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He works hard, keeps in trim, can walk on his hands. In Los Angeles last summer he was arrested for reckless driving. Next day he was arrested again because he still felt so jolly that he had stood outside a café and squirted a hose on the café manager's automobile and on passersby. Tall, lean, industrious, he is seldom so jolly as that, though last week he was to be seen in Manhattan full of great cheers over a new M-G-M cinema contract, and his employers' extravagant advertising.
Technicolor has been used with more or less success since 1922. Because it costs more per foot than black-and-white-films, producers formerly did not try it much. Last year the vogue of the experimental and obviously unperfected sound-device taught them that experiments could be profitable. Warner Brothers made the first all-Technicolor all-talking picture—On with the Show. Others followed. Technicolor, Inc. began to do a big business.
Technicolor is the trade name of a process invented by Dr. Herbert Thomas Kalmus, onetime (1913-15) professor of electro-chemistry and metallurgy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, now president of a $35,000,000 corporation. Dr. Kalmus built his first camera ten years ago. It took 15 months to build and cost $120,000. Technicolor cameras are cheaper now, but there are not many of them available ; a year ago there were only eight in the world. Technicolor, Inc. owns exclusive rights to its process — not the best process yet discovered for taking pictures in color, but the only one that has been made commercially practical. In the special camera which takes two negatives simultaneously the films coated with a tough gelatin emulsion pass through filters of red and green dyes. It has recently become possible by expert color planning of costumes, settings, to reproduce nearly perfectly all colors of the spectrum except yellow, which still gives trouble. Technicolor Inc. now manufactures one camera per week, rents the cameras, cameramen and color experts to film companies, develops all Technicolor film in its own laboratories.
*Hollywood pronunciation: "pree-mecr In English: "preem-yare."