Technicolor

When most people think about Technicolor, they think about The Wizard of Oz (1939). As Dorothy steps out of her dreary sepia life and into Munchkinland, she’s enveloped in glorious Technicolor. That kaleidoscope of highly saturated hues is actually produced from just three colours – red, green and blue – recorded on individual film strips and then dyed. This is the three-strip Technicolor process.

But Judy Garland wasn’t the first star of a Technicolor feature film. That triumph goes to Miriam Hopkins, who played the titular character in Becky Sharp (1935), the first feature to use the three-strip technique after its introduction in 1932. Technicolor was the most popular colouring system in Hollywood until the mid-1950s, when single-strip processes were developed.