Fast Color

To Hollywood, Technicolor is a magic word. On movie marquees, it automatically increases the gross of a film as much as 25%. But during the booming war years the word was not so magical to Technicolor, Inc. Hampered by strikes and shortages, its earnings were just soso.

Last week, Technicolor, Inc. proudly announced that the old magic was finally working for it too. In its annual report, the company reported record net profits of $1,422,752 in 1947, more than three times those of 1946. What was even better, Technicolor was booked up solid for at least a year, even though it is expanding production 44%.

Technicolor's success was a typical Hollywood one-man show, by dour, dignified Dr. (of physics) Herbert T. Kalmus, 66, who plays table tennis, wears dark worsted suits, and keeps pretty much to himself.

Two-Toiled Horses. The co-inventor, developer, majority stockholder and president of Technicolor, Kalmus is a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (after which Technicolor was named). He was a professor for several years before he got interested in color photography. With two other M.I.T. graduates, he worked-out a crude color method in 1914, bought out his discouraged partners soon after.

In their place, as a working partner, he installed a fellow Bostonian, his wife Natalie, a pretty woman with flaming red hair (which was fine for color experiments). Kalmus borrowed $300,000 and made his first motion picture, The Gulf Between, in two colors (red and green). Kalmus thought it much better than another color process, British-developed Kinemacolor, then in use. "It was nothing," said Dr. Kalmus of his old competitor, "for a horse to have two tails,. one red and one green."

Kalmus changed his process for his next picture, Toll of the Sea (1922). It was the first to use Technicolor's present process (in which no filters are used but special dyes are added to the film). It grossed some $250,000, of which Technicolor got more than half, and it sent Kalmus to Hollywood. When Jack Warner grossed $3,500,000 with his Technicolored Gold Diggers of Broadway in 1929, Technicolor hit the big time.

Osmotic Oozing. But the flood of orders swamped the small company. Its product became bad, and business soon fell to nothing. Dr. Kalmus turned the tide by what he calls "an osmotic oozing toward perfection." He developed the two-color process into a three-color one (red, green and blue), thus could reproduce every shade of color. This gave Technicolor a virtual monopoly on three-color pictures. Dr. Kalmus has done his best to keep it that way, by his tight control of every phase of operations.

There are only 25 Technicolor cameras in existence (21 in Hollywood, four in England), and they belong to the company. It does not rent them, sell color film, or lend advisers. It simply "sells a service," i.e., films the production for movie companies. The charge is a basic price of 6.22-c- a foot for final prints (last year's footage: 222,017,439).

Though the Kalmuses were divorced in 1944, Natalie's name still appears on all screen credits for Technicolor. She is credited with being a top color expert herself and was in charge of the color control department (which advises directors on proper clothing colors) for years. One apocryphal story is that her abnormally sensitive eyes perceive colors no one else can.

Jaundiced View. Kalmus' ambition is to have all A films made in Technicolor. The biggest obstacle at present is his own company; it needs six months to get out color prints and moviemakers hate to wait that long. Otherwise, most moviemakers would probably be glad to make all their A pictures in Technicolor. The Government takes a different view. As owner of the onetime German company, General Aniline & Film Corp., the Government has a three-color process of its own. It claimed that Technicolor deals with moviemakers -- and others -- were making it hard to market General Aniline's product.

Last August the Government charged Technicolor and Eastman Kodak Co., which the Government charges has cross-licensing agreements with Technicolor, with conspiracy to monopolize the industry. But Dr. Kalmus does not profess to be worried about the suit. He insists that his color processes are well known and no secret. Said he: "The only secret knowledge we have is know-how and you can't break up know-how by court order."

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