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Inside the colorization of ‘Citizen Kane’
By
RAY KELLY
A full-color version of Citizen Kane was
nearly a reality in 1989.
In late 1988, a team at Color Systems Technology Inc. in Marina
del Rey, California, secretly colorized a portion of Orson Welles' landmark
black and white film.
CST was formed in 1983 to convert black-and-white films and
television shows into color to attract a wider, younger audience. Among its
clients was cable TV mogul Ted Turner.
William Schaeffer, who worked at CST from 1986 to 1996, was an
assistant art director there when color was added to the closing minutes
of Citizen Kane as
a test prior a planned full transformation.
"The footage was 10 minutes (ending with) the warehouse at
the end of the movie and included the sled," Schaeffer said. "It was
very difficult to do at the time because of all the crates and boxes. It was
done primarily by the artists using the 'real time' coloring systems, if I
remember correctly ... The test footage was done on the digitally controlled
analog color adder and was done in 640 x 486 NTSC resolution, because that is
the resolution the system was designed for. "
Four planes of color were used in a process that Schaeffer
describes as quite labor intensive.
Before adding color to a black and white feature film, CST would
produce up to 700 reference stills, based on color photographs taken on the set
or production artwork, he said. "For a lot of movies, there were no
color stills, so you had to use your common sense."
In the late 1980s, CST had a staff of 150 working three shifts a
day, seven days a week.
Schaeffer, whose 40 or so colorization credits include Night of the Living Dead, All About Eve and A Night at the Opera,
had a chance to see the Citizen
Kane test footage produced by a CST team headed by art
director Bruce Jones.
"At the time I saw it, I had never seen Citizen Kane,"
Schaeffer said. "I thought it looked fine."
Turner Entertainment Company, which had obtained the home video
rights to Citizen
Kane in 1986, announced with much fanfare on January 29, 1989 its
plans to colorize Welles' first Hollywood movie.
There was an immediate backlash with the Welles estate and
Directors Guild of America threatening legal action.
Filmmaker Henry Jaglom, a friend of Welles and member of a DGA
committee opposed to colorization, went public with a conversation he and
Welles had in late September 1985 when the colorization of classic films was
still in its infancy.
"Orson said to me, about two weeks before he died — I
remember this vividly — 'Please do this for me: Don't let Ted Turner deface my
movie with his crayons,'" Jaglom recalled.
The furor was short-lived, as Turner backed down on February 14,
1989 after a review of Welles' 50-year-old contract with RKO Pictures revealed
he had been given absolute artistic control over his first Hollywood film,
which it specified would be a black-and-white picture.
"There was a tape vault with all the projects and I had
access to the vault," Schaeffer said. "After a few weeks, the
tapes just disappeared and nobody knew what happened. There were other
things to do."
He added, "It was customary for us to give the colorized
master 1-inch tape to the client."
The test footage has remained largely unseen, except for a
minute-long fragment contained in the 1991 BBC documentary The Complete Citizen Kane.
"After seeing that documentary, I would assume that the
tapes were given to Ten Turner. I do not know," Schaeffer said.
"They may have been bulk erased, but it is doubtful."
The control Welles enjoyed over Citizen Kane did not extend to two of his
subsequent movies, The
Magnificent Ambersons and The Stranger, both of which were colorized.
After leaving CST in 1996, Schaeffer worked as a rotoscope
artist for Digital Domain, only to see roto work outsourced
to Vancouver, China, and India when the recession hit a dozen years
later.
Schaeffer, 60, remains a proponent of adding color to classic
black and white films. He said he is glad that at least a portion of the
colorized Citizen Kane
footage created by his colleagues has survived and can be seen.
"Philosophically, I have no problem with colorizing a
movie," Schaeffer said. "I don't like black and white
photography or movies anymore. I prefer color. It provides more information.
Black and white looks flat to me."
When harassed by purists, Schaeffer said with a laugh that he
tells them he would like to see Ansel Adams' photographs colorized.
Schaeffer noted there is little fuss when classic films appear
on television with scenes cut, edited for a time slot or the image panned and
scanned.
"People are watching a brutalized, edited and distorted
version of a movie," Schaeffer said. "That's not what happens with
colorization."
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