When Ted Turner began to colorize black and white classics in the 1980s the entire film buff/film history/old Hollywood community rose in a uproar. How dare he desecrate the gorgeous and historic black and white films of the past! Who was this heathen who couldn’t appreciate the true cinematic art of the non-color movies of the past? Testimony was given by distinguished Hollywood spokespeople to the Senate to prevent further desecration of the films that Turner now claimed were his to do what he wanted with. I, for one, was always a bit puzzled by the outrage this provoked. Turner wasn’t looking to destroy the black and white films but merely to offer alternative method of seeing them. I don’t think that the people who reacted so negatively necessarily understood how many younger people won’t watch a black and white film simply because it’s…well…an old black and white film. Unfortunate though this stance is (and it is still prevalent), it’s a fact and leads to a lack of interest in some of the most wonderful films ever made. Finally I was always too afraid to come out and say this aloud; I found a lot of colorization quite beautiful. Seeing movies that you know as black and white turn into color representations of the same material has the odd effect of bringing the people to life a little more realistically–even when the colorization is too stylized as it often was in the early days of the process. Much as I love and cherish black and white movies, it doesn’t hurt to sometimes see people with flesh and clothing and hair colors that pop off the screen like it really looked (more or less) when they stood around shooting it way back when.
I think the attitude toward colorization has mellowed since those bellicose initial early days. Now it serves to bring older periods back to life–witness those marvelous documentary videos that I post by the YouTube artist known as NASS, where colorization makes views of old street scenes seem contemporary and vital. It reminds me a bit of Cinemascope which, upon first being introduced, provoked outrage and contempt in Hollywood circles due to its unusual horizontal widescreen perspective, which forced filmmakers to adapt to a new way of staging and photographing scenes. Silly jokes were made about it–the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson said that now when he wrote for Cinemascope he put the paper in his typewriter sideways. I think we can now all agree, however, that Scope is a marvelous format to shoot in and provides its own challenges and considerable advantages. As with colorization, a balance has been reached when confronted with innovation–one can choose to shoot in the format or not, just as one can see an old black and white film in its original form or in color. (I even think that in a short time we’ll be looking back at our initial fear and loathing of A.I. with bafflement once we see the marvelous things that can achieved via the technology.) Above I’ve posted a five minute clip reel of colorized scenes from The Marx Brothers classic ‘Duck Soup’, photographed in black and white in 1933. I find it fascinating to see them in color–even if it’s at the expense of the evocative nature of the early thirties nitrate-heavy black and white. But the terrific remastered DVD box set of the Marx’s first five Paramount movies preserves them in black and white, crisper and shinier than ever (or at least since the day that the release prints came freshly out of the lab). My point is that there’s room for both. And that leads me to a story about that Senate testimony committee whose members included John Huston, James Stewart and Peter Bogdanovich among others. But I’ll save it for tomorrow. Be sure to tune in…I guarantee a healthy dose of laughter and shock value.