by James Layton and David Pierce
George Eastman House
Yet it took nearly two decades for Technicolor to become so glorious. The Dawn of Technicolor: 1915-1935, an exhaustively researched book by James Layton and David Pierce, explores the early years of the technology and includes some 400 photographs and an annotated filmography for the early two-strip process that, because of technical limitations, couldn't replicate natural blues, purples and yellows.
Technicolor was founded in 1916 by Herbert Kalmus, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a physicist; fellow MIT graduate Daniel Comstock, an engineer, physicist and professor; and mechanical engineer and inventor W. Burton Wescott.
Kalmus, Comstock and Wescott didn't have any experience in motion pictures, Layton says, but they saw opportunity when a British colour system called Kinemacolor was proving problematic. "It flickered a lot on the screen and caused headaches," says Layton, an assistant archivist in the Moving Image Department at the George Eastman House. "Wescott saw a demonstration and saw the flaws."
He took the sample of the film back to the lab, and his team tried to improve it, Layton says. "They came up with an improved camera and an improved way of projecting it. That was the first Technicolor process." Film historian, archivist and author Pierce says the then-new company was similar to the modern Silicon Valley start-up.
"They raised investments from Boston bankers, railroad magnates, people who were looking to invest their fortune in something that could be profitable," Layton adds.