We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
INTERNATIONAL PROJECTIONIST
VOLUME IX
NUMBER 1
JULY 1935
Mid-Summer Musings Upon Color
Sound System Profits, Television and Sundry Other Items
By JAMES J. FINN
• •
The weather hardly being conducive to brow-puckering and concentration on involved technical articles, and the editor having succumbed to a seasonal lassitude that invites reminiscent dreaming of bygone events, there are offered herewith a few mental meanderings on topics which are deserving of convenient consideration by the craft.
* *
THERE have been sufficient runs of "Becky Sharp" throughout the country to enable a reasoned appraisal of the significance of this first all-color feature picture to the motion picture industry. Admittedly, Technicolor involves no serious reproduction problems, yet the craft is tremendously interested in the general overall effect of color upon the industry from which it derives its payroll dollars.
The highest hurdle confronting color films at present is an economic one, ignoring for the moment other problems which likely will succumb to the ingenuity and skill of the technicians, who thus far have exhibited some marvelous sleight-of-hand in licking numerous tough production problems.
But what about the economics of color films? Black-and
white prints cost 1.8 cents per foot. Technicolor costs 5.8 cents per foot; which leaves a balance favorable to the former process of 4 cents per foot. A little multiplication of 4 cents times the number of feet in a feature, times the number of prints in circulation, makes for a tidy sum of money on each release. Furthermore, a Technicolor feature requires the services of color specialists for plotting the composition of each scene, including the costumes and backgrounds, in addition to extra labor costs for lamps, etc.
Proponents of the Technicolor process will resist vigorously the citation of color film costs at 5.8 cents per foot. They hold, and not without justification, that the price per foot will be lowered with increasing use of color by producers. Lowered it certainly will be, must be, but it appears that 3 cents per foot is the rock-bottom figure attainable by even the most optimistic colorists; which still leaves a balance of 1.2 cents per foot in favor of black-and-white prints.
Champions of color will go to the mat with anybody on this latter cost difference, and will rend the heavens with their cry that color is more than worth the difference. But is it?'
The ballyhoo surrounding the release of "Becky Sharp" was in the best traditions of motion picture publicity, which is to say, at the very least, that it was vigorous and attentioncompelling. Potential customers were led to believe that Technicolor would bowl them over and precipitate a box-office
[7]