Question - Color vs Sound

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Agnes McFadden
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Question - Color vs Sound

Postby Agnes McFadden » Tue May 25, 2010 9:38 pm

So,

Most everyone here posts such schollarly material, so I do a lot of reading!
I am not up tp the level of most of you here, so I can't add much. Then I was thinking............... the best thing about being the "student" in the room is that when everyone else knows so much more, it is a great opportunity to learn. So, will you guys teach me here? It will save you a lot of time in Arlington!

Don't worry, I am not going to ask the dreaded "4th Genius" nonscence - I only answered that stuff on the "other list" because that is the only thing that some of the true"Newbies" feel comfortable asking, and I remember being like that ( a long time ago). No I am certainly not a "newbie" ( if I were, I doubt that I could get approved by the Godfathers) , but I am so far from the experts here. Is there room in your days to teach a passionate intermediate?


My first question is color vs sound. I have watched "The Black Piarate" and "Toll of the Sea" and thought that even the 2-strip process added so much to the beauty of the images on screen. Juxtapose that to any early talkie with the chatty banter and generally lackluster picture quality ( yes, I agree with Richard that the picture was really sacrificed in these for sound), and I start to wonder why things went the way that they did. Color was introduced in features several years before that of sound. I think that color was a positive additive to these pictures, while early sound was somewhat annoying. Both processes were expensive, so I don't know if money was a deciding factor. On the subject of expenses, sound had the additional burden of getting theates to put in speaker systems ( that wasn't required to sell a color picture), so I would surmise that color would be an easier sell.

So, why did sound take hold so completely and so quickly ( 2-3 years after "The Jazz Singer almost everythign was "talkie"), and color wasn't used regularly until over 30 years after "Toll of the Sea" ( and only got wide use at that point to give the theaters an advantage over TV). I thought that early color was more amazing than early sound, but it didn't play out that way. Why ?
Agnes McFadden

Richard M Roberts
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Re: Question - Color vs Sound

Postby Richard M Roberts » Wed May 26, 2010 12:39 am

Answering Agnes:

As usual, there is no really clear cut answer to this, partially because silent film audiences had been seeing experiments in both color and sound way before many historians usually say they did.In fact, pretty much from the beginning, from the hand-colored prints and various synchronization devices going back to the Kinetoscope and the Chronophone. And with silent film music, sound effects, and even narrators going back to the turn of the Twentieth Century, silent films were never really "quiet". Add tinting and toning to black and white film and color was even less of a novelty than one might think.

I think, in the end, it just took corporations big enough and well-funded enough to put out and enforce new technologies on a big enough scale to entrench them in the public's eye, then the public just kept on going to the movies. And tastes did flux and change, so when things like gaudy technicolor early-talkie musicals became box-office poison thanks to an oversaturation of especially bad ones, things like color would take a step or two back on the progress change until an improved process and a new popular reason to use it came into being.

If you want to learn a lot about all the various early sound and color processes, I heartily recommend Flicker Allry/Lobster Films DISCOVERING CINEMA DVD set, which covers quite a bit of this historical ground on both processes.

RICHARD M ROBERTS

Brent Walker
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Re: Question - Color vs Sound

Postby Brent Walker » Wed May 26, 2010 1:52 pm

Agnes, this is an excellent question on why sound took quicker than color. I don't know the answer, but here is one theory that may not be the full reason, but one possible aspect (and it's fresh on my mind, in fact, because of some program notes I just wrote for Slapsticon).

Technicolor (the color system that broke through in the 1920's after the other processes Richard mentioned that went back much further) was essentially its own entity in Hollywood, and had complete control of the Technicolor process. Any studio wanting to use it had to come to them had to pay, and pay through the nose.

Early sound processes (other than Edison's) were also done mostly by independent people like Lee DeForest. However, the sound processes that finally took in the late 1920's came from more direct involvement of Hollywood studios, such as Warner Brothers and Fox, in conjunction with sound companies. So in the theory that the major film studios preferred to have total control over things at all times whenever possible, maybe they'd rather initiate a technology they developed themselves (or had a hand in). And also (as we continue to see with technology companies today) had their own proprietary brand to advertise as better than the others (i.e. Vitaphone vs. Movietone), with the intent to eventually "win" the battle and force the other studios to pay them to use it.

Whereas, Technicolor had a virtual monopoly, and dictated terms to the studios that wanted to use it--requiring them to rent the cameras, hire Technicolor's photographers, hire Natalie Kalmus as color technical advisor and send all the film to Technicolor for processing. Besides costing the studio more money than they could take in at times on a color release, I'm sure it stuck in the craw of studio executives having Kalmus and her Technicolor people telling them how they could and couldn't shoot a picture. There was a little of that with the Western Electric and RCA people who came to Hollywood to implement sound, but at least the studios were invested in the product themselves. When 3-strip color came in in the 1930's, it was such a jump ahead that everyone had to have it despite the costs and lack of control. Still, the studios were still looking for a way out of Technicolor's stranglehold, so they all switched to Eastman color when it was introduced in the 1950's, because it used regular film processing and didn't have to be sent to Technicolor for their expensive dye transfer process. Of course, as everybody soon found out, the cost saved in the short-term resulted in color that didn't look as good from the start and faded quickly, while Technicolor's dye prints remained vibrant.

David Kalat
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Re: Question - Color vs Sound

Postby David Kalat » Thu May 27, 2010 3:54 pm

I think the single most important distinction between the implementation of color vs sound is the difference between what was a change in the asthetics of a film's production vs a change in the technology of a film's exhibition.

At that critical moment when sound really blossomed, 1928-1929, you had Warners and Fox shopping around rival and incompatible technologies. A theater owner who decided to fork out the $30,000 (!) per theater to install sound equipment wasn't going to do this solely for the privilege of showing THE JAZZ SINGER--they expected to amotize that investment over many movies, right away. Additionally, if they opted for Movietone they might be disinclined to also install Vitaphone, and so as long as the format war continued, a theater that signed up for one brand would pretty much stop being a customer for your rival competition. This is all a way of saying that the salespeople at Fox and Warners were going around making the pitch to theaters that they (the studios) were making a massive commitment to sound. Those studios and the exhibitors agreed to shift over completely to sound film, before the audience had even been given a vote in the matter.

By contrast, a decision to make a film in color was a decision each filmmaker could make on an ad hoc basis, and didn't have to be negotiated with theaters. As a result, it was a technology that never had the kind of wholesale, industry-wide push that went into sound.

You can see the same dynamic at work in the rise of widescreen film. It was incumbent on theaters to install specialized equipment to handle large format images, and so that changeover happened very rapidly.

I think to some extent it's happening again with 3-D. The 3-D of the 1950s asked for a fairly modest investment from theaters--anaglyph films didn't need specialized equipment at all, and it was possible to retrofit existing 35mm projectors for polarized projection inexpensively, and then undo the conversion to return to 2-D projection. This meant the onus of choosing 3-D or not 3-D lay entirely on the filmmakers' aesthetics. But current 3-D technology does require a massive capital outlay from exhibitors, and they will only make those investments if Hollywood will keep justifying it with new 3-D products.


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