http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/H...96/oz-lore.htm

Was The Wizard of Oz the first movie made in color?:

This is another question that visitors to my site ask me quite often. The short answer to this is "No!". I recently came across a terrific source and explanation about this in a book called The Hollywood Archive : The Hidden History of Hollywood in the Golden Age by Paddy Calistro; published by New York, Universe Publishing, 2000. On pages 54-56 in this book there's a section called "Bringing Color to the Movies". This is what the author had to say:


"Color on the motion picture screen? Never!" scoffed filmmakers in the first decade of the twentieth century. Performers, too, laughed at the idea, and for good reason. Why risk their careers on a gimmick that could jeopardize the success of their films?


Movies in color had long been the dream of international film pioneers: Louis Jacques Daguerre, James Clerk Maxwell, H.W. Vogel, Emile Reynaud, Georges Melies, and the brothers Lumiere. But their efforts had been costly and time consuming since each frame had to be individually hand-tinted. Even Thomas Edison, who produced a color film of a stage success, Annabell's Butterfly Dance, hand-tinted the entire thirty-five-foot length, frame by frame.


In 1915 a new enterprise named Technicolor made color movies a possibility on a commercial basis. But the going wasn't easy at first, even for Technicolor, headed by Dr. Herbert T. Kalmus, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the name Technicolor was in honor of his alma mater) and a former chemistry and physics professor. Instead of forging ahead in giant leaps, Dr. Kalmus and his partners--two fellow M.I.T. graduates, Daniel Comstock and Burton Westcott--moved in smaller steps to maintain quality control, conserve time and money, develop a natural-looking color process, and ultimately to project the image with standardized equipment.


Using the same two-color components--red and green--devised in 1910 by Kinemacolor, Kalmus's team produced a ten-minute one-reel film. A refurbished railroad car, Technicolor's first laboratory, made its way from Boston to Jacksonville, Florida, where the filming of The Gulf Between (1918) took place.


Between 1917 and 1926, Technicolor released its first two-color feature film, The Toll of the Sea. The first film with artificially lit interiors, Cytherea (1924), came out, along with several star vehicles, including Stage Struck (1925), with Gloria Swanson, and Douglas Fairbank's The Black Pirate (1926).


The first surge of real enthusiasm for Technicolor came between 1928 and 1930, as more and more producers rushed to add color to the new sound movies. The result was a series of subpar productions with garishly tinted pictures--still in the two-color process--that did Technicolor more harm than good. Dr. Kalmus, who had opened a facility in Hollywood, decided to embark on one last push to overcome Technicolor's basic shortcoming, the lack of a three-color-or full-color-image. In 1932, Techicolor introduced a new camera that finally could successfully record all three colors: red, green, and blue.


Producers were still skeptical. However, Walt Disney, who had never used the two-color process in his cartoons, was so impressed with the new full-color image that in 1932 he released Flowers and Trees, the first full-color Technicolor film. The following year came Disney's animated Three Little Pigs. In 1934, the first live-action short in three-color was released, La Cucaracha.


The door opened slowly, but studios gradually began adding Technicolor sequences to their releases. By the end of the 1930's, Technicolor had become a star in its own right. And by 1939, Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz proved that there was no limit to the impact of color on the big screen."

Originally posted by El-Kabong
I'm talking all color from open to close,