ABSTRACT
Technicolor Inc. introduced a three-strip color motion picture process in 1932 which improved upon their earlier two-strip process by adding a blue component to what had previously been only a red and green system. 1 However, problems of resolution and accuracy with the earlier two-color process made Hollywood's major studios leery of color. The costs of Technicolor increased producers' hesitation toward live-action feature filmmaking. According to Variety, in 1930 the industry warned that the added cost of color must be limited to about ten percent above black-and-white costs before it could be widely accepted. They cite Warner Bros.' Gold Diggers of Broadway (1930) as an example: in black and white the daily rushes would have cost $23,000, in Technicolor they were $115,000; in black-and-white release prints would have been $63,000, in color they were $451,000. 2 Technicolor was therefore seen as an outrageously risky expense.
