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expense in the way of lost time and wasted effort in handling a new medium. This second element would be only temporary, for after you learn how to handle color the higher photographic cost should be its only extra charge, and with greater volume, Technicolor expects to reduce its rates. But $135,000 is a formidable sum to the current cinema, which is making very few pictures that cost over $500,000 and a good many between the $200,000 and $250,000 levels (although distributing - as distinct from producing - costs another $200,000). Many companies would prefer to spend the extra $135,000, if necessary, in order to get big names in the cast. For they know that names have a box-office draw and they are not at all sure about color. |
 On the other hand, the excellence of the three-color process plus the general Hollywood interest in color argue well for Technicolor's future. There are hazards, even from within, but they are not insurmountable. Color experimenters are apt to go arty and prevent even natural colors from producing natural illusions. Producers still associate color with musical comedies or costume pictures. These tendencies the industry must outgrow if it is really to revolutionize the world's amusement. Eventually, however, a color producer will turn out a good picture with a conventional plot, and with color experts restricted to their proper technical sphere. Let such a picture appear, and the issue will be settled in a single week on Broadway.
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Appendix: Technicolor
How Technicolor Works
The first point to grasp about color is that all the colors in the rainbow are present in a ray of sunlight. What we call white light is really made up, of course, of many combined colors. From the standpoint of motion pictures in color, however, we may consider white light as composed of only a red, a green, and a blue element. For from these three major color sensations all the others are produced in the eye.
But forget, for the moment, the eye of the camera and consider your own eye. What makes the red stripes in the U.S. flag look red to you? Simply the fact that the red surface has the property of absorbing the green and the blue portions of white light. Therefore, the red surface can reflect to your eye only the red element. And so from the red stripe your eye receives only the sensation of red. It is a matter of subtracting all the colors except the essential color, of transmitting to you only the particular color sensation that the colored object is designed to register. The Technicolor process works on the same principle of subtraction. Its proper description is indeed a "Subtractive process."
Since by that process it registers a single color on a single film, it follows that Technicolor must also split white light into its major components and take not one but three pictures of the scene before it. That is why Technicolor uses three times as much negative as black and white, because it actually does employ three strips of negative film. Imagine a beam of light passing through the lens of the camera. Now imagine it passing through a prism which splits it into three parts. If one of these parts strikes a piece of red gelatin, the red in the gelatin will permit the passage of only the red in the light. If another part is sent against a piece of' green gelatin, only the green element will get through. And if the third part runs into a piece of blue gelatin, only the blue element
can continue its journey. The three pieces of gelatin are called filters, because the light is filtered through them to the negatives.
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