It’s almost a cliche for “indie” directors to make their first film in black and white; Ana Lily Amirpour, Darren Aronofksy, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Randy Moore, Christopher Nolan, George Romero, Martin Scorsese, Kevin Smith
Well, back in the day they did that because it was cheaper. Color film stock, processing and shooting was quite a bit more expensive than black and white. Same with video in the early days.
Today in the world of digital, it is purely an aesthetic decision.
Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee made black & white films in the 80s for financial reasons. Alfred Hitchcock made Psycho in B&W because he thought it would be too gory in color.
I got my first color TV in 1984, when I was 17. I bought it from a pawn shop for $25, over my mother’s objection.
She had banned color TVs from the house, because she believed they gave you cancer.
She probably read something back in the 1950s about experiments with uranium to produce the color red in televisions-- and it produced great red, but the TVs could never be sealed correctly, and were always a little radioactive, so uranium was abandoned, and no uranium-containing TV was ever released commercially.
The first color TVs didn’t have true red, either. The red problem wasn’t solved for a while, and was the holy grail of TV research for about a decade, IIRC.
Also, the ghost, or bad hold, or whatever people talked about had to do with very early color simply being colors broadcast over B&W. Color TV images were very poorly defined, and needed the “support,” or whatever or the B&W images to define them. The first color images looked like you were sitting across the room watching through your reading glasses.
But back to my personal saga. Our TV when I was little was a 19" portable B&W. I must have filled in the colors in my head, as other people have said. The first time it was ever an issue was when I was 5 or 6, and I got an album of Sesame Street songs. On the cover, Big Bird was yellow. Big Bird, I insisted, was white. Mind you, I was fine with Bert being yellow, Ernie being red, and Grover being blue. I just thought Big Bird was white.
I’d been watching the show since the first episode, so, two or three years.
My mother explained that we didn’t have a color TV-- our TV was black and white. Of course our TV had color, I insisted-- how could we see the different parts of anything without the colors? (or words like that-- I don’t remember verbatim.)
Our old portable went out, and we got a new 19" portable B&W. That went out, and my brother and I thought we might finally get color, because only 13" came in B&W anymore. But nope. My mother still believed in the cancer/color connection (it’s interesting to note my parents both died rather young from cancer, and neither was a smoker). At this point, my brother and I had our own 13" B&W TVs our grandfather had bought us, so we didn’t care about the B&W in the living room. My parents moved it into their bedroom.
In 1992, I gave them my old color (not the one from the pawn shop-- I’d given my brother that-- one that was 19" and about 4 years old) as a gift when I moved and got a better one. My father was so happy to get it. He was 62.
I suspect that by the time regular broadcast TV over here here had gone to colour, any technical problems had been sorted out, or the PAL system didn’t have them. I don’t recall us being snooty about b/w for the general range of programming* - but since the BBC had made a thing about choosing snooker as a showpiece for colour, it caused a laugh when the commentator said “and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.”
*And I’m not now, but I do notice how the popular dramas of the b/w era that turn up on the “archive” channels had much lower production values.
I can’t recall having much of a preference. Color obviously catches attention more as you’re flipping channels, as B&W tends to look all the same. Plus B&W suggests “pretty old” which suggests “probably not interesting” (or at least as a child). But I did watch tons of B&W shows like The Munsters and The Addams Family, which honestly I can’t imagine being improved by color.
And now I’m not sure memory serves, because I was thinking Lost in Space was not diminished for being B&W, but on second recollection I think that one was actually color, and my memory is telling me it’s B&W just because it’s old. That kind of thing is happening to me a lot now. I recall the theme from The Waltons having melodica as a lead instrumental, but in fact it was a trumpet, which I don’t remember at all. But I digress. Memory fabulation is a funny thing.
I think color quality was a factor too. I have a lot of negative opinions of most 70’s shows, but it occurs to me that maybe this was because the color quality was very often trash, over-saturated with oranges and greens, not enough blue, yellow, and white. When I see that, my gut reaction is “ugh, the 1970’s, gross, not interested”.
Actually, for me, B&W in a movie screamed “check this out!” I started with Universal monster movies when I was 8, and allowed to stay up to watch them, then progressed to other 30s & 40s horror & mystery films, then other movies with the same stars. Once you have seen Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, you want to see every film she has ever made. And that’s how you see the Spencer Tracy Jekyll & Hyde, which is how you discover Katharine Hepburn, and screwball comedies, and also films like those Golden Age biopics. You are an addict for life.
When I was a kid, the Saturday newspaper came in the early afternoon, and brought the TV schedule. (We weren’t shomer Shabbes in the house when no relatives were visiting.) I grabbed the TV schedule first, and a highlighter, and searched for movies from the 30s and 40s. I highlighted anything that was called “horror,” “mystery,” or “thriller.” If it was something else, I looked to see who was in it. There were certain stars I watched in anything. I checked out the descriptions of early 50s horror, mystery & thrillers too, and sometimes highlighted those. If I found a Hitchcock film, I highlighted it.
Then I copied then titles, times and channels into a notebook. I had to set an alarm clock to get up for a lot of them, and sometimes I fell asleep right away, and missed most of them, but I’d usually sit up, and have a cup of tea to stay awake. Keep the volume low so as not to wake my parents. Stuff a towel under my door to block both light & sound.
Afterwards, if I stayed awake, I gave it a rating, 0 - 5 stars, and a synopsis. I thought some day I’d publish a book of grown-ups’ movies rated for kids, or movies kids aren’t supposed to like but do, or something. Couldn’t get my slogan together. But I kept it up through junior high, and had A Streetcar Named Desire, Sea of Grass, Anna Christie, Mrs. Miniver, and some of the more intricate screwball comedies, like My Man Godfrey, and His Girl Friday.
Believe it or not, I still have it. Haven’t written in it since the 8th grade, but I still have it.
I wish I’d dated the entries.
It was both. The first season was black and white, and then they switched to color.
I was born in 1957, so my childhood included a lot of black-and-white programming as just a normal thing. Color was nice, but in the big picture, not all that important. I was pretty well focused on the content.
I agree with this for the shows that transitioned from B&W to color in (mostly 1966) but I think many of the new shows from that year owed a lot of their enduring success (reruns) to the color revolution, especially Batman, The Monkees, and Star Trek.
I too love the old screwball comedies. Interesting tidbit about Howard Hawks’, His Girl Friday (1940): Hawks broke convention by having the actors (Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, et al) overlap their lines—everyone’s interrupting and cutting each other off. And the dialogue was exceptionally fast-paced, clocked at 240 words per minute—double the speed of normal conversation. Great Film; very funny! Who needs color when you have film gems like that!?
If I’m scrolling for content, and I end up with a dilemma, I will always default to the black and white option. I’d say 80% of the greatest movies ever made are in black and white.
I kept a Zenith b&w portable for several years.
I thought b&w movies like Key Largo looked slightly better on a real b&w tv. Sharper contrast and better picture.
Film Noir made b&w an art form. Experimented with shadows and contrast.
That b&w tv eventually went to Goodwill.
Hehe, The Munsters actually had their pilot filmed in color. The series itself was in B&W. Yeah, I can’t imagine color improving either of them, especially The Addams Family.
TV’s work by aiming an electron beam out of the set, towards you. To work with the color phosphors, color TVs had a higher-energy electron beam.
Electron beams cause cancer, and create X-ray radiation. There was a well-known history of people getting cancer from these initially poorly understood technologies.
On a functional TV, the electron beam is captured by the screen, and X-ray generation is negligible (and is limited by regulation). However, there was a recommendation that children should be seated with their eyes at least several inches away from the screen, and AFAIK that was a legitimate recommendation based on the fear that something might go wrong with the electron beam capture / X-ray radiation.
Lotta people we scared of early microwave ovens for similar reasons. Some leakage from some badly designed or badly made ovens did cause some genuine problems for some people. When there’s no way for a layman to tell safe from unsafe, “better safe than sorry” becomes a common rule of thumb.
Oh yeah. Batman would have been a completely different show in black and white, for sure.
I guess “big picture” was careless wording on my part. I just meant “the big picture as nine-year-old dirtball saw it at the time.”
As a family we only had a B&W TV, but us kids had comic books advertising these magic plastic films that you could place over the screen, resulting in an instant color picture. The top was a stripe of blue, and the bottom a stripe of green. Amazing! Blue sky and green grass! We never bought one, but I bet it looked horrible when it wasn’t an outdoor scene.
She was saying this to us in the 70s and 80s-- along with the one about sitting too close ruining our eyes, nevermind that we sat close only a few minutes in a day, to hear it because she was vacuuming.
Given my luck, I’m probably not going to live past 70, but my brother, the one who is 53, and has never had a cavity, will make it to 100.
That might be survivor bias. There were a massive amount of crappy B&W movies made but they’ve all been forgotten. The B&W movies that are still being watched in 2025 are the good ones.
A hundred years from now, people will think that the early 21st century was a golden age for movies because they will have forgotten all of the crappy movies we’re making and will only be watching the good ones.
I acknowledge that. I’ve said it myself many, many times.
There was a MUnsters movie released in color, just after the TV series ended – Munsters, Go Home! (1966). Color did not improve or denigrate the series. It was still just The Munsters.
Oddly, they replaced Marilyn, who had been played by Beverly Owen first, then by Pat Priest in the TV series. The movies substituted Debbie Watson (who had played Tammy on TV), because they had her under contract. (Owen left the series to get married).