Republic used Trucolor mostly for its Westerns, through the 1940s and early 1950s. The premiere Trucolor release was Out California Way (1946) and the last film photographed in the process was Spoilers of the Forest (1957).[2] With the advent of Eastmancolor and Ansco color films, which gave better results at a cheaper price, Trucolor was abandoned, coincidentally at the same time as Republic's demise.
At the time of its introduction, Trucolor was a two-color subtractive color process. About 3 years later, the manufacturer expanded the process to include a three-color release system based on DuPontfilm stock. They later replaced the DuPont film with Eastman Kodak film stock. Thus, in its lifespan around 12 years, the Trucolor process was in reality three distinct systems for color release prints, all bearing the same “Trucolor” screen credit.[3] Yet, even by 1950, some filmgoers and entertainment publications found Trucolor productions at times deficient and visually distracting due to color inaccuracies. As part of its review of the Roy Rogers “oatuner” Twilight in the Sierras, the influential trade paperVariety stated quite pointedly, “Trucolor tinting adds to the production values despite the overall untrue reproduction of facial and landscape hues.”[4][5]
Trucolor process
In its original two-color version, Trucolor was a two-strip (red and blue) process based on the earlier work of William Van Doren Kelley's Prizma color process. Trucolor films were shot in bipack, with the two strips of film being sensitized to red and blue. Both negatives were processed on duplitized film, much like Trucolor's rival process Cinecolor. Unlike Cinecolor, however, the film was not dyed with a toner but a color coupler, similar to Eastmancolor film. Because of this chemical composition, Trucolor film fades over time, unlike Cinecolor.
A scene from Romantic Rumbolia (1949). On the left is the original film as it is today (faded) and as it originally looked (color corrected).
Three-color Trucolor was first used in 1949, for making prints of cartoons photographed in the "successive exposure" process, in which each animation cel was photographed three times, on three sequential frames, behind alternating red, green, and blue filters. They used multilayer Du Pont Color Release Positive Film for the release print material.
DuPont supplied the stock for Trucolor's three-color process between 1949 and 1953. Prints after 1953 were on Eastman color print stock 5382, and at that point, the name "Trucolor" became synonymous with other trade names for Eastmancolor processing.
Republic Pictures introduced live-action three-color Trucolor with the release of the Judy Canova musical comedy Honeychile in 1951.[6] Kodak Eastmancolor negatives were used for principal photography. DuPont positive stock (type 875) was used to make release prints. This stock had a monopack structure that used synthetic polymer rather than gelatin as a color former.[7]
Trucolor films
Though renowned for being used in Roy Rogers and other Westerns, Republic used Trucolor in a variety of films. The 61-minute live-action feature Bill and Coo (1948) was filmed in Trucolor and received a special Academy Award. Such recognition kept industry personnel interested in the ongoing refinement of the Trucolor process and its use in other films by Republic. In 1949 in New York City, Showmen’s Trade Review—“The Service Paper of The Motion Picture Industry”—reported the following:
Republic has scheduled two additional Trucolor productions to go before the cameras before the end of the year, making a total of 12 pictures to have utilized Republic’s color process during the year. The two planned Trucolor features are a Roy Rogers film, “Trigger, Jr.”, slated for a Nov. 28 start, and a comedy romance starring Estelita Rodriguez, now being prepared for late November production. One Trucolor picture, “Singing Guns,” is now being filmed. [8]
Director John Ford in 1951 filmed a Korean Wardocumentary in Trucolor, This is Korea. Republic also used the process for The Last Command, an epic portrayal of the Battle of the Alamo. In that 1955 production the Mexican army uniforms were tailored in sky-blue fabrics to improve their appearance on the screen.[9]Montana Belle, a Western starring Jane Russell as outlaw Belle Starr, was filmed in Trucolor in 1948 by independent producer Howard Welsch. The picture was intended for release by Republic; however, it was bought back by RKO, to whom Russell was under contract, and was not released by that studio until 1952.
In addition to feature films, Republic commissioned Robert Clampett to make one cartoon in Trucolor, It's a Grand Old Nag. From 1952 to 1955 Republic released a series of 32 travelogues in Trucolor called This World of Ours produced by Carl Dudley. The studio also commissioned Leonard L. Levinson to make four limited animation cartoon satiric travelogues called Jerky Journeys using the process. The live-action travelogue Carnival in Munich, written by Sloan Nibley, and Zanzabuku, filmed in Africa by Lewis Cotlow, are two other Trucolor productions.
↑ Fleet, R. (1948). “The Trucolor Process,” American Cinematographer, March 1948, p. 79.
↑ American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures (online database). The Republic feature Pawnee was filmed before Spoilers of the Forest but released after.
↑ Ryan, Roderick T. (1977). A History of Motion Picture Color Technology. London: Focal Press, pp. 109-110 and pp. 148-149.
↑ “Herm.” (1950). “Twilight in the Sierras”, review, Variety (New York, N.Y.), April 5, 1950, page 6. Retrieved August 14, 2018.
↑ The term "oater" was a period slang term in the film industry for a Western. As used in the cited review by Variety, "oatuner" was a more specific term for "singing Westerns", Roy Rogers' specialty.
↑ Brady, Thomas F. (1951). "Hollywood Unhappy", The New York Times, May 27, 1951, p. 77.
↑ Haines, Richard H. (2003). Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing. McFarland, 2003, p. 57. ISBN978-0-7864-1809-1.
Film stock is an analog medium that is used for recording motion pictures or animation. It is recorded on by a movie camera, developed, edited, and projected onto a screen using a movie projector. It is a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film base coated on one side with a gelatin emulsion containing microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals. The sizes and other characteristics of the crystals determine the sensitivity, contrast and resolution of the film. The emulsion will gradually darken if left exposed to light, but the process is too slow and incomplete to be of any practical use. Instead, a very short exposure to the image formed by a camera lens is used to produce only a very slight chemical change, proportional to the amount of light absorbed by each crystal. This creates an invisible latent image in the emulsion, which can be chemically developed into a visible photograph. In addition to visible light, all films are sensitive to X-rays and high-energy particles. Most are at least slightly sensitive to invisible ultraviolet (UV) light. Some special-purpose films are sensitive into the infrared (IR) region of the spectrum.
35 mm film is a film gauge used in filmmaking, and the film standard. In motion pictures that record on film, 35 mm is the most commonly used gauge. The name of the gauge is not a direct measurement, and refers to the nominal width of the 35 mm format photographic film, which consists of strips 1.377 ± 0.001 inches (34.976 ± 0.025 mm) wide. The standard image exposure length on 35 mm for movies is four perforations per frame along both edges, which results in 16 frames per foot of film.
Republic Pictures Corporation was an American film studio corporation which originally operated from 1935 to 1967, based in Los Angeles, California. It had production and distribution facilities in Studio City, as well as a movie ranch in Encino. Republic was best known for specializing in Westerns, cliffhanger serials, and B-films emphasizing action and mystery. The studio was also notable for developing the careers of such famous Western stars as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and John Wayne. It was also responsible for the financial management and distribution of several big-budget feature films directed by John Ford, as well as one Shakespeare motion picture directed by Orson Welles. Under the supervising leadership of Herbert J. Yates, Republic was considered a mini-major film studio, producing almost 1,000 motion pictures.
Herbert John Yates, a Hollywood mini-mogul, was the founder and President of Republic Pictures. With his contract, he had launched the film careers of such Western stars as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and John Wayne. Between 1935 and 1959, under the supervising leadership of Yates, Republic has produced 956 feature films and 66 multi-chapter cliffhanger serials, some of which are today considered classics, later broadcast on television and then released on home video.
Cinecolor was an early subtractive color-model two-color motion picture process that was based upon the Prizma system of the 1910s and 1920s and the Multicolor system of the late 1920s and the 1930s. It was developed by William T. Crispinel and Alan M. Gundelfinger, and its various formats were in use from 1932 to 1955.
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In bipack color photography for motion pictures, two strips of black-and-white 35 mm film, running through the camera emulsion to emulsion, are used to record two regions of the color spectrum, for the purpose of ultimately printing the images, in complementary colors, superimposed on one strip of film. The result is a multicolored projection print that reproduces a useful but limited range of color by the subtractive color method. Bipack processes became commercially practical in the early 1910s when Kodak introduced duplitized film print stock, which facilitated making two-color prints.
Twilight in the Sierras is a 1950 American Trucolor Western film directed by William Witney and starring Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger, along with Dale Evans, Estelita Rodriguez, and Pat Brady.
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Showmen's Trade Review was a weekly trade magazine for exhibitors and distributors of motion pictures published by Charles E. "Chick" Lewis out of offices in New York City.
Technicolor is a series of color motion picture processes, the first version dating back to 1916, and followed by improved versions over several decades.
Edward M. Newman (1870–1953) was a film producer of many documentary film shorts released by Warner Brothers and edited at Vitaphone studios in Brooklyn, New York in the 1930s. These were mostly of the travelogue genre. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio on March 16, 1870. His parents were Hungarian immigrants. He died in Los Angeles, California on April 16, 1953.
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