Raiders of the Lost Art

By RICHARD CORLISS

When film fans dream of old movies, they dream in black and white. They think of Lillian Gish's Scarlet Letter emblazoned in gray. For them the true colors of Red River, Blue Denim, Golden Boy and Green Pastures are those shades of pearl and ivory determined by the films' cinematographers. And when Bogie says, "Here's looking at you, kid," movie lovers gaze at Ingrid Bergman in glorious monochrome.

But who cares about the visual integrity of Hollywood movies when there is a buck to be made? Not the studios or the TV networks. For them the golden oldies are either profitable inventory or chopped celluloid. And now the archives are being raided by technicians with a new idea: "colorizing" the black-and-white films of Hollywood's Golden Age through computer wizardry. The film is copied onto video and broken down into gradations of gray. An "art director" sits at a console and chooses the colors for each face, dress and prop, which the computerized "paintbrush" adds frame by frame. (Cost per film: about $180,000.) Voil`ah! Jimmy Stewart's Christmas tree in It's a Wonderful Life is as green as greenbacks.

Some people, especially young people nurtured on color TV, like the idea. In a poll by Ted Turner's Cable News Network the day the colorized Yankee Doodle Dandy premiered on Turner's SuperStation WTBS last month, 61% of call-in respondents preferred to see old films in color. Good thing: the Turner Broadcasting System has ordered the coloring of 100 black-and-whites from the MGM and Warner Bros libraries. "We're not trying to make bad films great," says Jack Petrik, executive vice president of WTBS. "We're trying to make great films better." Charles Powell, executive vice president of Color Systems Technology, which provides the new versions to TBS, calls the process "simply another state-of-the-art enhancement. Would you rather have a film sit on the shelf in its 'pure' form or be seen by large numbers of people only because it was colored?"

Pure form! cry the angry filmmakers. The Western branch of the Writers Guild of America calls colorizing an "act of cultural vandalism and a distortion of history." The president's committee of the Directors Guild of America is "unalterably opposed to the cultural butchery." Woody Allen, who has shot four of his last seven films in black and white, sees colorizing as "mutilating a work of art and holding the audience in contempt. I hope people will rise up and put a stop to it." Billy Wilder puckishly sees the debate as a "black-and-white case of logic." Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull) is worried that the process will be used on less popular movies that "would be totally changed and destroyed by color. It would be insane to do this just to get a bigger audience." Says Director Jeremy Paul Kagan: "It's as if somebody put blue eyes on David and said, 'Wouldn't Michelangelo love it?' "

Two weeks ago, the American Film Institute called a Los Angeles powwow at which Jimmy Stewart testified that he found the colorized Wonderful Life too awful to watch. "I couldn't get through all of it," he drawled, adding that the colorizing was "detrimental to the story, to the whole atmosphere of the film. I felt sorry for [Cinematographer] Joe Walker." Then a surprise witness appeared: Earl Glick of Hal Roach Studios, parent company of Colorization, Inc., which had performed the cosmetic surgery on Wonderful Life. His associates, Glick proclaimed, had worked closely with . . . Joe Walker himself! The revelation changed few minds, however, and A.F.I. Director Jean Firstenberg reiterated her proposal for a summit of the hostile parties.

Glick also related how his people had visited the location of a John Wayne western, Angel and the Badman, to match the colors precisely. But by its nature, black-and-white cinema was an antirealistic art form; the best cinematographers were artists whose palettes contained every color in a monochrome rainbow. The expressionist riot of shadows in, say, The Spiral Staircase (1945) is ominous and gorgeous and as vital to the film as any actor or plot twist.

The folks at the colorizing consoles are not expressionists; they are bureaucrats of pictorial realism. And because of the relatively primitive technology, their work looks like an Earl Scheib paint job left too long in the sun. In the films from Colorization, Inc. (which include Cary Grant's Topper and Laurel and Hardy's Way Out West), things look pretty bleak: living sepia. The colors are washed out and heavy on the earth tones, like Technicolor in the early '30s. In films from Color Systems Technology like Yankee Doodle Dandy, the tints tend to run wild. At times, colors follow characters around like laggard halos, and Jimmy Cagney's face has the eerie phosphorescence of an embalmed sun worshiper. Says George Romero, whose cult shocker Night of the Living Dead has just been colorized: "I think the actors in all these movies look like the living dead."

The good news is that the colorized cassettes sold in video stores are struck from clear, crisp prints, and they cost about the same as the black-and-white copies. Take them home, turn off the color on most TV sets, and the majesty of monochrome reappears. The bad news is still in the making, for nothing is impossible to computer mavens with an itch to reprogram the past. Say, guys, how about redubbing Citizen Kane, but with the four-letter words that a real newspaperman would have used? Or inserting a steamy sex scene in Casablanca? Here's looking at that, kids, while the rest of us mourn the treasures of a lost art. --By Richard Corliss. Reported by Roger Franklin/New York and William Hackman/Los Angeles

With reporting by Roger Franklin/New York, William Hackman/Los Angeles