Talk:Natalie Kalmus

Birth

Natalie's birth date and place stated here are also confirmed in the U.S. Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007 which is probably more authoritative than shipping records. Neb-Maat-Re (talk) 02:26, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Watkin section

I cannot confirm to my satisfaction if Watkin actually did work with Kalmus or not. His autobiography mentions his only Technicolor job as occurring few early on in his camera assistant years, which would place it towards the end of Kalmus's "regime". Compounding this is the fact that most camerawork of the period was generally not credited as far as ACs went. I do have contact with Mr. Watkin, however, and will ask when I next have an opportunity. I do, however, have a feeling that they may have met - why call someone you've never met "Pre-Raphaelite lady"? I'm assuming he wouldn't go out of his way to look up a photo of her.

In any case, I'm not certain how relevant their meeting is anyway - plenty of bio articles include quotes given about others centuries apart. And although Watkin's calling her a dictator may on the surface appear controversial or contentious, a wide variety of sources and contemporaries of hers seemed to be of consensus.

Finally, as regards colors - brash, garish, and bright are three entirely different qualifiers. Garish refers (I assume) to ugly or mismatched colors; brash colors are very saturated and noticeable ones; and bright colors in the context of cinematography can be misconstrued as lighter colors or colors given extra exposure. To clarify the matter, I've re-edited the "garish" to state that the consultant's explicit job being to advise on color rendition. For example, Technicolor had a noted bias towards blue colorspace, and thus certain colors needed to actually be slightly "miscolored" in reality in order to render properly. (A good example of this is Dorothy's blouse in The Wizard of Oz - it was white onscreen and pink in reality.)

Her consultancy was therefore supposed to cover technical oversight in order to correct against colors not showing accurately on film. However, it appears that she was regarded as overstepping her bounds from technical to creative matters - always a VERY big no-no in the industry. In this light, most accounts I've read hold her as responsible for the oversaturated and "garish" colors that later came to be remembered as archetypical of the "Technicolor style" - even when the production didn't want it. (As the Selznick complaint makes obvious, and is only one of many.) However, from a business standpoint this makes logical sense, as the company would have wanted to promote the full spectrum in all its glory to show off the system's capabilities. It also accords with the later objections during production (post Kalmus and 3-strip, admittedly) that the 1956 adaptation of Moby Dick would have when Ossie Morris decided to add a b/w overlay to the dye transfer in order to desaturate the image. Girolamo Savonarola 02:37, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

I do hope you can find the name of the three-strip Technicolor picture that Watkin worked on. If it was made after 1948, and Watkin never met Kalmus, then his opinion of her character would be hearsay, and not worth a quotation in the body of the text. A quotation from someone who actually worked with her (as David Selznick did) would be more appropriate.

As for the statement, "most accounts I've read hold her as responsible for the oversaturated and 'garish' colors that later came to be remembered as archetypical of the 'Technicolor style'", everything I've read on her (and I first wrote on Technicolor in 1980) stated the exact opposite, that she opposed garish colors, which you define above as "ugly" or "mismatched" colors. Much of what I've read is that the studio art departments took her color advice with a grain of salt, and did what they wanted to do. On "oversaturated", see the quotation by Kalmus that I've added in a footnote. Her advice for both Fairbanks' The Black Pirate and Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was to turn down the intensity of the colors, not up.

I do think you misunderstand the Selznick quote during the making of Gone With the Wind, and perhaps would understand what he meant if you read it in more context:

We should have learned by now to take with a pound of salt much of what is said to us by the technicolor experts. I cannot conceive how we could have been talked into throwing away opportunities for magnificent color values in the face of our own rather full experience in technicolor, and in the face particularly of such experiences as the beautiful color values we got out of Dietrich's costumes in "The Garden of Allah," thanks to the insistence of Dietrich and Dryden, and despite the squawks and prophesies of doom from the technicolor experts. . . . I am the last one that wants in any scene a glaring and unattractive riot of color — and I think I was the first to insist upon neutralizing of various color elements, particularly of sets, so that the technicolor process would not obtrude on dramatic scenes, but I certainly never thought that this would reach the point where a sharp use of color for dramatic purposes would be completely eliminated; nor did I ever feel that we were going to throw away the opportunity to get true beauty in a combination of sets and costumes. . . . If we are not going to go in for lovely combinations of set and costume and really take advantage of the full variety of colors available to us, we might just as well have made the picture in black and white. It would be a sad thing indeed if a great artist had all violent colors taken off his palette for fear that he would use them so clashingly as to make a beautiful painting impossible.

— Walloon 04:05, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, I did some digging and found this, and now reading your response, I must concede the point. As far as Watkin goes, well, if he's wrong about the colors, I guess it should go. Seems that the "garish" Technicolor films were the ones that escaped her grasp, not the ones which succumbed to it. Frankly, as regards the Selznick note, I'd use a full quotation from the top to the first ellipsis of the above excerpt in the article - it seems to get a lot more across. Girolamo Savonarola 04:43, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Natalie Kalmus "balancing" color

A rare neutral statement of the Natalie Kalmus working method during movie production was given by former Hollywood movie actor Esther Williams, who starred in several MGM Technicolor features. Speaking on British television ("Parkinson" program) when aged 78, she recalled that Kalmus was on the set each shooting day, and at the end of the day would march forward and demand "Give me the film." She took the three strips of film away for a process she named "balancing", and nobody other than her saw it for about 10 days -- there were none of the usual rushes. What balancing means does not seem to have been reported in earlier works in Kalmus, but one hint of what it involved was given in the Williams interview, when she recounted receiving a phone call from Kalmus who asked: "Esther, what color are the whites of your eyes?" "Why, Natalie, they're blue." "Blue! Why didn't you tell me! That's caused me an unnecessary three weeks of work!" and Kalmus hung up. In the 1999 television interview, Williams described the color renditions in her Kalmus-involved movies of half a century earlier as usurpassed.

There's no reason to believe that Williams misrepresents that conversation, and the story indicates that Kalmus played a much more active role in determining the way Technicolor movies looked than most authorities suggest. One can understand why she was so unpopular among movie production workers. Who would want to hand over the only exposed film during production to somebody who's doing something mysterious -- deliberately mysterious -- and unexplained to achieve some unknown thing akin to what today is called "sweetening" to it? In her own sweet time? The fact that so many people over the years were prepared to do that suggests that the value of her work was widely recognized.

Personal observation: Looking through some of the better-known films on which Kalmus was the Technicolor consultant dispels the usual belief that what she produced, consistently, was over-saturated colour. Neptune's Daughter looks nothing like Rope, for instance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.44.62.131 (talk) 21:27, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

But this Wikipedia article doesn't say anything about over-saturated color. To the contrary, it says that Kalmus deliberately kept the palette mild, much to the consternation of people like David Selznick. — Walloon (talk) 07:57, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Likewise, you can't judge by video masters, which are usually timed totally differently from their original counterpart.

I take it from her writings and other persons' accounts that Kalmus was not as technically inclined as she made herself out to be. What she may have been referring to as "me" in the "weeks of necessary work" could have, in actuality, been a staff of technicians she was taking the credit for.

Also, I'm suspect about the comments that rushes would not being available for more than 10 days. Waiting that long would have jeopardized the company, as Technicolor's contractual promise was 24-hour rushes (as well as black and white prints from the green record for work prints). The Photoplayer 05:30, 27 March 2009 (UTC)