Technicolor

Technicolor was a family of color motion picture processes developed by the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation, founded in Boston in 1914 by Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Frost Comstock and mechanic W. Burton Wescott, with the name inspired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Kalmus and Comstock had studied. The earliest two-color process, Process 1, was demonstrated in New York in February 1917 and used in the company's only feature made in that process, The Gulf Between. Process 2, a subtractive two-color system introduced in 1922, produced Technicolor's first general-release feature, The Toll of the Sea, later that year, but its cemented double-sided prints were prone to cupping and scratching. Process 3, introduced in 1928 with the dye-transfer imbibition method, made The Viking the first feature shot entirely in the new process. The definitive three-strip Process 4, using a beam-splitting camera to expose three black-and-white negatives simultaneously behind red, green and blue filters, became the most widely used color process in Hollywood's Golden Age, prized for its highly saturated color in musicals such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), animated features such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and costume pictures such as Gone with the Wind (1939). By the mid-1950s the three-strip camera gave way to single-strip Eastmancolor negative, with Technicolor laboratories still producing prints by the dye-transfer method from three matrices made from that negative.