Eastmancolor: 1950
Eastmancolor: 1950
It’s hard to believe, but single strip 35mm color film was not available until 1950. This rendered Three-Strip color photography relatively obsolete, even though, for the first few years of Eastmancolor, Technicolor continued to offer Three-Strip origination combined with dye-transfer printing (150 titles produced in 1953, 100 titles produced in 1954 and 50 titles produced in 1955, the very last year for Three-Strip).
The first commercial feature film to use Eastmancolor was the documentary ‘Royal Journey’, released in December 1951. Hollywood studios waited until an improved version of Eastmancolor negative came out in 1952 before using it, perhaps most notably in This is Cinerama, which employed three separate and interlocked strips of Eastmancolor negative. ‘This Is Cinerama’ was initially printed on Eastmancolor positive, but its significant success eventually resulted in it being reprinted by Technicolor, using dye-transfer.
By 1953, and especially with the introduction of anamorphic wide screen CinemaScope, Eastmancolor became a marketing imperative as CinemaScope was incompatible with Technicolor’s Three-Strip camera and lenses. Indeed, Technicolor Corp became one of the best, if not the best, processor of Eastmancolor negative, especially for so-called “wide gauge” negatives (65mm, 8-perf 35mm, 6-perf 35mm), yet it far preferred its own 35mm dye-transfer printing process for Eastmancolor-originated films with a print run that exceeded 500 prints, not withstanding the significant “loss of register” that occurred in such prints that were expanded by CinemaScope’s 2X horizontal factor, and, to a lesser extent, with so-called “flat wide screen” (variously 1.66:1 or 1.85:1, but spherical and not anamorphic).
This nearly fatal flaw was not corrected until 1955 and caused numerous features initially printed by Technicolor to be scrapped and reprinted by DeLuxe. (These features are often billed as “Color by Technicolor-DeLuxe”.) Indeed, some Eastmancolor-originated films billed as “Color by Technicolor” were never actually printed using the dye-transfer process, due in part to the throughput limitations of Technicolor’s dye-transfer printing process, and competitor DeLuxe’s superior throughput.
Incredibly, DeLuxe once had a license to install a Technicolor-type dye-transfer printing line, but as the “loss of register” problems became apparent in Fox’s CinemaScope features that were printed by Technicolor, after Fox had become an all-CinemaScope producer, Fox-owned DeLuxe Labs abandoned its plans for dye-transfer printing and became, and remained, an all-Eastmancolor shop, as Technicolor itself later became.
Below, Alfred Hitchcock shooting ‘Rear Window’ in 1954 on Eastmancolor film stock.
My father got to work on Eastman 5201 cine color negative film while he was at the Kodak research lab. He told me of taking a wind-up Bell+Howell 35mm camera to a Kodak picnic to get some test shots to view in the screening room. When Warner Brothers decided they liked the film, Jack Warner flew out to Rochester and met all the folks like my father who worked at the lab. He then worked on Ektacolor Type C color print paper and worked on the hard sell of getting professional portrait photographers to make portraits in color. He retired after becoming the top tier tech support person for Kodak film.
My film professor at Northwestern, Jack Ellis, told me an interesting story: When Eastmancolor first came out, the Japanese used it for those post WWII monster-type movies with the international stars (we used to run those movies in Huntsville). And the pictures were beautiful–the skies were blue, the grass was green, the faces were flesh-colored; however, when Hollywood first used it, the faces were purple, the grass was brown, the skies were green, etc. So, Eastman-Kodak sent a group of scientists and engineers to Japan to work with their film industry, and see what it was that rendered such beautiful pictures and color from Eastmancolor. And the report came back: The Japanese cinematographers, the first thing they do when they open a can of Eastmancolor–they read the instructions!
Fascinating…
Great stuff. I am currently employed by Deluxe.