50 SHADES OF GRAY
Five decades of ‘America in Color’: from the ’20s to the ’60s
BLACK-and-white historical footage spanning the 1920s through 1960s will be brought to you in living color on Smithsonian Channel.
The 50-person crew behind “America in Color,” a new five-part series premiering July 9 (and narrated by Liev Schreiber), combed through 27 miles of blackand-white footage — encompassing nearly 6,000 hours culled from archives and collectors — to choose key events from each of the five decades.
A team of historians and researchers then pored over each frame of each film to determine corresponding colors for clothing, cars, uniforms, buildings, etc. — using magazines, color photos, books and information from collectors for comparisons. Computer technology (using logarithms) then transformed these images into color.
“It’s a very delicate and long process,” says colorist Samuel Francois-Steininger, CEO/Producer at Composite Films, who worked closely on the year-long project. “It’s different than [colorizing] a TV series or a classic film. The footage comes from different libraries, archives and collectors and some of it is quite random — compared to a feature film or a TV episode that has only a few characters and and a few sets. Of course, there were occasions where we couldn’t find an exact match — a civilian surrounded by a crowd, for instance — but we cross-referenced with other sources and said, ‘OK, this tie cannot be yellow or pink or light blue because it’s too dark in the black-and-white grey scale. “Sometimes it’s by deduction.” The “America in Color” team often discovered footage that hadn’t been seen since it was originally shot — in some strange places. “That little extract of film from thee 1920 Wall Street bombing came from fragile nitrate [film] in the British Pathe [newsreel] collection,” says David Royle, Smithsonian’s executive VP of programming and production. “It was being kept in a nuclear vault, and the first can they opened, which was labeled as the bombing, was empty. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.” So how were each of the decades’ events featured in “America in Color” chosen? “I think there are certain events that pop out as telling a historical story,” Royle says. “Obviously, the quality of the footage that allows you to tell that story is key. Along with big, momentous events, the challenge is to constantly surprise people and look for stories with modern-day relevance. “I was jarred by how much has changed and how little has changed,” he says of the five decades covered in the series. “You see that anarchist bombing in New York, at 2323 Wall St. [in which 38 people were killed], and you’re reminded that terrorism is not just a phenomenon of our time. And the [1921] Tulsa racial massacre obviously resonates with the tensions of today. “These films were shot in black-and-white but life is not lived in black-and-white,” he says. “It’s lived in color, and this [series] has a way of reaching a much broader audience than the old black-and-white archivacl films did. It’s more magical to an audience to see the more distant past brought to life. What once seemed grey and distant now becomes compelling.”