Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2018 November 10

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November 10

When did the norm change from monochrome to colour feature films?

After the introduction of colour film in the 1930s (e.g. The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind), it remained the norm for quite some years for feature films to be shot in black-and-white. Gradually colour became predominant, and for a long time now colour has been the default assumption, although some b/w films continue to be made (e.g. Good Night and Good Luck.).

So, exactly when did the default change from monochrome to colour? I realise that this cannot be pinned down to one specific year, but there must be a range before which monochrome was the norm and after which colour was the norm. This may vary by country to some degree. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 03:48, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

This article gives a range of "Late 1950s" and notes that by the 1960s, the choice to shoot in color was no longer financial, but was a largely artistic choice. Both that article and this article note the introduction of single-strip processes in the early 1950s led to the rapid, widespread adoption of color by the end of the decade; prior color film processes used expensive, three-strip processes (separate negatives for cyan, magenta, and yellow) that made the process slow, time consuming, and expensive, and it was the technological leap to a single-strip color processing (both cite Eastmancolor as the process) that made the transition to mostly color film happen. --Jayron32 04:42, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

That late, eh. Thanks for the info, Jayron. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:34, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

I suggest that for Hollywood at least, the best date for the division is a bit later: the mid to late 1960s.

At one time the Oscars had separate award categories for Best Cinematography in color and in B&W. This began with the awards for 1939 and ended with the awards for 1966, when the B&W nominees were The Fortune Cookie, Georgy Girl, Is Paris Burning?, Seconds, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. To me at least, this list (and particularly the first two entries) suggests that B&W was still being used sometimes at that time for financial reasons.

In an attempt to get actual data on this, I went to the IMDB's outdated raw data files available here. (The IMDB makes current data available here, but it does not include as much information as the older files.)

I extracted a list of all US or UK movies (only including actual movies, not TV-movies and other things the IMDb lists) for which color information was available, and counted how many were in color and how many in B&W. Note that I did not attempt to limit the list to feature films; some of the movies listed will be shorts and some will be documentaries.

Anyway, for the period 1930 to 1980, this is what I found:

  Year     B&W     Color
  1930     1419       92   (6.1%)
  1931     1454       25   (1.7%)
  1932     1323       23   (1.7%)
  1933     1276       33   (2.5%)
  1934     1336       62   (4.4%)
  1935     1276      124   (8.9%)
  1936     1243      126   (9.2%)
  1937     1253      142  (10.2%)
  1938     1141      165  (12.6%)
  1939      967      190  (16.4%)
  1940      974      171  (14.9%)
  1941     1033      186  (15.3%)
  1942      971      213  (18.0%)
  1943      838      191  (18.6%)
  1944      743      214  (22.4%)
  1945      757      213  (22.0%)
  1946      728      254  (25.9%)
  1947      670      259  (27.9%)
  1948      706      295  (29.5%)
  1949      727      278  (27.7%)
  1950      679      283  (29.4%)
  1951      643      310  (32.5%)
  1952      538      353  (39.6%)
  1953      513      402  (43.9%)
  1954      387      420  (52.0%)
  1955      363      424  (53.9%)
  1956      357      397  (52.7%)
  1957      459      314  (40.6%)
  1958      361      283  (43.9%)
  1959      312      295  (48.6%)
  1960      293      288  (49.6%)
  1961      321      319  (49.8%)
  1962      327      330  (50.2%)
  1963      257      399  (60.8%)
  1964      297      450  (60.2%)
  1965      340      532  (61.0%)
  1966      265      561  (67.9%)
  1967      198      664  (77.0%)
  1968      227      691  (75.3%)
  1969      182      757  (80.6%)
  1970      110     1088  (90.8%)
  1971       94     1072  (91.9%)
  1972       81      960  (92.2%)
  1973       70      945  (93.1%)
  1974       68      916  (93.1%)
  1975       65      864  (93.0%)
  1976       85      919  (91.5%)
  1977       74      768  (91.2%)
  1978       68      824  (92.4%)
  1979       62      762  (92.5%)
  1980       64      729  (91.9%)

This data is consistent with what I said at the start.

I would also suggest that in addition to the availability of Eastmancolor film, an additional reason for the change taking place at this time is the desire to compete with television. At least in the US, NTSC color TV broadcasting began in the 1950s, but initially color TVs were too expensive for most viewers. As the price came down over time, more people could watch TV in color, movies still made in B&W must have suffered in comparison.

--76.69.46.228 (talk) 23:38, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the data. So it looks like colour first outstripped b/w in 1954, lasted for only 2 years, then dropped back sharply in 1957 and didn't recover until 1962. What could explain this? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:38, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

One out of every eleven US/UK cinematically released movies in 1980 was black and white? That does not pass the sniff test for me. Would you be able to post the list somewhere? It's bad form to rely on memory - especially mine - but I just find that very jarring. Matt Deres (talk) 23:30, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, I discarded the data after constructing the table and I don't feel like reconstructing it. I suspect the B&W "movies" were the sort that never gets a wide release. --76.69.46.228 (talk) 08:32, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Using the data in WP, five US films from 1980 were in B&W, out of 229 in total, and one UK film from 1980 was B&W, out of 47 films. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 15:50, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Re The Longest Day (film) which was shot in monochrome in 1962 and "was the most expensive black-and-white film made until 1993, when Schindler's List was released" according to our article. Another article, WAR ON FILM – The Longest Day, says that Darryl F Zanuck "wanted it shot in black and white to look realistic and like most of the archive film of the war".

Earlier British war films, such as Sink the Bismarck! (1960), were shot in monochrome so that wartime newsreel footage could be spliced into the action sequences, reducing the reliance on unconvincing models of ships and aeroplanes. See BRITISH WAR FILMS, 1939 - 45 (p. 150) by S. P. Mackenzie. Malta Story (1953) is another British war film which makes liberal use of archive newsreels, especially the climactic scene of the arrival of SS Ohio. Also Reach for the Sky (1956) which I think used actual gun camera footage to enliven the dogfight scenes.

Alansplodge (talk) 18:05, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Extended content for thems that cares. Matt Deres (talk) 20:04, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Reposted from my talk page (this page is semi-protected so the user could not post here directly). As Lugnuts and others have indicated above, it's trickier than expected to identify this stuff. Matt Deres (talk) 20:04, 14 November 2018 (UTC) With regard to your "sniff test" remark here, now that I had some time I decided to examine the 64 movies that my previous computations gave as the number of B&W releases in the year 1980. I had assumed previously that there would not be a significant number of double-counted movies, i.e. those shown as both color and B&W because they contained segments of each. But in fact 27 of the 64 were in this category. Those titles were: Agee (1980); At the Fountainhead (of German Strength) (1980); Barnes & Barnes: Fish Heads (1980); The Big Red One (1980); Blue Suede Shoes (1980); Broken Nights (1980); Ecstatic Stigmatic (1980); Fantastic (1980); Fist of Fear, Touch of Death (1980); Fixation (1980); Generations of Resistance (1980); Ghosts of Cape Horn (1980); Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980); The Last Prom (1980); Life Dances On... (1980); The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980); Lion of the Desert (1980); Memories of Duke (1980); The Mirror Crack'd (1980); Musing (1980); Popeye (1980); Raging Bull (1980); The Sea Wolves (1980); Send in the Clowns (1980); Tell Me a Riddle (1980); This Is America Part 2 (1980); The Trials of Alger Hiss (1980). I have not attempted to look up their IMDB pages to find further information. I did look up the other 37, the ones shown only as B&W. (I did this manually, so there may be occasional errors.) And as I suspected, most were documentaries or shorts. Specifically, there were: 3 documentary features: Manoeuvre (1980); Missing Persons (1980); L.A.X. (1980). 4 documentary shorts: Anything for Jazz: Jaki Byard (1980); Jackie McLean on Mars (1980); Why Women Stay (1980); Visits with God: Two First Hand Accounts of Near-Death Experiences (1980). 24 other shorts: After the Game (1980); British Universities Historical Studies in Film: Fascism (1980); City Edition (1980); Cry Wolf (1980); Devices (1980); Finds of the Fortenight (1980); The Grid (1980); Gun (1980); In Between (1980); Intercut (1980); Invasion of the Aluminum People (1980); Julie (1980); A Nermish Gothic (1980); Nitemare (1980); The Nocturnal Immaculation (1980); The Pocketbook (1980); Prelude (1980); Primary Stimulus (1980); Soundings (1980); Taylor Chain (1980); Wall Street (1980); We All Know Why We're Here (1980); Wind & Water (1980); Zoo-Time (1980). And that leaves 6 features for your sniff test: The Elephant Man (1980) Forbidden Zone (1980) Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1980) Stardust Memories (1980) The Cold Eye (My Darling, Be Careful) (1980) Faust (1980) Now that the page has been semi-protected again, I hope you will post find this interesting enough to post part or all of this data in the thread for me as you see fit. --76.69.46.228 (talk) 22:50, 13 November 2018 (UTC) "To me at least, this list (and particularly the first two entries) suggests that B&W was still being used sometimes at that time for financial reasons." In the 1950s, several of the blackand-white films were B movies and associated low-budget products. JMost of the films of Ed Wood, for example, were black-and-white. By the 1960s, even the low-budget films were switching to color. Per our article on the B movie: "In July 1960... That year, Roger Corman took AIP down a new road: "When they asked me to make two ten-day black-and-white horror films to play as a double feature, I convinced them instead to finance one horror film in color." The resulting House of Usher typifies the continuing ambiguities of B picture classification. It was clearly an A film by the standards of both director and studio, with the longest shooting schedule and biggest budget Corman had ever enjoyed. But it is generally seen as a B movie: the schedule was still a mere fifteen days, the budget just $200,000 (one tenth the industry average)" Dimadick (talk) 20:14, 14 November 2018 (UTC)