jects are not always known, the colorists must rely on
common sense, aesthetics, and their own judgment.
Often research into studio archives produces infor-
mation or photographs of sets and costumes that al-
low color choices to be authenticated.
The Pros and Cons of Colorization With the in-
creased popularity of old movies on television in the
1970’s and 1980’s, it was clear to studio heads that
the huge backlog of black-and-white films and televi-
sion shows could fill many hours of air time, cost very
little, and produce healthy profits. The audiences
most coveted by television stations, however, were
young people who had grown up watching most
films in Technicolor. Black-and-white films did not
appeal to them. Colorization was clearly the answer.
The process had been used successfully to color the
black-and-white pictures of the Moon taken during
a 1970 Apollo mission. Since that time, the color-
ization process had been improved by several differ-
ent companies, each developing slightly different
computer technologies, such as Neural Net, pattern
recognition, and background compositing, and in-
teractive processes that allowed pixels of similar
tones automatically to be given similar colors.
The downside of colorization was its expense
and labor-intensiveness. Colorizing a film or an old
black-and-white television show was estimated at one
time to cost $3,000 per minute of running time. The
film or show had to be colored frame by frame.
Single objects were digitally tinted in each frame,
one at a time, until every object in that frame was
colored. One old film or show could therefore cost
$300,000 or more. Still, a colorized film shown
on television could generate revenue of at least
$500,000, and even more revenue might come from
the sale of videocassettes, so colorization seemed a
good business plan.
Colorization’s High Point Television mogul Ted
Turner bought all or parts of the film libraries of the
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Warner Bros., and
Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) movie studios. He
commissioned Color Systems Technology to begin
colorizing more than one hundred of his movies
over the next few years to make them more appeal-
ing to television viewers.Yankee Doodle Dandy(1942)
andTopper(1937) were two of the first black-and-
white films redistributed in color.
Controversy erupted when Turner said he in-
tended to colorize the iconicCitizen Kane(1941).
Critics, historians, film directors, and fans all de-
cried the plan, calling colorization “cultural vandal-
ism” and film “bastardization.” Turner responded
that he had been joking; he had no intention of
colorizingCitizen Kane. Actually, the film was still un-
der the control of the Orson Welles estate, whose
permission was needed for anyone to tamper with it
in any way. Turner did, however, proceed to colorize
several other movies, including the venerableCasa-
blanca(1942). Sufficient outcry among movie direc-
tors and others in the film industry caused Congress
to create the National Film Registry in 1988. This
registry was a list of movies, chosen by the Library
of Congress at a rate of twenty-five per year, that
were deemed to be culturally, historically, or aesthet-
ically significant. The National Film Preservation
Act of 1988 made it illegal to distribute or exhibit a
colorized version of a black-and-white film included
in the registry, unless the film was labeled with a suit-
able disclaimer.
The Controversy Those who considered film an art
form considered colorization an immoral appropri-
ation of the original filmmaker’s conception. They
contended that black-and-white films were works of
art in a form created by the filmmaker and were not
to be altered by anyone else for purely monetary
gain. Even those who saw films as collective artworks,
rather than realizations of personal vision, asserted
that colorization was simply ugly, that the technol-
ogy was not advanced enough to produce satisfac-
tory results, and that the black-and-white originals
were more aesthetically pleasing than their color-
ized versions. Filmmakers, however, had no legal
rights over their films, which in almost all cases be-
longed to studios and production companies, not
to directors. Consequently, the corporation that
owned a film could colorize it regardless of its cre-
ator’s desires. Film directors especially felt that color-
ization destroyed the artistic integrity of their black-
and-white films. They felt that if studios were allowed
to add color, there would be nothing to prevent
them from adding different sound tracks, introduc-
ing additional scenes, or even reediting the entire
film.
Impact As the decade waned, so did the interest in
colorized films, especially since, as critics had pointed
out, most of them had washed out colors and overly
soft contrasts. The colorized films could obviously
not match the high quality either of the originalThe Eighties in America Colorization of black-and-white films 229