DECOLORIZING? : Consider the Possibilities

The debate over colorizing classic black-and-white films--exhaustive as it has been thus far--may be overlooking one key question: What if this expanding technology falls into the hands of someone with less integrity and artistic sensibility than Ted Turner & Co., and with more guile?

Much of the colorization dialogue, including Woody Allen’s sparring with a Turner representative before a U.S. Senate subcommittee last week, was framed as a debate between commercialism and aesthetics. Yet this discussion, which has probably gone on too long already, is not simply a proprietary matter of who may tamper with whose work, of painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

Allen started his film career with “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?,” dubbing a Japanese detective movie with funny English dialogue; in “Zelig,” he skillfully integrated a modern narrative with old black-and-white news footage. Less successfully, Carl Reiner and Steve Martin cobbled together clips from black-and-white classics to create a new film in “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.” A recent episode of “Murder, She Wrote,” used sections of the 1949 film “Strange Bargain” as flashbacks, with now-older Martha Scott and Jeffrey Lynn from the original film also appearing in the television drama.

But we’re still at the dawning of the “Max Headroom” era. Recent computer-generated advances now permit technicians to isolate and selectively bleed color into black-and-white videos and TV commercials. Experts say that the next step is vocal reconstitution and image reconfiguration, enabling us to make characters say and do things--with their own voices and bodies--that they never said or did in life.

The day may not be far off when we will be able to pair living and dead actors in new productions, and to change the endings of completed movies. The possibilities are endless: Rambo dies; Rocky loses; Bogart changes his mind, elbows aside Paul Henreid and flees on the plane from Casablanca with Ingrid Bergman.

Such new technologies raise political and cultural issues, as well as artistic ones.

What would keep, say, the government of South Africa from pirating the movies of Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg and Richard Pryor and “decolorizing” them so that the stars are white?

Since the Pretoria regime is as strait-laced as it is racist, it might simply dub the dialogue into Afrikaans to remove the ethnicity and obscenity from the movies of the aforementioned. However, there is no technical reason why programmers will not be able to use computer generation to re-create less offensive dialogue and put it in the mouths of the originals.

The South Africans wouldn’t even face that problem if they started taking popular American TV programs off the satellite. Wouldn’t a decolorized “Cosby Show” work as well as the original? Or Oprah Winfrey?

In the old “Front Page” days, newspaper photos were zealously airbrushed and people were thinned out and blemishes were painted away. If we’re talking people-pleasing these high-tech days, they could probably make Winfrey thinner in the bargain. For that matter, they could take Phil Donahue and make him sound less insipid.

There’s no technical reason why, if the South Africans couldn’t make the black people white, they couldn’t make white characters black. Think of it: “The Color Purple” could become transformed into “The Color White”; an all-white “Soldier’s Story”; “In the Heat of the Night” with a white Sidney Poitier and a black Rod Steiger.

Nor would this kind of sociopolitical racial realignment be confined to South Africa. To enhance cassette sales, the government of Nigeria could do some diddling of its own, reversing the race of the cast of a colorized “Birth of a Nation” and, yes, even of Ted Turner’s precious “Gone With the Wind.” What would “Captain Outrageous” think of that?

The next step after altering art may be altering reality.

(Well, of course, reality is constant. But, as recent events prove, perceptions of reality can vary. Widely. Incredibly widely.)

Films like “The Candidate” and “Power” demonstrated how quickly political consultants make use of technological advances in the media. When Gary Hart was teetering, as a result of his alleged trysting with Donna Rice and whoever else in Washington and wherever else, some commentators suggested that only a miracle could save him.

Just think what kind of miracle a consultant could have wrought with a TV commercial featuring Jack Kennedy, F.D.R. and Grover Cleveland--all now known for dallying--sitting with Hart. Each could soothingly explain to viewers why personal indiscretions had little to do with successful governance.

That would make history come alive.