TINTING PUT IN A TEAPOT BY PAN, SCAN?

The debate over computer colorization of old black-and-white films has been fueled in recent days with network television coverage, radio call-in polls and the added voices of outrage from nationally known film critics. NBC’s Bob Costas even managed to link the evils of colorization and the use of videotape replays for deciding close calls in baseball during a feature before Game 2 of the World Series.

But not all film lovers are up in arms over colorization. Ron Haver, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s film department, called the debate a tempest in a teapot and said that as an offense to art, colorization is nothing compared to the venerable ritual of “panning and scanning.”

“Colorization will go away; it’s just another pimple on the face,” Haver said. “But the pan-and-scan versions of Cinemascope films are the only ones that most people will see. They’re there for generations to come.”

Panning and scanning is what faceless engineers do to wide-screen films to shrink them to the nearly square face of a TV screen, often losing such detail as actors, mountain ranges, buffalo herds and Roman armies along the way.

When the engineers pan and scan, they decide which section of a scene is most important, then pan to it. During conversational scenes, that usually involves panning back and forth from one speaker to another. It’s like watching a tennis match with a stiff neck.

Panning and scanning has been with us since the studios began preparing their wide-screen epics (it all began with “The Robe” in 1953) for TV, in the days when TV screens were the size of Fig Newtons. Cinemascope and other wide-screen formats, shot with anamorphic lenses, which provide images nearly 2 1/2 times wider than they are high, will not fill the entire TV screen when shown in full width. There will be empty bands at the top and bottom.

Woody Allen, equally offended by colorization and pan and scan, made it a condition of his contract that his “Manhattan” be shown only in its wide-screen format. Haver applauds Allen but says there is something hypocritical about the creative community’s campaign to halt colorization while maintaining silence on pan and scan.

“I’m amazed that so much attention is being paid to this innocuous offense (colorizing),” Haver said. “It is just a fad. It will go away. But it’s the glamorous cause and is getting all the publicity. Nobody wants to talk about (pan and scan) because it’s too hard to get reversed.”

Haver said he believes craft unions should make it a condition of their next contracts to not allow panning and scanning, and strike if they aren’t successful.

Gilbert Cates, president of the Directors Guild, said pan and scan and colorization are equal horrors, and that the creative community was asleep at the switch when panning and scanning and other atrocities, were committed on behalf of TV.

As despicable as pan and scan is, it is nothing compared to the arbitrary editing that has always been done to make feature films conform to the running times of TV schedules. And that practice is nothing compared to the effect of commercial interruptions.

Obviously, it is easier to rouse public interest over colorization than these institutionalized desecrations. Colorization is new and dramatic and the growing VCR audience has the integrity of its videotape library to protect.

Haver may find that colorization won’t go away, however. Unless the process is outlawed, which seems unlikely, colorized versions of black-and-white films will become the standard on TV and in video stores. But he raises an important issue when he says that the creative community needs to channel at least as much energy into fighting pan and scan as colorization.

Haver says the pan and scan films can be corrected when the studios create new masters to meet the needs of the imminent switch to high-resolution TV. Without the kind of pressure being applied against the colorizers, the panning and scanning will continue.

With today’s large TV screens, there is no reason to expect anything but the full image of Cinemascope and Panavision films, as the film makers intended them to be seen. If viewers are uncomfortable with the black bands at the tops and bottoms of their screens, the studios and networks can always have them colorized.

There are companies that do that.

COLOR COORDINATES: Dorothy Schrader, general counsel for the U.S. Copyright Office in Washington, said the first batch of mail after the Oct. 15 opening of the public-comment period on colorization of black-and-white movies brought legal briefs from lawyers representing both sides of the issue.

The Directors Guild of America was the first to file, issuing a 27-page argument against colorization. Since then, the Copyright Office has received comment from Hal Roach Studios, which is colorizing films taken from the public domain, and from Color Systems Technology, the contractor for more than 100 black-and-white films that have been selected for colorization by Turner Entertainment Co.

Color Systems was joined in its brief by Turner Entertainment and the Motion Picture Assn. of America, whose members--the major studios--have large financial stakes in colorization’s future.

They, of course, are all for it.

While the growing debate focuses on moral and aesthetic issues, the principals have confined their formal arguments to the issue of individual creative authorship. The only issue that concerns the Copyright Office, which will determine if colorized films are subject to copyright protection, is whether the colorized versions are “new creations.”

It’s interesting that while officials of the colorization companies have publicly argued that colorizing merely enhances the original creation, their position in their copyright briefs is that they, in fact, are altering them. Significantly.

The Color Systems brief maintains that the colorized versions are the result of numerous individual creative decisions, which add up to authorship.

Charles Powell, the beleaguered senior vice president of Color Systems, does not defend colorization on aesthetic grounds, although he maintains that anybody who takes a tour of his company’s Marina del Rey facility will realize how much care goes into the process.

“I say I do a good job, but I am not hiding behind any lofty aesthetic view,” Powell said. “I’m not saying (colorized films) look better. It’s a business. The owner of a black- and-white film has a right to do it in color to make money. I was hired to do it, I have a right to do it, and I have no ethical problems at all in doing it.”