Mamba in Denmark

August 28 will see the Danish premiere of Mamba at Paradisbio in Aarhus. Paul Brennan will be flown in to present the film.
September 1 it's time for Copenhagen to get the Mamba treatment at the Cinemateque of the Danish Film Institute. Both Paul and myself will be present at the second date.

The US showing of Mamba at Cinefest in March had a great impact in the classic film community. Many prominent people attended the showing, among them legendary critic Leonard Maltin and Chris Horak, the director of the Film and TV arcives at UCLA. Both Maltin and Horak wrote articles about the event:

The Maltin Review
Chris Horak's impressions of Mamba

Me, Chris Horak, Paul Brennan and Bob Birchard (AFI) at Cinefest

At Cinefest Paul and I also made it official that the nitrate print of Mamba was to be donated to the Archive at UCLA as soon as transportation could be arranged.

In August 2012 the nine reels of Mamba magic was shipped to USA where it belongs.
The next chapter in the Mamba adventure will be the release of a restored print. It will take about two years to restore it once funding has been provided. Until then the nitrate reels will be stored in the UCLA vaults.

The recycling of music in The Artist

There is an ongoing debate surrounding the choice of music in the French Oscar-nominated silent film The Artist. Legendary actress Kim Novak is accusing the French director Michel Hazanavicius of musical rape because of his use of a snippet of Bernard Herrmann’s score from Hitchcock’s Vertigo. This is an opportunity for me to give my thoughts on the recycling of music in the movies

Bernard Herrmann's score to Vertigo (1958)

First some background:
In the dawn of film there were no particular scores, theme songs or soundtracks. But as the films didn’t have a soundtrack the air had to be filled with something. Music was of course a natural choice. The smaller houses had a pianist or a couple of musicians at most, maybe a trio that also worked at the nearby restaurant. The bigger cinemas often had orchestras. Sometimes a band of 8 to 12 players if it was a medium sized city theatre. If the cinema also doubled as a regular theater or music hall venue the orchestra could be bigger. The really big palaces that were built after WWI could house a full size symphony orchestra. The Roxy in NYC opened in 1927 had a very large orchestra of more than a 100 players.

The cinema often had a musical director who in most cases also was head of the orchestra. The musical director took bits and pieces of well known classical music that fitted particular scenes or emotions and put together a program of sorts for each film. The use of already existing music was thus commonplace from the very beginning of film history.

The Scala Theater in Brighton UK 1930

With time, the bigger cinemas developed a quite vast musical library to use. Well known pieces by Verdi, Wagner, Beethoven and other masters were used to the extent that they became synonymous with particular moods or scenes in the movies. The more creative musical directors sometimes also wrote transitional music to fill out the gaps.

By 1915 the studios had become aware of the importance of music as it clearly had become a part of the movie going experience. It was at this time the first commissioned scores appears (Read more about the early days of movie scores and theme songs here)

This was also a time when the hit songs were born. Some songs could sell a million copies in sheet music alone. With the portable phonographs of the late teens records became more common. Records had been more or less a luxury item up until this time. A single sided opera record could sell for as much as $6 in 1910. (that would be about $100 today). Then came radio and the modern music business was born. The hit songs now quickly found their way into the movies.

It was more common that the songs went through a music publisher rather than through the movie studio. The studio could often commission the song but didn't own the rights to sell sheet music or records. With the advent of the talkies the music could be nailed to the filmstrip. The studios set up musical departments almost immediately.

Prolific song writers of Tin Pan Alley in NYC were hired and often got very lucrative deals with the Hollywood studios that now had a never ending need for songs and scores.
This is why the early musicals (pre 1934) have so many good songs. Hollywood hired the best composers and lyricists they could find. Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and teams like the Gershwins, Freed & Brown or Brown DeSylva & Henderson.

Business as usual at a Tin Pan Alley music publisher in 1929

Most of these songs are still evergreens. There was an avalanche of hit songs that got even more power from radio performances. All this marketing power made the songs stick in peoples ears forever. The movies the songs first were used in were quickly forgotten but the songs themselves lived on and still does.

Incidental music and scores that was not considered stand alone songs however, did not have the same life or commercial value. The songs were usually commissioned from someone like Cole Porter, but the incidental music was written by a staff composer, sometimes using the themes from the different commissioned songs, sometimes not. The composer to the incidental music often never received any credit in the final product as he was on a monthly salary at the studio. It was the stand alone songs that were important.

Marion Davies, Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed (1934)

It goes on more or less like this until Orson Welles commissioned an entire score from newcomer Bernard Herrmann for Citizen Kane in 1940. No hit songs, just a great big score by Herrmann alone, including a fabulous aria from a fictitious Opera - Salammbô, written in the strict post-romantic style of Richard Strauss or Giacomo Puccini. Spotify link: Salammbô's Aria from Citizen Kane
To me this is the birth of the modern film score that had begun with the commissioned scores to the silent movies 20 years earlier. The composer now also recived credit, sometimes even on the poster.

Bernard Herrmann in the 1940's

The case with The Artist:
I think it's difficult to re-use a score or pieces of it as this often instrumental music more or less serves as a backdrop to the scenes in the movie. In that respect I give Novak a point. It would be awkward to use really prolific scores like Star Wars or Jaws for other pictures that are not parodies of the original films.

If the composer to a new score use a few bars or a theme from an old score as a nod or homage to the original composer I think it should be considered a nice gesture rather than a rape situation. It's all a matter of style and how it is done. In the Artist it is beautifully done and clearly serves as homage to Herrmann. What is even more important is that Hazanavicius has permission from Herrmann's estate and his publisher to use the music in his film.

Herrmann used bits and pieces from the great masters himself. There is a lot of inspiration from both Mahler and Strauss in many of his early scores. Another great composer, John Williams is often stealing bits and pieces from others to his scores (which I often think are better than the films they were created for). The best example is perhaps Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score for Kings Row (1942). If you listen to the main theme you hear a mix of Superman and Star Wars both written 35 years later by Williams. Spotify Link: Kings Row (Main Theme) - Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Songs on the other hand can be used many times in many different films. The important thing is that they fit in. In Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, the filmmaker makes a statement by only using modern hit songs, most certainly to attract a younger audience to a period film. I think that is incredibly cheap! Imagine a 1940's film with a contemporary score by Gaga, Beyonce or 50 cent, it would be totally wrong.

Singin In The Rain from Hollywood Revue of 1929

The use of old songs in Singing In The Rain is a celebration of the first hit composers and the songs that were used in the first talking pictures. Singing In The Rain by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown was a hit in 1929 because of it's inclusion in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, but became an even bigger hit in Singing In the Rain in 1952. Many songs used in movies didn't become hits until they were re-cycled in other movies. This go way back, I have no good examples here but an instrumental theme used in a 1942 film could very well get lyrics and be re-used in a 1948 movie and then become a major hit.
I have no problems with that. The difficult task is to use the right music at the right time.

Conclusion:
Dear Kim Novak, I’m sorry to say it but the use of Bernard Herrmann’s score in the Artist is definitely not a rape situation. Not even a slight groping to put it bluntly.

A French behind the scenes featurette in color from The Artist 2011

Mamba World Premiere in Melbourne Nov 21

It's not without pride I can announce that Tiffany Pictures 1930 all color triumph Mamba will be shown in public for the first time in about 80 years. This very special event will take place at The Astor Theatre in Melbourne, Australia November 21.

My collaborator Paul Brennan and I will be there in person to present the film together. It was Paul who found the long thought lost nitrate reels in 2009, I then edited the whole thing together into a presentable format. Since 2009, when Mamba was found, the complete soundtrack has been added to the film elements thanks to a kind contribution from the UCLA Film & Television Archives.

With all the different elements in place Mamba is now ready to be properly restored. However, when the opportunity to present the film before a live audience came about, and at such a wonderful place as The Astor we immediately decided to share this remarkable discovery even though it's still a work in progress.

"The Astor was built in the 1930s and still retains the art-deco charm of that period. The theatre is a classic, single-screen cinema with stalls and a dress circle, the overall seating capacity of 1,150 is reduced from the original 1,700 - and the auditorium has the same, soft ambience that you will have enjoyed in the foyers. Beautiful curtains cover the screen - there are no jarring, advertising slides to greet you!

But there is nothing "old-fashioned" about The Astor's facilities. The fully air-conditioned cinema boasts a state-of-the-art sound system and now has Australia's first installation of the superb, Barco 4K Digital Projector which is capable of providing resolution that is up to four times higher than the industry standard." Thus a splendid venue for such an important event.

This is the first of two articles about Mamba, it's importance in film history and more information about the people who made it. The story about how the film was found can be found here.

Mamba is one of the earliest all talking all color features ever made that also survives complete. The use of color throughout an entire talking feature was something completely new in 1929 and for such a small studio as Tiffany it was unheard of. It’s clear Tiffany decided to take a risk with hopes to become a bigger player in the Hollywood studio system. In the fall of 1929 Hollywood was not only a turmoil of sound but also color. Every studio of note was wiring for sound and the bigger players also wanted color in their productions, if only just short sequences.

One should note that at this time only about a dozen Technicolor cameras were available in Hollywood altogether. The studios had to battle to use them and the schedules were tight. The big studios monopolized the color cameras quite thoroughly but Tiffany got lucky, probably by some sort of divine intervention and could shoot an entire feature in color. All color talkies was clearly the next big thing and Tiffany decided to go all in right from the start. They were even planning to take technology a step further and shoot it in 3D according to this article in the Film Daily published Nov 12, 1929

Mamba was shot during approximately 10 weeks, from the end of September to early December 1929. At the time production begun, only two all talking, all color features had been released. Those were two backstage musicals from Warner Bros, On With The Show! released in July and Gold Diggers of Broadway in late August. None of the two have survived intact.

 When production wrapped in December, two more WB musicals were ready for release. The two hour extravaganza The Show Of Shows opening late November and the Jerome Kern operetta Sally starring Marilyn Miller just before Christmas 1929. These two have survived in black and white only, save from short fragments in color.

The fifth all color talkie The Vagabond King from Paramount had its NYC gala premiere late February 1930 (it wasn’t released to the general public until April). It has survived and has been restored by UCLA. Then comes Mamba, released March 10, which makes it the sixth all color talkie ever produced, and the earliest known all color talkie that wasn’t a musical or came from a major studio. It is intact and in quite good shape but it needs to be restored.

Tiffany Pictures was formed in 1921 as an independent production company by silent superstar Mae Murray and her then husband and director Robert Z. Leonard. Probably inspired by United Artists, formed two years earlier by Pickford/Fairbanks/Chaplin/Griffith, Tiffany's main goal was to produce Mae Murray vehicles, distributing them through Metro. After having made eight features together, Mae Murray divorced Leonard and left Tiffany for MGM in 1925. She eventually came back to Tiffany in 1929 to remake her 1922 success Peacock Alley as a talkie. It didn't work out well and Murray's talkie career was more or less over within a year. She sued Tiffany accusing the company having ruined her career. She lost the case and eventually left the movie business. The rest of her life is a mentally unstable, rather sad story. Mae Murray left us in 1965, a year after her last attempt for a come-back at 75. She was the real Norma Desmond.

Mae Murray in The Merry Widow 1925

What happened to Tiffany Pictures right after Murray's departure is somewhat unclear. My guess is that it was in limbo for a while until someone decided to pick up the pieces. There are indications of Tiffany being reformed from the scraps of the MGM merger in 1924. Considering its close relationship with Metro, many redundant people left over from Metro (and Goldwyn) who wasn't transferred to MGM was probably hired by Tiffany. With a new management and a staff of skilled craftsmen the company was ready for big business.

Tiffany is often referred to as a poverty row studio. I'm not sure if the term poverty row is a correct label for a company like Tiffany. I think independent studio would be more suitable. After all, they had their own studio from 1927, The Reliance Majestic Studios which had been the home of DW Griffith. The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance and Broken Blossoms were all partially or fully shot at the studio.

The Tiffany-Stahl Studio 1929 

Poverty row units normally had to lease facilities, often cameras and other equipment, sets and sometimes even actors from other studios when they wanted to make a picture. The classic poverty row production was generally a poorly funded venture with very unclear distribution. In an era when the bigger studios also owned the major theatre chains, getting an independent picture into movie houses was a challenge. I guess the Tiffany studio may have served as a base for other smaller companies, thus linking it to the poverty row epithet.

With the acquisition of the Reliance Majestic in 1927 came the new boss the MGM director and producer John M. Stahl who stayed in power until 1930 when he sold his interest in Tiffany and became a director at Columbia. I guess Stahl was largely responsible for the "New expanding Tiffany" as it coincides exactly with his time as CEO. Stahl was generally considered a really competent and nice man, liked by both staff and actors.

From August 1929 Tiffany had a very lucrative agreement with RCA. The deal was very straight forward - If a cinema owner agreed to book a block of 26 Tiffany films, RCA would wire the theatre for sound for $2,995, which was a bargain for most managers. By February 1930 no less than 2,460 theaters had signed up for the deal. Tiffany had thus a distribution network, at least for a while.

John M. Stahl

After Stahl left Tiffany in 1930 the company sunk back among the B-players concentrating on westerns, shorts and cheap monkey movies. They finally went out of business in 1932, much because of the ongoing depression, a general lack of funds and a hard time getting their films out to the theaters. According to my sources the main reason for their demise was because "they had no profitable distribution network." So I guess the departure of Stahl also ended the profitable RCA distribution agreement. The studio was sold and the main part of the Tiffany legacy, including most of the original negatives went up in smoke during the filming of Gone With The Wind in 1939.

John M. Stahl later directed several great pictures for Columbia in the 1930's and later for 20th Century Fox, his best known film is the brilliant Technicolor noir Leave Her To Heaven. 1950's melodrama master Douglas Sirk remade no less than three of Stahls pictures from the 30's. Magnificent Obsession is one of them.

My next post will give you more Mamba magic. Stay tuned!

Color in the movies - Part 2 - Chronochrome

The additive color processes were many and all fairly alike. The basic principle of an additive color system consisted of black and white film stock that was treated with some sort of filters or sequence of filters when shot and up on projection the same filters were applied. Most of the problems with the different processes boiled down to getting the colored filters in perfect sync with the running film. While Kinemacolor had some success it wasn't the best looking additive color system. From a technical point of view it had quite a few shortcomings, most notably the irritating flicker and the limited color spectrum it offered. The best looking and probably most advanced additive color process was French inventor Léon Gaumont's Chronochrome, patented February 11, 1911. Chronochrome was a three-color system where the three different color images were shot simultaneously rather than in sequence. The camera was equipped with three lenses and three filters, blue, red, green. The resulting positive was then projected by a machine also equipped with three lenses and filters.

Léon Gaumont

Léon Gaumont was born in Paris 1864. He grew up in a family of humble origins. His mother was a maid and his dad a Paris cab driver. In 1876 young Léon had the oppportunity to enter the Collège Sainte-Barbe, probably with the financial assistance of his mother’s employer, the countess of Beaumont. He was forced to leave school at the age of 16 when his parents separated. Gaumont continued educating himself by attending classes at different public Paris institutions. In 1888 Gaumont married Camille Maillard, who brought as her dowry a piece of land on the rue des Alouettes, near the Buttes Chaumont, the eventual site of the Gaumont studios and of the 'cité Elgé'. When Gaumont was offered a job at the Comptoir géneral de photographie in 1893, he jumped at the opportunity. His decision proved fortunate when two years later he was given the chance to acquire the business. In August 1895, he partnered with Gustave Eiffel (the creator of the tower), the astronomer Joseph Vallot and the financier Alfred Besnier to make the purchase. Their business entity, called L. Gaumont et Cie, has survived in one form or another to become the world's oldest surviving film company extant. The company sold camera equipment and film, but in 1897 inaugurated a motion picture production business. Initially, Gaumont made films for the picture arcade business such as those operated by the Lumière brothers, but it was under the direction of Alice Guy, originally Gaumont's secretary made head of production that they began making short films based on narrative scripts.

Alice Guy

Alice Guy is considered to be the first filmmaker to systematically develop narrative filmmaking. She was also one of the pioneers in the use of sound recordings in conjunction with the images on screen in Gaumont's Chronophone system, which used a vertical-cut disc synchronized to the film. An innovator, she employed special effects, using double exposure masking techniques and even running a film backwards. Alice Guy pretty much set the standards for what could be done technically at the time. More about the Chronophone system and an example of Alice Guy's phonoscenes can be found here . She left Gaumont in 1906, before most of the experiments in color film took place. In papers found after his death Leon Gaumont described the Chronochrome process like this:

“Each image appearing on the screen in natural colors was formed by superimposition of three images, violet, green and orange. The combined radiation of these three colors results in the reproduction of natural colors. The image was photographed on the film by three objectives placed one above the other, each provided with a glass color filter. These three images were were projected in superimposition through carefully aligned objectives and filters. In this process the single image of ordinary motion pictures is replaced by three images simultaneously projected and superimposed. If these three images had the same dimensions as used in ordinary motion pictures, 18 by 24 mm each, each scene would require three times the length of film ordinarily used, and would necessitate very rapid movement of the film. Therefore, it was decided to reduce the height of the film by one quarter. By this method, the film length was approximately two and one-half times that of ordinary film.” Three images in different colors would thus overlap on the screen. A servo engine installed on the projector would correct parallax problems. The chronochrome frame measured only 12 mm in height (the standard was 18 mm), which resulted in a panoramic format on the screen. The purpose of the truncaded height of the image was purely economical as less film were used because of this. Three frames were shot on the same space as two with normal height. One could argue that the dimensions of the Chronochrome image was a forerunner to wide screen film of later years. The most fascinating thing about the Chronochrome process is that it still looks so good. Let's take a look at some of the Chronochrome films which was included in the first public presentations of the system. Ten short films were showed before an amazed audience in Paris, November 15 1912. It was a great success. In June 1913 the system was ready for export and thus presented in New York. The New York show contained slightly different snippets than the Paris showing and contained 16 scenes. To really show off the possibilities of the system both showings started with studio shots of flower and fruit arrangements. The next segment showed what 1912 French beach life was like. In this clip there's also some footage used in the New York presentation. The Carnival in Nice, early spring 1913, some shots of Venice and a military parade in Berlin celebrating the wedding of Princess Victoria Louise of Preussia and Ernest Augustus Duke of Cumberland in May 1913. At the outbreak of the first world war the Chronochrome and many other techincal innovations were either completely forgotten or put on hold. This snippet was shot at the Victory parade in Paris July 14,1919 and is one of the last scenes filmed in the process before it was finally abandoned in the early 1920's.

Color in the movies - Part 1 - Kinemacolor

Since my second child, my beautiful daughter Juni was born January 22 there has been little time left for writing. Now things are slowly finding their tracks and new routines are being created. Uninterrupted sleep really does wonders for the creativity!

This is thus part one of a series I have planned for a long time. Many people seems to believe the first color feature was Gone With the Wind in 1939 which of course is untrue. In the series I will try to explain and show examples of some of the early color systems, all of them predecessors to 3 strip Technicolor (the system that was used in GWTW). I will try to leave out most of the technical details and concentrate on the basic principles in each system. Enjoy!

”3D films will be the next big thing”. It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? I wonder if this modern day tagline was used in September 1922 when the first known 3D film opened. The film was called The Power of Love and was shot with a modified Prizma color camera. Prizma color was a primitive color system that was invented in 1913, but color movies were of course yesterdays news even in 1913.

The first successful color motion picture process was Kinemacolor. From the start it was a three color system. The roots of the system dated back to the work of Edward R. Turner, a British inventor who had received a patent for a three color motion picture system in 1889. This is really interesting since a working three color system for motion pictures didn't hit the public until 1932. Turner's early three color method was based on a mid-19th century discovery that virtually all colors could be produced by a combination of the three primary colors red, green and blue. This additive principle (bringing together the separate color parts to create a composite full color result) would be the inspiration for Kinemacolor.


In 1901, Turner went to Charles Urban, an American businessman residing in London, to request assistance in developing the patent, in return for exploitation rights. Urban was instantly enthusiastic, and got his engineer Alfred Darling to design a camera and projector. Research to produce a workable three color system went on for a year until early 1903 when Turner suddenly died of a heart attack in his laboratory. A few individual frames and one short strip of film show that the camera could take pictures, but in projection the images were almost impossible to enjoy because of the heavy flickering.

This short fragment shows the earlier three color experiments of Edward Turner. Note the distinct presence of the blue color in the footage.

To obtain a normal projection speed of 16 frames per second Kinemacolor had a speed of 48 frames per second, one frame for every color that was projected in sequence red, green and blue.

Charles Urban and George Albert Smith

Charles Urban quickly bought up the patent rights and set his associate George Albert Smith to work on the project. Several more years of trying to put three colors on the screen failed to yield acceptable results. Ultimately a simpler system using two colors was developed in 1906 and the results were deemed workable. The Kinemacolor system was born.

One impediment to producing natural color motion pictures had been the fact that existing film stocks were orthochromatic which means they were basically insensitive to red light. This was probably the major reason color film wasn't invented earlier. Until the commercial availability of true panchromatic black and white film that was equally sensitive to light of all wavelengths in the mid 1920s, color pioneers had to chemically sensitize their film so that it would record more or less of the entire visible color spectrum. Thus Smith and Urban had to make their own panchromatic film stock.

The Kinemacolor camera and projector

The Kinemacolor camera exposed black and white film through alternating red and green filters so that alternate frames were exposed through either the red or the green, but resulting in a black and white positive. The camera speed was 32 frames per second. The blue element in the earlier version was left out which also as a bonus meant less flicker. In projection the movie was shown through a filter wheel, similar to that in the camera. The filters added the red and green tints to the successive frames. The results were remarkably good, but like all sequential color processes, Kinemacolor suffered from color fringing when objects moved, since the two color records were not recorded at the same time. Many color processes used this approach and all suffered from fringing on moving objects. The images demanded a stronger light in the projector but were often still seen as rather dark and muddy. Sometimes the film was not loaded in the projector in appropriate sync with the color wheel. This gave a undesired almost psychedelic effect. None of the two-color processes could reproduce blue or pure white, but various tricks were used to fool the eye into thinking it was seeing a neutral white.

Here is a 1906 demonstration of the two color Kinemacolor. The first motion picture exhibited in Kinemacolor was an eight-minute short filmed in Brighton titled A Visit to the Seaside, which was trade shown in September 1908. On 26 February 1909, the general public first saw Kinemacolor in a programme of twenty-one short films shown at the Palace Theater in London. The process was first seen in the United States on 11 December 1909, at an exhibition staged by Smith and Urban at Madison Square Garden in New York. Kinemacolor projectors were eventually installed in some 300 cinemas in Britain, and 54 dramatic films were produced. Four dramatic short films were also produced by Kinemacolor in the United States in 1912–1913, and one in Japan, Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura (1914). However, the company was never a success, partly due to the expense of installing special Kinemacolor projectors in cinemas. Kinemacolor in the U.S. became most notable for its Hollywood studio being taken over by D. W. Griffith, who also took over Kinemacolor's failed plans to film Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, originally intended as a color feature. The project eventually became The Birth of a Nation (1915) but the color was left out. Urban's greatest triumph was the Kinemacolor film of the Delhi Durbar. This spectacular ceremony, held in Delhi in December 1911 to celebrate the coronation, was filmed by several film companies, and their black-and-white records had already been seen in Britain by the time Urban returned from India with his team of eight and many thousands of feet of colour film of the ceremonies. The film opened at the Scala on 2 February 1912, and many felt that the filmgoing public would now be tired of the Durbar. Urban proved them very wrong. Offering the public an unprecedented two and and a half hours of film (16,000 feet)was unheard of at the time when a feature film rarely had a duration of more than 50-60 minutes. Urban presented the film with a stage setting that represented the Taj Mahal, and accompanied it with a 48 piece orchestra, a chorus of 24, a fife and drum corps of 20, and three bagpipes. Its success was phenomenal. Patriotic London flocked to see it, and the proceeds from the Scala run and five road shows made Urban a wealthy man.

A Kinemacolor fragment of Lillian Russell from 1913.

Kinemacolor was quite successful in Europe and promised to grow and improve. However two events ultimately killed the company. First, another excentric British inventor, William Friese-Greene sued for patent violation. Friese-Greene claimed to have invented virtually everything relating to motion pictures but he lost his suit through all the lower courts in England. He finally did win when he appealed the lower court decisions to the House of Lords. Friese-Greene had discovered a technicality that made the original patents "incomplete" according to British law. This didn't get Friese-Greene anything but it did open up the Kinemacolor technology so that anyone could take advantage of it. The second event was World War I, which nearly destroyed all the European film companies. By the time Europe started to make a comeback Kinemacolor was nearly defunct and Technicolor in Boston, Massachusetts had taken the lead in producing a workable color process. Other additive color processes were also waiting in the wings. More on those in part 2 so stay tuned. Most of the information here is to be found on Luke McKernans brilliant site about Charles Urban. Please visit it for the full story about Urban and Kinemacolor.