This weekend, the Academy Awards celebrates its 89th year. While not among this year’s nominees, Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation has been a mainstay of the awards ceremony since its founding. The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs owe their award-winning electric blue skies, golden yellow brick road, and fiery landscapes to Technicolor’s color motion picture process. From 1939 to 1967, Technicolor was honored with an Academy Award in color cinematography in all but three years.
Technicolor was founded by three MIT alumni—Herbert Kalmus 1904, Daniel Comstock 1904, and Burton Westcott 1914—originally to research a malfunctioning motion picture projector.
While they were never able to fix the projector, “it brought them to the idea of looking at color…they took their crack at solving it,” explained William Uricchio, a professor at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing Department. Learn more about Technicolor in this Slice of MIT podcast.
The alumni decided on the name Technicolor in honor of their alma mater. In a 1938 Tech Engineering News article Kalmus wrote, “As a Tech Man not too many years beyond graduation, the word ‘Technique,’ the name of our annual class book, was fresh in my memory. And obviously it was color, so putting the words ‘Technique’ and color together, I invented the name ‘Technicolor.’”
Like many startups, Technicolor’s early years depended upon trial and error as much as skill. Their first lab was in a functioning railway car so that they could easily travel to film production locations. The alumni often called on friends and colleagues from MIT. “They were able to tap a pool of expertise of creative problem solving that really is MIT’s forte,” said Uricchio.
They went through many film iterations, ultimately creating a color composite film using a three-strip camera. “They would literally expose three strips of film and would color each of them distinctively and then make a composite,” said Uricchio.
By 1953, Technicolor had sold more than 560 million feet of color film. “It brought this magic to the movies…color by Technicolor meant that the colors were going to be punchy, fantastic, the world of illusion that we associate with cinema,” said Uricchio. And along with its characteristic punchy colors, the company ushered in a new business model to Hollywood studios unaccustomed to relinquishing control. Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation brought in their own cameras, technicians, makeup, and color director in order to guarantee a quality color outcome for a given film.
Learn more about Technicolor’s origins and its role in creating some of Hollywood’s biggest cinematic classics in this Slice of MIT podcast.
The Color by Technicolor podcast includes interviews with William Uricchio and additional research and audio from the Old Time Radio Researchers Group, the National Archives, and the MIT Archives. Additional narration was provided by Jay London and Russell Boulais. “Darxiland,” “Plucky Daisy,” and “Merry Go Slower” were created by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com).