LOST TECHNICOLOR

Above is an example of two-color (red and green -- without actual blue) Technicolor in its final iteration ("Process Three"). It encompasses most, but not all, of the color spectrum on a single strip of film. An earlier version ("Process Two") had the same colors on two strips of film cemented together. Hence, "two-strip Technicolor" (Duh).

This week in 1930, Warner Bros.'s fourth "all talking, all singing, all Technicolor" musical production Sally goes into wide release.

Sally was the film version of the Florenz Ziegfield Broadway hit starring Marilyn Miller (the woman directly above); she was one of the premiere musical comedy stars in the era of the flapper, and the toast of Broadway. Warners paid her $100,000 to make the picture, and the investment paid off. Sally earned $2.2 million against a budget of $650,000, becoming another WB hit.

Miller, despite Sally's success, made only two other full-length films. Born in 1898, she died after nasal surgery at the age of 37. (She also struggled with alcohol.) Her co-star in this flick was comedian Joe E. Brown, whose career was red hot after a string of successful Warners' musicals. (Sally was the second of five color films Mr. Brown made in 1929 and 1930. By 1932, Brown's name regularly appeared above the title of his films. He's best-remembered today as millionaire Osgood Fielding III in Some Like It Hot.)

What's endlessly frustrating is almost all the two-color features the brothers Warner (and others) made between 1928 and 1932 have disintegrated to powder or been thrown away. Many of these films were hits when released, but few people know they ever existed. Two-color Technicolor, which by 1930 had been around for eight years, was near the end of its commercial life. Full spectrum Technicolor would burst onto the scene in 1932 with Disney's Flowers and Trees (seen below). The first full color Technicolor feature arrived in 1935. And two-strip Technicolor was mostly O.Ver.

Tons of three-strip Technicolor survive today, but its older cousin two-strip Technicolor has had a hard-scrabble existence. Sally exists only in black-and-white; just a couple of minutes of color scenes remains.