as much film over a B&W shoot, not to mention all new equipment not just for those filming it but also those showing it. Plus, since the colors are shot in sequence and not all at once, fast moving objects took on an odd rainbow fringe. So, bad idea because it’s expensive and complicated.
Next up, hand coloring. This was widely used because it was comparatively cheap to hire a bunch of people and give them stencils and dye and, although time consuming, very simple to do. It used no special equipment and needed no extra film. Although some colorizations were very elaborate and life-like, most only added in one or two colors to spice up important elements in the scene–like in the film The Red Kimono, the kimono is colored red. So, not too expensive and not at all complex.
Cheaper still is simply dying the whole strip of film to match the predominate color of the scene. If you consider that “color”, then most silents are color. So, dirt cheap and simple.
The first “natural color” film (that is, recording the color and not adding it in later) that was a commercial success was 2-strip Technicolor, starting in 1915 I believe. It only recorded two colors, red and blue-green. As such, the colors of the scene projected on the screen didn’t exactly match those in real life, but if it was carefully planned, it could look very natural. It recorded both at once, so no fringing on fast objects, and both through the same lens, so no parallax distortion. It used twice as much film and needed special cameras, which was an expense, but its benefit came after filming was done: the red strip and the blue-green strip would be printed onto the front and back of a single strip of film and, instead of projecting through a filter, the film itself was dyed. Thus, any projector could show it. Thus, any cinema could show it. Thus, there was a wide audience and tremendous room for profit to make up for the initial expenditure. Only two colors were possible because there was only two sides to print to on the final print. 3-strip Technicolor, recoding the whole color spectrum, wouldn’t come around until later and was rather more prohibitively expensive.
Although some feature films were shot entirely in color, and many more shorts were (TCM shows The Flag periodically, it’s in full color), it was more common to just shoot color sequences in an otherwise B&W film. For example, The Phantom of the Opera is B&W (well, it’s tinted, but let’s ignore that), but has a couple color segments like the masked ball. Similarly, Ben Hur is B&W with several elaborate color sequences (and a good deal of pre-Hays code nudity). So, you had color, which was a good selling gimmick, but kept the costs down to a minimum.
Color sequences didn’t die out at the close of the silent era, either. You can find B&W movies from the 30s and 40s with them. The Picture of Dorian Gray springs to mind.
The Jazz Singer in 1927 is generally considered “the first sound film” although it was not sync sound throughout and did not use the system that eventually became the standard. Sound was essentially universal by 1929.
Although there were many different color systems in the 1920s and 1930s (which I see on preview that Dusty has dealt with nicely), three-strip Technicolor is widely considered the first process to offer realistic color in movies. It was introduced in 1934 and was used for such classics as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, both made in 1939 and directed by the same man. (Do you remember his name?)
But shooting three-strip Technicolor required a special camera, unbelievable amounts of light, and three times as much film as B&W, as well as complicated processing and printing. It was much more expensive than B&W. But it was beautiful.
In the early 1950s Kodak’s single-strip Eastmancolor process was introduced and made color much easier and cheaper to shoot, and therefore much more common. But even so, it wasn’t until the mid-1960s that color essentially became the default mode.
Since then, as Johnny L.A. has mentioned, B&W has been used to evoke a certain mood or period feel to a film. I suspect that shooting B&W is probably no longer cheaper than color, because there is so much less demand that the stock and processing are probably harder to get.
My favorite line about B&W is from The Big Picture. Idealistic young director Kevin Bacon wants to make his artistic film in B&W. One of the studio execs he’s pitching it to tells him that he can’t, because modern film projectors can’t project B&W.
• First commercially successful natural color process: Kinemacolor, a two-color additive process developed by George Albert Smith of Brighton, England. He made his first short film in the process in 1906.
• First commercially produced film in natural color: G. A. Smith’s A Visit to the Seaside (1907), an eight-minute short in Kinemacolor.
• First dramatic film in natural color: Checkmated (1910), a short film about Napoleon, in Kinemacolor.
• First feature-length film in natural color: The Durbar at Delhi (1912), a documentary made in India, in Kinemacolor.
• First feature-length dramatic film in natural color: The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1914), a British film, in Kinemacolor.
A total of 54 dramatic films (all shorts) were made in Kinemacolor in the UK in 1910-1912, and four dramatic films (all shorts) were made in Kinemacolor in the US in 1912-1913.
• First feature-length film in natural color produced in the U.S.: The Gulf Between (1918), made in Florida in 1917, in two-color Technicolor (Process 1). It had a limited road-show release in a few Eastern cities, mainly to interest distributors and exhibitors in the idea of color movies. (The term “two-strip Technicolor” is a misnomer: only one strip of negative film ran through the camera.)
Early color features filmography.
• First feature-length film in natural color produced in Hollywood: The Toll of the Sea (1922), in two-color Technicolor (Process 2). This was the first color movie that did not require a special projector to show it.
• First commercially made film in full color: The Walt Disney cartoon Flowers and Trees (1932), made in three-strip Technicolor (Process 4), in which three strips of black and white negative ran through the camera simultaneously, one for each of the three primary colors of light.
• First feature-length film made in full color: Becky Sharp (1935), made in Technicolor.
• First year in which the majority of U.S. features were made in color: 1954.
• First year in which the majority of U.K. features were made in color: 1965.
• First year in which color television sets outsold B/W sets in the U.S.: 1972.
The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first feature-length film to have talking sequences. But scores of short films were made with sound between 1900 and 1927.
B&W is readily available. you can order it directly from Kodak, for example. I don’t have time to look for exact prices right now, but I think that 400 feet of Fuji 125T 16mm reversal is about $110 or so, and that the same amount of Kodak B&W reversal is about $75 or $80. Remember that 400’ is 11 minutes, and that there are usually multiple takes. The difference adds up on a 90 minute movie. I haven’t bought any 35mm, but it’s more expensive and the price difference for a featuer film will be greater than in 16mm.
As for TV though, I was kind of a catch-22. Why would a broadcaster make a color show when nobody had a color set? Why would the average person buy a color set where there weren’t many color shows? Plus, you could watch a color show on you B&W set. I’m not sure what TV show really popularized color. I’ve seen ads for color TVs that featured Kirk and Spock from Star Trek and suggesting that you really needed a color set to watch that show.
When you’re RCA, and you own a television network (NBC), and you make color television sets.
Right! But if you didn’t have that con-huge-corp thing working, then you wouldn’t. Sometimes those things are good.
I saw “Good Night and Good Luck” recently. At the end there’s a credit:
“Color and prints by Technicolor.”
So I guess if you really wanted to be picky you can say there are B&W films in Technicolor.
Sorry, no. Technicolor is the lab that does the processing. (It’s now owned by the European conglomerate Thomson.) But B&W prints are not the Technicolor color process.
[Emphasis mine.] Yes, but you’ve always been able to order stock straight from Kodak, and time was you could pick up B&W stock from any of a dozen outlets in most major cities. Do you know if the processing is still less expensive than color?
I’m just saying that although B&W stock is less complicated to make and process, its declining popularity is reducing the number of places that handle it, and that eventually it probably won’t be any cheaper than color. Of course, in the next decade the number of places selling and processing color film will decline sharply, too, as Hollywood moves to digital projection and production. Sic transit gloria mundi.
While NBC jumped into more color programming earlier than the other networks, even they didn’t go all the way. Bonanza and Walt Disney were telecast in color in the 1950s, but the network didn’t go “full-color” until (IIRC) 1965, with CBS and ABC following the next year.
Walt Disney’s Sunday show wasn’t broadcast in color until it moved from ABC to NBC in 1961, when it was renamed Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. ABC remained stubbornly B&W throughout the 1950s.
BTW, kunilou, you may want to click on that link for RCA.
Well, put this thread in the “Who Knew?” department.
All I have to add to this is how the TV guide first started making a notation of “C” for color on the few color shows broadcast in the 60s. Then it switched to “B&W” to notate the few that were still being broadcast in black and white. I don’t know what the last B&W show was, but I was kind of sorry to see it go.
The last prime time black and white television series were on CBS and ABC in the spring and summer of 1966.
According to Walloon’s link, the last B&W show on NBC was the game show Concentration. This strikes me as odd. I would have expected a filmed drama to be the last to be made in B&W, not a studio game show.
commasense: You can still buy either kind of film from shops that deal with cine cameras. It doesn’t have to be ordered directly from Kodak/Fuji/etc.
Yale Film & Video lists colour or B&W negative processing at 14¢ per foot (100’ minimum). They also sell stock for $25/$24 (B&W reversal/negative) and $47/$46 (colour reversal/negative).
One thing about B&W is that some labs won’t process B&W reversal. Or is it B&W negative? I don’t remember.
Hmm, I really haven’t anwered the OP. Mainly, the problem was cost. I’ll quote from a 1934 article in Fortune magazine: