Technicolor's first colour films needed a technician babysitting every projector
The earliest Technicolor system of 1916 split each shot into red and green frames and demanded a special projector with two lenses and a prism that kept drifting out of line. Only one feature was ever made with it, and just a few frames of that film survive.
Technicolor grew out of a research firm founded in 1912 by Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Comstock and the mechanic W. Burton Wescott. Kalmus and Comstock had studied at MIT, which inspired the Tech in the name, and both went on to Swiss doctorates. When a client asked them to evaluate a flicker-free projection system, they caught the film bug and launched Technicolor in Boston in 1914.
Their first process shot red- and green-filtered frames side by side at double speed. It was shown to mining engineers in New York on February 21, 1917, and used for a single film, The Gulf Between, but constant fiddling with projector alignment sank it. The team switched to printing the colour into the film itself. For Process 2 they glued two thin, dyed prints back to back, and The Toll of the Sea became the first general-release Technicolor film in 1922. The glued prints misbehaved, though: they warped from projector heat, flipping direction at random so the image popped out of focus, and had to be shipped back to Boston for flattening. Coloured scratches on both faces showed up vividly.
Process 3, from 1928, replaced the sandwich with dye transfer. Gelatin relief strips soaked up coloured dye and pressed it onto a blank film, much like a printing press, giving colours more stable than ordinary photographic prints. The breakthrough came in 1932 with the three-strip camera, which ran three black-and-white films at once and delivered the saturated look of The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
From 1954 single-strip colour negative such as Eastmancolor made the bulky camera obsolete, yet Technicolor labs kept making dye-transfer prints from the new stock. The company even dabbled in video, transferring Frank Zappa's 200 Motels from tape to 35 mm film for cinema release in 1971.
Source: Technicolor
