Back in the 80s, Ted Turner and his evil minions tried their evil hands at colorizing old b&w movies. Well, to put it bluntly, it sucked. I don’t know what planet the colors came from, but they certainly weren’t this one.
Now, a new company, Legend Films (note: Flash-intensive site) has come up with a new process. I must say, it’s very impressive (and, no, I have no affiliation with them).
They not only colorize the film, they also restore the b&w version and include it on the disc. I just recently ordered their version of Plan 9 From Outer Space (which includes a running commentary by MST3K’s Mike Nelson).
Take a look at the demos and let me know what you think (even if you are opposed to the processs in general).
Of course, I will always prefer the director’s original, whatever the movie. But I’ve known about Legend for awhile, and my impression is that they’re at least conscious of the effect colorization has, and that what they do isn’t for everybody.
Also, it’s less troublesome to me that a third party is making colorized versions available. When Turner was doing it, he *owned *the films in question; there was a distinct threat of having the colorized version *replace *the original.
Turning down the color saturation doesn’t do it. My recollection is that Turner’s process involved washing out the black and white to add the color, so turning down color on your set wouldn’t have the contrast that the original had.
I have mixed feelings about it; some old movies seem to be crying out for colour - and you even get the impression that the director would have loved to use colour if only it had been available.
Others just don’t need it and adding it is a pointless distraction; what would be the point of colourising a Laurel and Hardy film, for example?
And in probably most cases, the technicians applying the colour are making assumptions about the real colours of the objects depicted; they’re making decisions of style too, perhaps directly contrary to the (unknown) intention of the original director; who is to say that yellow it the right colour for the little girl’s dress, etc - in this sense, the colour techs are making their own movie and maybe in some cases, they just don’t have the necessary expertise for that.
Seems that the linked site is being fairly skilful and sensitive about the whole thing though.
I’ve got no problem with using colorization techniques to RESTORE color in films that are degrading, but black and white movies should never be touched. They did a decent enough job as far as making the colors more natural, but that’s not the point.
Regarding Mangetout’s comment that some movies are begging to be colorized, I say that that’s probably true. But in those cases, you have to accept that the movie was probably no good anyway with respect to lighting and set design. The truly good films took all those varying degrees of gray into consideration when the shot was designed. They work as originally shot.
The problem, too, is that Turner had ownership, and there was fear that the original versions would disappear – as with George Lucas and the original STAR WARS.
The tragedy is that the original STAR WARS was an important part of film history, and now it’s gone. No one can ever see it again (unless Lucas changes his mind.) It’s lost to film historians and to the public. We don’t want to see that happen to any film, let alone a b&w classic.
Imagine if one person owned the rights to Shakespeare and decided to re-write all the plays, since modern staging allows so much more flexibility than was known in Elizabethan times, and it’s possible to have chandeliers fall on the audience… and the originals were no longer available.
Producer Hal Roach wanted to film the Laurel and Hardy feature Babes in Toyland in Technicolor, but didn’t have the budget for it. It was already the most expensive movie he had ever made.
IIRC, Roger Ebert reported that the total number of sales for the colorized Casablanca was around 300.
That’s the main reason why there’s been very little colorization since then – people who like the movies want the B&W version, and people who aren’t interested in B&W movies aren’t going to be interested in them simply because color is added.
I think it owuld be interesting, but only if I could colorize the movie. Of course I’d want the B & W version, too. But if someone other than the director is going to add color, I’d like it to be me.
My feeling about this is if you don’t like b&w movies, then don’t watch them. If you have to have them colorized to make them “palatable” for you, then like RealityChuck said, you’re probably not going to like it any more than you would have just because it has color added to it. And then you can argue at length on what to do about Hitchcock’s Psycho.
IIRC, one of the guys at the company talked about trying to introduce his children to the Three Stooges, but they didn’t want to watch them because they were in b&w. As an experiment, he showed them a short that had been colorized and they loved it (or so the story goes).
Movies like Plan 9… and Reefer Madness can’t possibly be harmed in any way by the colorization process.
Aye, I have the original trilogy in a nice letterboxed VHS set – original at least, in its video form, which has two or three trivial differences from the original theatrical releases.
You betcher ass I’ve got archived copies on DVD-R. Sometime when I’ve the time I intend to make them into .RAR sets with accompanying parity files, so that I can recover them if the media is damaged.
Those films will never be truly lost – just unavailable for rental/purchase.
As for colourization, I’m agin’ it. It doesn’t matter if the colour is made to look more “natural.” It’s still false. Most black-and-white films were made specifically with a greyscale palette in mind. Adding colour is rarely an improvement, and is usually aesthetically inferior.
I mean, take the colourized version of King Kong. Sure, the colours suck – but that’s not the problem. Most of Skull Island (and much of Kong’s Manhattan) is a fantasy creation – it’s stylized to start with, and its entire art concept is approached with the strengths of monochrome contrast in mind. It’s modelled after the dramatic appearance of Gustav Dore prints, with high contrast in the foreground attenuated to an uncontrasted brightest in the background.
The entire concept of the art is predicated on it being presented in black and white. Cooper made great use of Technicolour when it became available, (and curses upon the idiot who will eventually use this process to “correct” the supersaturated look of early Technicolour) but like everyone else who made movies that are still worth watching, he made his black and white films to have the best effect in black and white. That was the palette. You can’t just colour it in and expect it to work.
Sheeit, even myself, before going digital, I used to walk around with two cameras – one loaded with black and white film and another with colour. Sometimes you see a composition that is great, except that the colours are unfortunate, and black and white is the right choice.
It appears that all of the films that Legend Films has colorized thus far are in the public domain. I don’t know what this means, other than apparently, major studios have decided to shy away from colorization (probably for good reason).
