And it reveals some more filmmaking history you might not already know.
When Robert Hoffman sent me a copy of his new book, Alchemy In Technicolor, to peruse, I have to admit, I was a little hesitant to write about it. Technicolor and its stable of VFX studios had just gone under, and many, many artists had lost their jobs.
But the book, of course, is not about this current era of Technicolor. It looks at the Technicolor 3-strip dye-transfer printing process, as well as other Technicolor breakthroughs from the early-1900s onwards.
I asked Hoffman, who was Vice President of Marketing & Public Relations at Technicolor for 18 years (and previously worked at Digital Domain), about how the book project came to be and about the history of Technicolor’s filmmaking achievements. He also offered his thoughts on the what recently happened with the company.
b&a: How did this book come about?
Robert Hoffman: Shortly after I retired from Technicolor in the Summer of 2018, I was made aware of a colour conference to be held in Bristol, in the UK, the following year. The overall theme of the conference was the Eastmancolour Revolution that took place in the early 1950s. Having done a lot of research into Technicolor history from that same period, I was aware of certain misconceptions about Technicolor’s history and its longstanding relationship with Eastman Kodak.
I drafted a pitch responding to the conference’s call for proposed submissions and it was accepted. Over the course of the following 9 months, I refined my paper, that was presented on my behalf by Professor Carolyn Rickards. The paper addressed a number of those misconceptions about Technicolor history.
Through the process of researching and writing the paper, it occurred to me that the era of classical Technicolor 3-strip dye-transfer printing could be an interesting framing device for a book. That got me going, and what I was constantly discovering was interesting facets of the company’s history that hadn’t really been addressed. Up to that point there was considerable work done looking at the company’s early period but very little written about the period from 1955-1978.
That era coincided with my own personal experience with having first seen Technicolor films from that period, beginning in the mid-50s – many of those films being imprinted on my psyche: the films of The Archers, and Gene Kelly’s musicals were stunning examples of films that fully exploited the dye-transfer process. John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock were filmmakers that left a huge impression on my generation. And later, in the 1960s and early 1970s you started to see films directed by the masters of Italian cinema, and then the emergent generation of American directors, led by Francis Coppola and Alan Pacula – filmmakers that shared a passion for classical Technicolor.
All of this sort of aggregated into the final book.
b&a: For people who might not be aware, what were the landmark achievements in color that were pioneered by Technicolor?
Robert Hoffman: The company’s recognized achievement was clearly 3-strip IB dye-transfer. The imbibition process was first conceived in the late 1920s, with research led by Technicolor’s master scientist, Dr. Leonard Troland, and the company’s head of engineering, J.A. Ball. By 1932, led by Ball working with the Mitchell Camera Corp., the company had built its first 3-strip camera, and had introduced the color blue into the process which led to the naturalistic color dye-transfer could produce.
Walt Disney was the first filmmaker to employ the 3-strip process, but shortly David O. Selznick and producer Merian C. Cooper fully engaged with the nascent 3-strip process. By the late 1930s, with the success of The Adventures of Robin Hood, in 1938, and The Wizard of Oz along with Gone With the Wind, both in 1939, the company had clearly established its preeminence. By that time, the company expanded to London with a bespoke lab it built in West Drayton, adjacent to Heathrow Airport. Production in London was curtailed after the start of World War 2, but by 1943, filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger had produced The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The next year, actor-director Laurence Olivier made Henry V. From these early films, one could see that a Technicolor aesthetic was being defined by the creative talent as much as by the company itself – and that talent was not solely located in Hollywood. It would become a global phenomenon. The Archers greatest films, in my opinion, were Black Narcissus, and then The Red Shoes.
Not to be outdone by their British contemporaries, Gene Kelly, along with directors Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen created two of the greatest American musicals – in Technicolor: An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain.
It naturally followed that other great directors would want to work in Technicolor: John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and perhaps less well known, French cinema master, Jean Renoir.
b&a: What might be some of the other artistic and technical achievements in filmmaking that Technicolor achieved that you think many people might not realize?
Robert Hoffman: Great question. I have my colleague Rob Hummel to thank for bringing to my attention the development of a piece of technology anyone who worked in a motion picture film lab would be aware of and not the case for most everyone else. The Hazeltine color analyzer became a mainstay in the lab business as part of the final color-timing process. But it was Technicolor who developed the underlying patents on the Hazeltine in the mid-1950s. It’s a fascinating piece of technology that married together analog television CRT technology with celluloid scanning.
Another piece of technology developed by Technicolor in the mid-1970s, was the high- speed printer. The first American films to employ these printers were Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, and George Lucas’s first Star Wars film. Up to that point, most theatrical releases would see print runs of 50 or so prints being struck. With the high-speed printers you could manufacture 300-400 prints for day-in-date release. This fostered whole new theatrical release paradigm for exhibition in the US market. And to give you some sense of the growth of theatrical release patterns over the subsequent decades, the last of the Harry Potter films, in 2011, was given a massive theatrical release, of over 20,000 prints…distributed day-in-date. But then, of course, within five years, Technicolor retrenched entirely from the manufacturing of theatrical release prints in lieu of digital cinema that overtook the global market.
b&a: Although you worked at Technicolor, what kinds of extra research did you need to undertake for the book?
Robert Hoffman: Fortunately, I had access to a vault of documents in the legal affairs department at the company’s Hollywood headquarters. It happened to be in very close proximity to my office, and I had worked closely with the legal affairs team over the years. In 2009, I was charged with the responsibility of overseeing (on behalf of the company, with Dr. Richard Goldberg, and our legal team) the donation of the vast Technicolor archive Dick had amassed, given to the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. That collection of over 40,000 artifacts is the preeminent archive of Technicolor assets in the world.
Many of the primary source documents I was able to review helped fill-in the blanks in certain period of the dye-transfer era and narrative for the book. Those documents now reside in Rochester.
But I’m also mindful that my first jobs in Hollywood, in the early 1970s were doing research – and that period in my career was very much informed by my time at the American Film Institute in 1970-1971 and the work being conducted there. At that time, I started reading, voraciously, everything I could get my hands on dealing with cinema history. That process never stopped for me. So, when I started seriously researching the book and the era I was focusing on, I first turned to my own library which had so much great information.
One of the other major reasons to write the book had to do with celebrating the scholarship of many others I’m indebted to. Scott Higgins, from Wesleyan University; professor Sarah Street, from the University of Bristol; and especially emeritus professor John Belton, of Rutgers University provided so much great information and direction. And also, a shout out to cinema historians James Layton and David Pierce who wrote The Dawn of Technicolor on behalf of the George Eastman Museum. Those guys are rock stars.
b&a: With the shutting down of Technicolor, can you offer any thoughts on what went wrong, and reflect on the demise of such an important company in filmmaking history?
This remains such a sore subject for me. Management incompetence putting thousands of people out of work…it’s absolutely shameful! Honestly, I chalk it up to corporate governance being out of touch with the realities of the business they presume to lead.
Having worked at Digital Domain, during the explosion of digital visual effects in the mid-1990s, it was obvious to me that the VFX industry, by 2020, was way over-built. But why the corporate management decided to collapse the brands of MPC, The Mill, Mr. X, Mikros, under the Technicolor name never made any real sense. Technicolor, as a brand name, never had any cachet in the domain of VFX.
And, yes, there were unforeseen events, like Covid, and the strikes, that exacerbated the situation, but that doesn’t absolve corporate management of their steady stream of bad decisions.
A bigger issue remains unfortunately, and that is the dearth of good management and a sense of direction at a number of the Hollywood studios. What’s happening right now at studios like Warner Bros or Paramount is really quite troubling.
As for the Technicolor brand and future…hope springs eternal.
Alchemy in Technicolor is available as an e-book or in hard cover here: https://moviealchemy.com
