Show Business: Raiders of the Lost Art

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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.) Voilàh! 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?' "